Chapter 9
I stared at the pristine Canadian passport.
The photograph inside was mine—taken from a distant surveillance still captured outside a coffee shop three days ago, cleaned and forged with state-of-the-art cryptographic watermarks. Renzo had spent the entire afternoon, while ostensibly preparing to execute me, using every black-market asset at his command to build a fortress around my freedom.
"And you?" I asked, looking up from the documents, searching his face. "What happens to you, Renzo?"
Renzo let out a low, rough exhale. He reached across the table, his rough, scarred knuckles brushing against my trembling fingers where they rested on the edge of the passport.
"I have to stay," he said simply.
"No," I gasped, the protest slipping out before I could calculate it.
"I have to, Clara," he urged gently, his thumb tracing the curve of my knuckles. "Silvio will expect the body to be buried by morning. When Dante realizes I burned the drop and sent you out of the city, they’ll lock down the highways and the train stations. The only way you make it across the border is if I stay in Chicago and draw their fire."
"They'll kill you!" I choked out, leaning forward, grasping his wrist with both hands.
His skin was burning hot beneath my fingers, the heavy gold watch ticking steadily against my palm.
"They’ll try," Renzo said, a faint, lethal grin flickering across his scarred features. "I’m not an easy man to put in the ground. I’ll buy you twenty-four hours. By the time they realize you aren't in the city, you’ll be three thousand miles away, safe and warm. You can start over. Go to school. Buy a house near the water. Forget you ever saw my face."
"I could never forget you," I whispered, and for the first time in three months, the words were not entirely a lie.
Renzo closed his eyes for a second, swallowing hard, as if the phrase were a physical blow to his sternum. When he opened them, the raw hunger in his gaze was almost overwhelming.
"You have to go now," he murmured, his voice tight with an agonizing restraint. "My driver, Marco, is waiting in the alley behind the kitchen. He’s loyal to me, not the Don. He’ll take you straight to the hangar in Gary."
He leaned in across the table, his broad chest pressing against the edge of the wood, bringing his face inches from mine.
"Take the keys, Clara," he pleaded, his gravelly voice dropping to a rough, broken whisper. "Take the passport and run. Don't look back. Don't ever come back to this rotten city."
The moment hung suspended in the amber candlelight.
The rain roared against the glass outside. The smell of cedarwood, expensive wool, and warm skin filled my senses. Across the red tablecloth, the most feared hitman in Chicago was willingly laying his neck on the executioner’s block, ready to betray his blood oath, his Don, and his entire syndicate just so a frightened girl could live in the sunlight.
It was breathtaking. It was magnificent.
And it was the exact moment the curtain had to fall.
I looked down at the forged Canadian passport.
I looked at the clean cash, the private jet manifest, and the brass keys resting on the blood-red linen.
Then, very slowly, the trembling in my hands stopped.
The frantic, shallow breaths that had racked my chest smoothed out into a deep, measured rhythm. The frail hunch in my shoulders vanished as my spine straightened, aligning with the rigid, poised elegance of a woman who had spent her entire life walking through rooms filled with armed men without ever dropping her gaze.
I lifted my chin.
The weeping, terrified eyes of Clara Vance disappeared entirely.
In their place, cold and bright as polished emeralds, were the calculating, amusement-filled eyes of Elena Vance—sole heir to the liquidated Vance syndicate, master architect of the North Side purge, and the anonymous client who had orchestrated Sal Valenti’s demise from three thousand miles away.
Renzo froze.
His thumb, which had been stroking the back of my fingers, went completely still. His dark brows furrowed, a flicker of confusion darting across his features as he sensed the seismic, terrifying shift in the air between us.
"Clara...?" he began, his voice hesitant, searching.
I didn't answer. A slow, razor-sharp smile parted my lips—a smile devoid of innocence, dripping with dark, intoxicating authority.
Moving with smooth, unhurried precision, my manicured right hand reached into the sleek designer leather tote bag resting beside me on the booth’s velvet cushion.
I didn't pull out a handkerchief. I didn't pull out a cross.
I pulled out a sleek, matte-black encrypted titanium transaction tablet, its high-definition retina display pulsing with a faint blue standby light.
With a soft, deliberate flick of my wrist, I slid the military-grade tablet across the red tablecloth, right over the Canadian passport and the stacks of hundred-dollar bills, stopping it against Renzo’s crystal scotch glass with a clear, sharp *clink*.
The screen flared to life, illuminating Renzo’s stunned, uncomprehending face with cool white light.
On the display was a digitized Swiss escrow verification screen bearing the private seal of the Zurich Banking Syndicate, showing an active balance of four million dollars awaiting dual-key biometric authorization, alongside the high-resolution architectural schematics of Don Silvio’s Highland Park compound and the real-time GPS coordinates of every single enforcer currently guarding the perimeter of Castiglione’s steakhouse.
Renzo stared at the screen, his pupils dilating in sheer, paralyzing disbelief.
I leaned forward over the table, resting my chin lightly on the back of my intertwined fingers, my smile widening into something lethal, brilliant, and infinitely dangerous.
"You really are the finest enforcer in Chicago, Renzo," I said, my voice completely stripped of Clara’s breathy tremor, smooth and rich as aged velvet. "And God knows you look spectacular when you're playing the protective knight. But before you sacrifice your life to smuggle me out..."
I tilted my head, my eyes locking onto his with absolute, predatory command.
"...don't you want to collect the remaining four million for the job?"
