Chapter 150 Fiorella
My phone buzzed while I was still in the shower, steam fogging the glass and my reflection. I wrapped a towel around my shoulders, glanced at the screen, and felt my stomach drop before I read the words.
I know you're dying to know who I am. Meet me. Water park. Midnight. Come alone. — N.
Alone.
The message sat on the screen like a hot coal. My thumb hovered over the reply, then pulled away. I'd been walking the tight rope between fury and sanity for days; Rocco thought I was staying on the safer side of caution. I would protect him from this. I would protect his family. But the photograph, my mother, chained and hollow-eyed, had convinced me that silence was a different kind of death. If Nek wanted a meeting, I would go. Carefully. Quietly. I wouldn't let him see the part of me that burned.
I wore black that night: soft pants, a leather jacket fitted at the shoulders, soundless boots. Leo watched me go without commenting. He offered to join me. I declined with one glance sharp enough to cut steel. "I go alone," I said. "Anything happens, I'll text. Stay near your phone."
He didn't like it. He didn't say it, but his jaw worked like a machine grinding down old iron. He handed me a small burner phone and slid a silenced pistol into my palm. "Use the burner. Use the gun if you must. Come back," he said, and the simple order beneath his words was a prayer.
The water park at midnight was nothing like the sunny playground I'd seen half a dozen times with charity gala ribbons and children's laughter. The slides were hulks of dark plastic, towers like sleeping giants. Neon signage that by day screamed with candy-colored font now blinked intermittently in the drizzle, casting the pools in a sickly, dreamlike light. The smell of chlorine lingered in the air, a chemical ghost. Everything was washed in the blue hush of closed rides and distant traffic.
I kept to the shadows. The main gate was chained and rusted, but the fence had been cut at one narrow point. Whoever had left this open wanted someone specific in. My boots made no sound on the cracked concrete as I crossed the empty concession stands, past a carousel whose painted horses held their breath in moonlight. My heartbeat drummed a private rhythm in my ears.
An old wave pool, still as a sea, curled at the middle of the park. Above it, the tallest slide - the one kids screamed down in summer - stretched into the night, its mouth a dark throat. A single figure waited near the lifeguard tower. He was too slender to be Camillo, too young to be Phillipe. He stood with the easy confidence of someone who belonged to the night.
Nek.
He looked like he was in his late thirties, black hair, black eyes, big body, about 5’10.
I didn't step into the open; I didn't let him know I'd come until I wanted him to. He saw me anyway, as if he'd been watching the whole time. When he spoke his voice was low and smooth, like someone who always chose his words and never wasted them.
“You came. Good, ” he said. He had a thick Italian accent.
“You gave me a location,” I replied, my voice steady. “You could have shown proof anywhere. Why here?”
He smiled without humor. “Because a place that used to be full of noise is a good place for secrets. The absence of people amplifies a confession.” He glanced at the pool, and for a second I thought he might be studying the water, then he tilted his head and pushed a small, phone across a concession table. It clinked against old plastic and landed at my feet like a pebble.
“You want me to believe you?” I asked. “That photo could be a fake.”
Nek's eyes flicked to mine. There was something in them I couldn't quite place: calculation, certainly, but also a flicker that looked like pity. "You’ve seen the photos and the videos," he said simply. "Don’t delude yourself to think it is a fabrication.”
My hands were steady when I picked up the phone, but inside my chest an animal stirred. It was blank at first but then the camera panned up and there she was.
“Why don’t you listen to the latest message from mommy dearest.”
“Fiorella,” my mom said through that tiny screen, and my knees wanted to buckle. “If you are watching, then I have a few hours to live. Please save me.”
She looked roughly beaten, weak and malnourished.
What had these bastards done to her?
Tears blurred the screen. For a moment, I forgot I was standing in an empty water park, alone in the dark. The world shrank to the face in the tiny rectangle and the fist in my chest. I wanted to run to her, to tear the concrete out of the ground and carry my mother back to light. Nek watched me, expression inscrutable.
"You see?" he asked softly. "Real."
“You filmed this,” I said, though it was an accusation I didn’t want to make. “You took that. You hurt my mother.”
He shrugged like it was nothing at all. "I have men. People on the ground who take what I ask them to take. Sometimes I'm the one who records. Sometimes I pay others to do what can't be traced to me." His smile was small and awful. "Proof is expensive, and you paid for it with a photograph."
“You gave me a location through Phillipe,” I said slowly. “You told Phillipe where she was?”
