Chapter 63: Decoy

Alessandro

The world had narrowed to a single, burning point: find her.

I stood in the alley behind the café, the rain sheeting down in heavy curtains that soaked through my suit jacket and plastered my hair to my skull. I barely felt it. The cold, the wet, the discomfort,all of it was distant, happening to someone else.

The only thing that felt real was the hollow, aching void where Bianca should have been and the white-hot fury that was rapidly filling that space.

The scene had been processed. Salvatore had mobilized our entire security apparatus within minutes of the abduction. The kitchen staff had been questioned, their phones confiscated and examined, their backgrounds investigated down to their childhood addresses. The café owner had been all but taken apart looking for connections to rival families, to the Vitales, to anyone who might have orchestrated this.

There was nothing. It was clean, professional. An insult in its efficiency.

The café's back door stood open, light spilling out into the rain-soaked alley. I could see the kitchen through it, chrome surfaces gleaming under fluorescent lights, now empty and silent. Hours ago, Bianca had been walking through that door. Hours ago, she'd been alive and safe and mine. I had failed to protect her.

The footage from the café's security cameras had shown it all with brutal clarity. Marco my own man, someone I'd trusted grabbing Bianca from behind. The needle sliding into her neck. Her body going limp. The professionalism of it had been damning. He'd known exactly where to inject her, exactly how to hold her to avoid the cameras capturing his face clearly, exactly when the alley would be most deserted.

This hadn't been opportunistic. This had been planned, probably for weeks.

My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I answered it without looking at the screen.

"What."

"Don DeSanti.

" It was Lieutenant Russo, one of my most reliable men. His voice was tense with barely suppressed urgency. "We have a ping. The tracking signal from Bianca's necklace. It's moving. An old warehouse complex near the docks, the abandoned industrial sector."

A sliver of hope, razor-sharp and painful, cut through the ice in my veins. I had insisted Bianca wear that delicate diamond pendant, a wedding gift whose true purpose I'd never explained. Its center stone was hollowed out to hold a microscopic GPS tracker, military-grade, impossible to detect without specialized equipment. A paranoid precaution that at the time had seemed like overkill, but now felt like divine foresight.

"Assemble everyone," I ordered, already moving toward the black SUV idling at the mouth of the alley. "I want that complex surrounded. Three teams—one for each potential exit. No one gets in or out without my approval. Russo? Tell them to be ready for anything. If Marco is there, I want him taken alive. He's going to tell me everything before he dies."

"Understood."

I climbed into the SUV, and Luca immediately put it in gear, the tires squealing on the wet pavement as we shot forward. The city blurred past the windows, lights smearing in the rain. In the back seat beside me, my phone lit up with incoming messages—confirmations from various lieutenants, tactical updates, the locations of our other teams.

"It could be a trap," Salvatore said from the driver's seat, his eyes never leaving the road as he navigated through traffic with aggressive efficiency.

"They know about the trackers. You had one made for Jennifer during your engagement. She could have told them."

"I know," I said, my voice flat. "We go anyway. If there's even a chance Bianca is there—"

"We go anyway," Luca agreed. "I'm just saying we go smart. No rushing in blind."

He was right, of course. Sal was always right about these things, which was why he'd survived as my right hand man while others had fallen,the animal part of my brain, the part that was screaming at me to tear the city apart with my bare hands, didn't care about smart. It wanted blood and revenge and Bianca back in my arms.

I forced myself to breathe, to think tactically. If this was a trap, what would its purpose be? To kill me? Possible, but inefficient. They had easier opportunities if that was the goal. To capture me? More likely, but risky. The moment I disappeared, the entire Corvino organization would descend on the city like locusts. No, if this was a trap, it was probably a distraction. A way to keep me busy while they moved Bianca somewhere else.

Which meant we had to be fast.

We arrived at the warehouse complex in under twenty minutes. It was a sprawling collection of buildings that had once housed textile manufacturing operations, back when the city still made things instead of just consuming them. Now it was a ghost town of rust and decay, windows broken, walls covered in graffiti, the kind of place where the homeless sometimes sheltered and where bodies occasionally turned up.

We came in silent, a convoy of black SUVs with their lights off, spreading out to surround the complex. I could see the shapes of my men moving through the rain, taking up positions, weapons ready. We'd brought enough firepower to start a small war, and I would happily use every bullet if it meant getting Bianca back.

The tracker signal was coming from the main warehouse building, a three-story structure with a partially collapsed roof. I led the first team in, my weapon drawn, my focus absolute. Luca was at my shoulder, and behind us came six more men, all of them veterans of previous conflicts, all of them loyal beyond question.

The warehouse was a maze of shadows and echoes. Our footsteps crunched on broken glass and debris. Water dripped from holes in the ceiling, creating puddles that reflected our flashlight beams. Every corner could hide an ambush. Every sound could be a threat.

But we encountered no resistance. The place was empty, abandoned, silent except for the rain and our own breathing.

We found it on the upper floor, in what had once been a management office overlooking the factory floor. The door hung askew on broken hinges, and inside, sitting on a rusted filing cabinet like a deliberate taunt, was Bianca's cream-colored sweater. The one she'd been wearing when she was taken. It was neatly folded, almost respectfully arranged, which somehow made it worse.

And beside it, carefully placed where we couldn't miss it, was the diamond pendant. The delicate platinum chain was intact, but the stone had been pried from its setting. Lying next to it were the crushed remains of the GPS tracker, its tiny electronic heart smashed into glittering dust.

It was a message. A dead end. A mockery