The quiet of the safe house felt like a fragile shell, protecting the warmth they had stolen for themselves at the cottage. For twenty-four hours, they had been just a man and a woman, their world contained within four walls and the rustle of sheets.
Now, back in the city’s sterile luxury, the silence was different. It wasn’t peaceful; it was expectant, humming with the low-grade tension of a storm gathering just over the horizon.
Juliette watched Sandro from the armchair, a book resting unread in her lap. He stood by the panoramic window, staring down at the indifferent river of headlights flowing through the city streets.
He was still wearing the soft, grey sweater from their trip, a relic of a peace that already felt a lifetime away.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked, her voice soft, not wanting to break the spell completely.
He didn’t turn. “The menu for next season. Sourcing morels from the coast. Whether Marco has finally perfected the saffron risotto.”
A ghost of a smile touched his lips, a sad, fleeting thing. “I was thinking about my life. The one I built.”
The one he had chosen. The one she had, however inadvertently, threatened. Guilt, a familiar companion these last few days, pricked at her. Before she could voice the thought, his phone, left on the marble countertop, vibrated with a harsh, insistent buzz.
Sandro’s posture stiffened. A call this late was never good news.
He crossed the room in three long strides, his movements suddenly stripped of their culinary grace and replaced by a predator’s economy. He glanced at the screen. “Enzo.”
He answered, his voice a low command. “What is it?”
Juliette watched his face, her own breath held captive in her lungs. She saw the blood drain from his cheeks, the sudden, stark hollowness in his eyes.
His knuckles, wrapped around the phone, turned bone-white. The silence stretched, filled only by the tinny, frantic squawking from the earpiece.
“When?” Sandro’s voice was a rasp of gravel. Another pause. “Who?”
He didn’t need to ask how. He already knew. The muscles in his jaw worked, a frantic, furious rhythm.
He ended the call without another word, placing the phone back on the counter with a precision that was terrifying in its control.
“Sandro?” Juliette was on her feet, her heart a frantic drum against her ribs. “What’s happened?”
He finally turned to look at her, and the man from the cottage was gone. In his place was someone she had only glimpsed before—in the alley, during the ambush.
His eyes were not the warm, dark pools of a passionate chef; they were chips of obsidian, cold and fathomless.
“Riccardo sent his message,” he said, his voice flat, devoid of all emotion. “He couldn’t get to you. So he went for the next best thing.”
A cold dread washed over her. “The restaurant?”
He gave a single, sharp nod. “It’s gone.”
***
The smell hit them a block away. The acrid stench of burnt wood, melted plastic, and wet ash clung to the damp night air, a funeral pyre’s perfume.
Flashing red and blue lights painted the surrounding buildings in strobing, macabre colors. Police tape, a flimsy yellow ribbon, cordoned off the street.
La Fiamma Nascosta—The Hidden Flame—was a blackened, skeletal husk.
Sandro stood across the street, shielded by the shadows of an awning, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. Juliette stayed beside him, a silent, helpless witness.
The elegant, understated facade was gone, replaced by a gaping, charred maw. The windows were blown out, shards of glass glittering like malevolent diamonds on the wet pavement.
Water from the fire hoses still dripped from the twisted sign, hissing as it hit smoldering embers within. Firefighters moved like ghosts through the ruin, their helmet lamps cutting beams through the lingering smoke.
This was more than a building. This was Sandro’s sanctuary, his rebellion, the tangible proof that he could create instead of destroy.
Every brick laid, every pan seasoned, every dish conceived had been an act of defiance against his own bloodline. Now, his past had reached out with a fiery hand and clawed it all back into ruin.
He didn’t speak, didn’t move. He just stared, his expression carved from stone. Juliette could feel the waves of devastation rolling off him, a silent, crushing tsunami of grief and rage.
This was Riccardo’s masterstroke. It wasn’t just an attack; it was a statement. Nothing you build will ever be safe. Nothing you are can ever be erased. I can touch you anywhere.
Then, through the chaos, Juliette saw a paramedic pushing a gurney toward a waiting ambulance. A figure lay on it, a blanket pulled up to his chest, an oxygen mask over his face.
One arm was bandaged, stained with blood and soot.
Sandro saw it too. A choked sound escaped his throat, and he took a half-step forward before freezing. “Marco,” he breathed, the name a shard of glass in his throat.
His sous-chef. The young, eager kid he’d mentioned just an hour before, the one perfecting the risotto. Marco had probably been closing up, cleaning the kitchen that was his own temple, dreaming of the day he’d earn his own stars.
An innocent, caught in the crossfire of a war he knew nothing about.