He made a soft dismissive sound. "Knowledge is a currency. Phillipe has coin; he likes to trade it for influence. I have other currency." He leaned in, elbows on the concession counter, eyes never leaving mine. "I know where your mother is because I put her there."
The words landed like a physical strike. For a furious second, I wanted to throw the screen to kick him into the chlorine-sweet smell of the pool and demand blood. I tasted bile.
“You put her there?” The world sharpened. “Why?”
“Protection, at first.” Nek’s voice had the faintest echo of sincerity in it-or the best mimicry of it I'd ever heard. “Then something changed. People shifted. Loyalties expired. She became leverage.” He tapped the drive with two fingers. “And then leverage became trade.”
“You want something,” I said. It wasn’t a question.
“Of course.” He spread his hands, palms up like a man offering a bargain. “You have routes. Routes are valuable. Routes are access. Access is what I need to move things without question. Give me access to De Luca shipments for three weeks, single corridor, rerouted at my signal, and I’ll let her go after the three weeks.”
“You think I’ll hand over that? I don’t have control over that.” The laugh that came out was sharp, brittle. “You think I’d betray my fiancé because you’re using my mother as bait?”
Nek's face had suddenly turned hard, the charm sliding off like a mask. "You will, if you want to keep her alive." He said it matter-of-factly, as any doctor might have, stating cold facts. "If you refuse, she dies. If you accept, I let her go. Simple. Mind you, she has been injected poison, your choice in the next few hours will determine if she lives or not.”
I wanted to ask him how he could be so cruel, I wanted to punch the smugness from his face and make him answer for every hour my mother had spent in darkness. But the thing that had unmoored me was not his threat , it was the certainty ringing through it. He sounded like a man who had rehearsed this for years.
“And how do I know you won't take her anyway?” I said finally, my voice low. “How do I know this isn't another trick to make me hand over everything and still lose her?”
Nek tilted his head, eyes narrowed as if weighing whether honesty would alter what he needed. “You don’t. But I am not Phillipe, Fiorella. I don’t need to lie about the things I want. Think of this as a transaction. You give me temporary access; I give you proof of life in hand and a timed window for pickup. You try to cheat me and she suffers.”
“Why me?” The question slipped out. “Why not go to Rocco? To the De Luca men?”
"Now where’s the fun in that?," Nek asked softly. "You will bend; he will break. Your love is useful; his wrath is dangerous." He folded his hands with that same eerie calm. "I need silence, and you need answers."
He pulled out a small photograph from his jacket-a different one from that taped to the envelope I had found earlier. This one was taut with immediacy: my mother on the same concrete floor, but in a different pose, a red thread tied to her wrist, fresh bruises on her forearms. Someone had taken it hours ago, not days.
“You have twenty-four hours to decide,” he said. “Give me access and she’ll be given tge antidote after I confirm receipt. Refuse, and I will make sure she does.”
It was a cold, terrible ultimatum-the kind men used when they had full ownership of both the means and the victim. I felt my knees threaten to give, would not give him that surrender.
“You've kidnapped a woman and made me choose between his family and her,” I said. My voice was barely controlled. “You think I'll play by your rules?”
"I think you'll do what you must." He stepped back, folding his coat around him. "Decide quickly, Fiorella. I'm a patient man, but patience is expensive."
He walked out into shadow like a ghost who'd never been here. I stood in the damp night, the plastic horses of the carousel grinning like blank witnesses. The phone in my jacket vibrated-a text from a number I knew altogether too well.
You have twenty-four hours. Don't waste them. -N
I slid to the concession counter and laid my forehead on my folded hands. The neon light overhead hummed with indifference. All around me, the park was a stage of discarded joys, and centre stage, the person I'd once called mother was being used as a ledger entry. My chest felt too full for breath.
Decide. Betray my people or betray her. There was no place in the dark for a good choice. Only options dogged by consequences. I thought of Rocco, the way he moved, the way his anger smelled like coming storms, and I thought of my mother's hands in the video, the way they had curled like someone still holding on to hope.
I slipped the burner back into my jacket and started walking, not toward the gate but toward the far edge of the park where the fence had been cut. I didn't go back to the penthouse. I did the only thing I could think to do: I sent a text.
Tell me how to make this work, tell me what corridor you want.
There was a pause, and then a string of coordinates.
The phone blinked with a time stamp: twenty minutes later. Nek's text came sharply. It told me exactly which shipments, which nights. It also told me in the coldest possible way that he'd already positioned eyes in our network. He knew the routes. He had people in our warehouses.
Was I really going to do this?