The air in the abandoned auto garage didn’t smell of thyme and searing scallops; it smelled of stale motor oil, cold concrete, and the bitter grounds of coffee that had been brewing for hours.
It was a scent of grim purpose, a world away from the fragrant steam of La Fiamma Nascosta.
Sandro stood over a large metal table, his hands braced on its scarred surface, staring down at the architectural blueprints of a sprawling estate.
The ghost of a chef still lingered in the precise way he studied the schematics, as if they were a complex recipe he had to master.
But the man was gone. In his place stood the Capo.
The rage that had consumed him after the firebombing had cooled, hardening into something heavier and far more dangerous: resolve. It was a solid weight in his chest, an anchor in the chaotic sea of his upended life.
He had spent years running from his name, from the blood in his veins, only to have his cousin drag him back by destroying the one pure thing he had ever built.
There was no more running. There was only the reckoning.
“It’s a fortress,” Enzo said, his voice a low gravelly rumble that barely disturbed the quiet tension in the room. He stood beside Sandro, a cigarillo clenched between his teeth, his weathered face etched with the pragmatism of a man who had survived decades of violence.
“Riccardo has tripled the guards since the coup. He’s paranoid. Motion sensors, infrared cameras on the perimeter, patrols every fifteen minutes. The front gate is a death sentence.”
Across the table, two other men nodded in agreement. They were the sum total of Sandro’s remaining loyalists, ghosts like him who had survived Riccardo’s purge.
Leo was an old-timer, his knuckles scarred and his eyes holding a weary loyalty that went back to Sandro’s grandfather.
The other, Marco, was young and wiry, his energy a thrum of nervous aggression, his hands constantly fidgeting with the grip of the pistol tucked into his waistband.
“He has to come out sometime,” Marco muttered, tracing a line on the blueprint with a greasy fingertip.
“We hit his car on the way to one of his clubs.”
“Too public, too messy,” Sandro said without looking up. His voice was different now. The heat and fury he’d thrown at Juliette in their first meeting had been replaced by a chilling calm.
It was the voice of a man who had made his peace with what he had to do.
“This can’t be a street war. It invites chaos, brings down the wrong kind of attention. We don’t have the numbers or the resources for that. This has to be surgical. We remove the cancer, not burn down the entire body.”
He tapped a finger on the main building, a grand villa overlooking the water. “We take the head off the snake. The rest will fall into line or scatter.”
“And how do you plan to get to the head when it’s locked in a steel box, Capo?” Leo asked, the honorific tasting both respectful and weary on his tongue.
Enzo took a drag from his cigarillo, the tip glowing like a malevolent ember in the gloom. “He’s not always in the box. Two nights from now, he’s holding a meeting. All his top captains will be there. A celebration of his consolidated power.”
A humorless smile touched his lips. “The timing is… poetic.”
A gathering. The entire command structure of Riccardo’s regime in one room. It was the perfect opportunity, a single target that, if hit correctly, could end everything in one night.
It was also, Sandro knew, the moment the villa’s security would be at its absolute peak. They were caught in a perfect paradox of opportunity and impossibility.
For an hour, they debated. They dissected every possible entry point: the sea cliffs behind the estate, the service roads, the heavily wooded eastern boundary.
Each route was a dead end, a new layer of Riccardo’s paranoid defenses revealing itself. The mood grew heavier, the silence between suggestions stretching longer. The plan was a fantasy, a suicide mission masquerading as strategy.
It was then that a new voice cut through the despair.
“What about this?”
All four men turned. Juliette stood in the doorway of the small, grimy office they’d relegated her to for her own safety.
She was holding a laptop, her expression one of intense focus that Sandro recognized instantly. It was the same look she’d worn when dissecting a dish, an analytical fire that saw past the surface to the structure beneath.
She had refused to be sent away, her quiet, unyielding presence a constant reminder of what he was fighting for. But this was different. She wasn’t standing behind him; she was stepping forward.
She walked to the table and placed the laptop beside the blueprints. On the screen was an old, digitized municipal survey map from the 1920s.
“I’ve been cross-referencing the estate’s original construction plans with city utility archives,” she said, her voice clear and steady.
She pointed to a faint, dotted line on the old map that ran from the coastline, directly underneath the villa’s foundation.
