Page 110 of The Cost of Silence

Silence.

Not the empty kind. The lethal kind.

“Isabella,” he says finally, voice low in a way that makes my skin pebble. “Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“Did you see anyone? Hear anything?”

“No. Just the alarm. And then… this.”

“Rossi?” he calls, a little louder.

“Here,” Rossi says, leaning slightly toward the phone.

“I’m already on my way,” Nico says. “Do not touch anything. No one comes in or out. You stay with her. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

The line goes dead.

I lower the phone.

The tree lights blink gently in the corner, cheerful and warm, like this is just another afternoon. Like nothing happened. Like there isn’t a dead animal bleeding on the table where we ate dessert yesterday.

Tears sting my eyes suddenly, hot and unwanted. “I was starting to feel safe,” I whisper, voice cracking. “I let myself believe it.”

Rossi’s face doesn’t change much. It rarely does. But his eyes soften, barely noticeable if you don’t know him. “You’re safer,” he says. “You’re still standing. He’ll be here soon. So will his brothers. This isn’t the end of your story, Isabella. It’s just a move on the board, and they fucked up when they messed with you here.”

I laugh, wet and short. “You all talk like this is chess.”

“It is,” he says simply. “Except the pieces bleed.”

A shiver crawls down my spine. I wrap my arms around myself and look, just for a second, at the rat again. At the ugly,small, brutal thing someone left like a calling card in the middle of my borrowed life.

A flare of anger licks up through the fear. “Okay,” I murmur. “You want to play?” My fingers curl into fists. “Then let’s play.”

Because I’m tired of being the girl they come after in the dark.

Tired of being the warning.

The message.

Maybe it’s time I remembered I’m a damn reporter.

And monsters don’t like it when you drag them into the light.

30.Nico

I’m already movingbefore the call ends.

One moment I’m in the boardroom listening to the head of the largest Bank in Asia talk about our expansion plans via a conference call, the next, my chair is back, my phone is in my hand, and every molecule in my body is pointed in one direction.

Home. To her.

A false fire alarm. People pushed out of the building. And when they come back up? A dead rat on my coffee table. In my penthouse, where my family and I celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday. Someone is going to die for this. I’ll gut them like a pig and watch them bleed for this.

Leaving a dead fucking rat where she sleeps, where she laughs. Where I let myself believe, for one fucking second, that we might be able to build something normal on top of all this.