The sight broke through Sandro’s stoic shock. The carefully constructed walls of the chef crumbled, and the raw fury of the capo bled through.
Juliette saw his fists clench in his pockets, the tendons in his neck standing out like steel cables. This was no longer about a building. It was about his people. The family he had chosen, not the one he had been born into.
He turned abruptly, his face a mask of cold fury, and started walking back the way they came. Juliette had to hurry to keep up.
“Sandro, wait.”
“Get in the car, Juliette.” His voice was low, dangerous.
“We can’t just—”
He stopped and spun on her, his eyes blazing with a fire far more destructive than the one that had consumed his restaurant.
“We can’t what? Stand here and watch? I’ve seen it. I understand the message. Now get in the goddamn car.”
She flinched at the venom in his tone but stood her ground. “This isn’t your fault.”
A harsh, bitter laugh escaped him.
“Isn’t it? I brought this on him. On all of them. I hired him, I taught him, and I put him in that kitchen tonight. My name, my past, is what put that boy in an ambulance. So don’t you dare tell me it isn’t my fault.”
He turned and strode to the car, leaving her standing on the sidewalk, the cold reality of their situation settling over her like a shroud. The dream was over. The interlude of peace was a lie. There was no escape, only a reckoning.
***
Back in the suffocating silence of the penthouse, Sandro paced like a caged animal. He had shed his sweater, and in the stark white t-shirt, the coiled power in his shoulders and arms seemed more pronounced, more menacing.
He moved from the window to the bar, pouring a glass of whiskey he didn’t drink, his hands restless, his energy a vibrating, lethal thing.
The chef was gone. The man who had cooked for her with such tender passion, who had found solace in the alchemy of ingredients, had been incinerated along with his restaurant.
In his place was Alessandro De Luca, the rightful heir to an empire of violence, and he was finally, irrevocably, awake.
Juliette watched him, her heart aching. “Talk to me, Sandro.”
He stopped pacing and slammed the untouched whiskey glass down on the counter. The sound cracked through the silence.
“There’s nothing to say. He won. He proved his point. I ran from that world, tried to build something clean, and he just poured gasoline on it and lit a match. He showed me that I can’t build. I can only inherit what’s already broken.”
“That’s not true. La Fiamma Nascosta was real. You made it real.”
“And now it’s ash,” he snarled, turning to face her. The grief in his eyes was raw, but it was being rapidly consumed by a colder, harder emotion.
“It’s a pile of smoldering rubble, and Marco is lying in a hospital bed with third-degree burns. Because of me. Because I was arrogant enough to think I could just walk away.”
He stalked towards her, his presence overwhelming in the small space.
“Do you see now, Juliette? Do you finally see what you stumbled into when you wrote that review? You said my food had no soul. Maybe you were right. Maybe I left my soul back in Sicily with my father’s body, and everything I’ve done since has just been a pathetic attempt to pretend I could grow a new one.”
He was a vortex of self-loathing and fury, and he was trying to push her out, to sever the connection that Riccardo had so expertly targeted. He wanted to drive her away before she got burned too.
But she wouldn’t let him.
She closed the distance between them, stepping directly into his path, forcing him to stop. She reached up, her hands cupping his rigid jaw, her thumbs stroking the tense skin. His eyes were wild, lost.
“Look at me,” she commanded, her voice steady despite the tremor in her hands.
“The man I see right now is not soulless. He’s breaking because an innocent person got hurt. He’s in agony because something he loved was destroyed. A soulless man wouldn’t feel any of this. He would feel nothing.”
His resolve wavered, a flicker of the man from the cottage returning to his eyes. He leaned his forehead against hers, a shudder wracking his powerful frame.
“He’ll come for you next, Juliette. This was the warning. You are the target.”
“Then let him come,” she whispered, her resolve hardening into steel. “I am not one of your perfectly plated dishes, Alessandro. I don’t break that easily.”
He pulled back slightly, his hands coming up to grip her arms, his gaze searching hers with a desperate intensity.
He saw no fear there. Only a fierce, unwavering loyalty that mirrored his own.
Her strength was a lifeline, pulling him back from the brink of his despair.
The grief was still there, a gaping wound in his chest. The dream of Chef Sandro was dead, reduced to ash and memory.
But as he looked at the woman before him, her belief in him an unyielding shield, he felt the embers of his rage begin to glow. The fire inside him hadn’t been extinguished. It had merely changed.
The hidden flame of the chef had been put out, only to be replaced by the cold, consuming fire of the capo.
Riccardo had wanted to burn his world down. He had succeeded. But he had made one fatal miscalculation. He had forgotten that some things are not destroyed by fire. They are forged in it.