“When the original mansion was built, there was a natural spring on the property. They built a stone aqueduct to divert the water and use it for the gardens. It shows up on the old surveys, but not on any of the modern ones. According to the zoning permits from a 1978 renovation, the main access was sealed, but the channel itself was never filled in.”
Sandro stared at the screen, then at the modern blueprints. He traced the path with his finger.
It emerged in what was now a grotto near the pool, an area designed for drainage and concealed by decorative rockwork. It was a forgotten artery, a ghost in the estate’s anatomy.
“It’s a service tunnel, essentially,” Juliette continued, her confidence growing.
“Too small for a car, probably cramped and half-flooded, but big enough for men to move through. It’s a structural element, not a security one. I doubt Riccardo even knows it exists.”
Silence fell over the garage. Marco let out a low whistle. Leo leaned in, his tired eyes suddenly sharp with interest.
Enzo looked from the laptop to Juliette, a flicker of profound respect in his gaze. “Where did you find this, signorina?”
“A food critic has to be a good researcher,” she said with a faint, wry smile. “You’d be surprised how many chefs lie about where they source their ingredients.”
Sandro felt a surge of something fierce and protective, mingled with an overwhelming sense of pride.
She hadn’t just accepted his world; she was finding a way to navigate it, to fight within it, using her own weapons: intellect and precision. But that pride was immediately choked by fear.
“It’s a good lead,” Sandro said, his tone final. “Enzo, you and Marco will scout the coastline entrance at dawn. Find the opening. We go in from there.”
He looked pointedly at Juliette. “Thank you. Now go back to the office. We’ll handle it.”
She didn’t move. She crossed her arms, her chin lifting in a gesture of defiance that was achingly familiar. “No.”
Sandro’s jaw tightened. “This isn’t a discussion, Juliette.”
“The hell it isn’t,” she retorted, her voice low but unyielding.
“The grotto on the other end is behind the main cabana. The plans show an electronic locking system on the service panel that covers the access point. You’ll need codes. Or you can tear it open and announce your arrival to every guard on the property.”
“We’ll handle the lock,” Marco grunted.
“How?” Juliette challenged, her eyes flashing.
“With a crowbar? A small explosive? You need to be ghosts, remember? I spent the last two hours not just finding the tunnel, but getting into the security contractor’s employee database. I have the master override codes for the entire poolside system. I can get you through that panel without making a sound. I need to be there.”
The air crackled with tension. Sandro stared at her, his internal war, the one he thought he had won, roaring back to life.
He saw her in the line of fire, saw Riccardo’s smug face, and a cold dread coiled in his gut.
“Absolutely not,” he bit out. “You are the reason we are doing this. I will not have you in the middle of it.”
“You don’t have a choice!” she shot back, stepping closer, her voice dropping to a fierce whisper for his ears only.
“Sandro, listen to me. This is not me playing soldier. This is me being your partner. You use the skills of your men, so use mine. My skill is information. I can be your eyes on the inside. I can sit in the cabana, looking like a guest who wandered off, and feed you information over a comm. I can disable the alarms in that sector. I can give you the advantage you need to make this ‘surgical.’ Without me, you’re just four guys with guns hoping for the best.”
She was right. Her logic was as sharp and irrefutable as one of her reviews.
She wasn’t a liability; she was an asset, perhaps their most important one. He looked into her eyes and saw not fear, but a strength that mirrored his own.
She was no longer just the woman he had to protect. She was the woman who was standing beside him, ready to fight for their future.
His love for her had started as a spark of anger and chemistry, but it had been forged into something unbreakable in the fires of the last few weeks.
Denying her this was denying a part of who she now was, who they now were.
He let out a slow, heavy breath, the surrender feeling less like a defeat and more like an acceptance of fate.
“Fine,” he said, his voice rough. The other men shifted, their expressions a mixture of shock and concern, but they said nothing. The Capo had spoken.
“You will have Enzo with you at all times. You will do exactly as I say. The second it gets hot, the second something goes wrong, he gets you out. No arguments. Is that understood?”
“Understood,” she said, her shoulders relaxing slightly, a quiet victory in her gaze.
He nodded, turning back to the blueprints. The final piece of the plan clicked into place, terrifying and perfect.
The chef was gone. The critic was gone. In their place stood a capo and his queen, ready to storm the castle.
He looked from the map of the forgotten tunnel to Juliette’s determined face, and knew that win or lose, they would face the fire together.