The cursor blinked, a rhythmic, mocking pulse on the blank page. Juliette Monroe stared at the screen, the title of her follow-up piece—The Man Behind the Flame: A Portrait of Alessandro De Luca—feeling more like an admission of defeat than a statement of intent.
For two days, she had tried to build a profile of the enigmatic chef, and for two days, she had hit nothing but polished, impenetrable walls.
She had called food suppliers, former employers from his brief, meteoric rise in other cities, and even a disgruntled sommelier who had once worked at La Fiamma Nascosta. The story was always the same.
Alessandro De Luca was a genius. A perfectionist. A private man.
He paid his bills on time, demanded excellence, and kept the world at arm’s length with a chilling efficiency.
No one knew where he came from, what drove him, or what he did when he wasn’t plating a dish with the precision of a surgeon. He had materialized in the culinary scene fully formed, a man without a past.
Her mind drifted back to their confrontation in his office. The cold fury in his eyes, the way his voice, a low baritone laced with an accent she still couldn’t quite place, had wrapped around her words and twisted them.
He was a fortress, and her review had been a cannonball that had, for a fleeting moment, cracked the facade.
She’d seen something flicker behind the anger—a flash of raw, wounded passion that completely contradicted the soulless cooking she’d written about. That flicker was the real story, and it was driving her mad.
Frustrated, she pushed back from her desk, the legs of her chair scraping against the hardwood floor of her small but well-appointed apartment. The afternoon light was fading, casting long shadows from the ficus tree in the corner.
She needed air. A coffee. Anything to shake loose the mental logjam. Grabbing her keys and tote bag, she left the blinking cursor to its lonely vigil.
The walk to her favorite café was brief, but she barely noticed the bustling city street. Her thoughts were a whirlpool of De Luca’s guarded intensity and the unsettling dead ends of her research. It felt less like journalism and more like espionage.
She returned forty minutes later, double-shot latte in hand, feeling marginally more human.
Unlocking her door, she stepped inside, shrugging off her coat. A strange stillness hung in the air, a subtle wrongness that made the fine hairs on her arms stand up.
At first, she couldn’t place it. Everything looked the same. Her laptop was on the desk. Her coat was where she’d tossed it earlier.
Then she saw it.
A single drawer in the antique credenza by the door was open. Just an inch.
Juliette frowned. She was meticulous about her space, a place for everything and everything in its place. She never left drawers open.
Her heart began to beat a little faster. She set her coffee down, her hand trembling slightly.
Moving into the living room, she scanned the space with a forensic eye. The stack of research books on her coffee table—the top one was askew, its spine facing the wrong way.
In the kitchen, a cupboard door was slightly ajar, the one where she kept the good wine glasses.
A cold dread trickled down her spine. Someone had been here.
Panic gave way to a surge of adrenaline. She moved methodically through the apartment, her journalistic instincts kicking in.
Her bedroom was the worst. The contents of her jewelry box weren’t stolen, but they had been moved, a delicate gold chain sitting on top of a pearl earring.
The drawers of her dresser were closed, but when she opened one, the neat stacks of sweaters were subtly disturbed, as if someone had run a hand through them.
Her laptop. Her files. Her notes on De Luca.
She rushed back to the living room and powered on her computer. It was fine.
Her documents were all there. Nothing seemed deleted or corrupted.
She checked her wallet, her emergency cash tucked away in a book. Still there. Nothing of value—nothing obvious, at least—was missing.
This was what truly terrified her. A thief would have been messy, efficient. A thief would have taken the laptop, the jewelry, the cash.
This was different. This was quiet and deliberate.
It wasn’t a robbery; it was an intrusion. A violation.
Someone had walked through her life, touched her things, and left a silent, chilling message: I was here. I can get to you.
She sank onto her sofa, wrapping her arms around herself as a tremor ran through her. She tried to rationalize it. A burglar, interrupted before they could take anything? Kids looking for a thrill?
But the quiet precision of it all belied any simple explanation. It felt personal.
After a long moment, she picked up her phone and called the police. The responding officers were professional but dismissive.
No forced entry—they guessed the lock had been picked. No stolen items.
They took her statement, offered her a pamphlet on home security, and logged it as a suspected botched burglary.
“Probably scared them off when you came up the walk, miss,” one of them said with a practiced, reassuring smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
But she hadn’t scared anyone off. The apartment had been empty when she arrived. She knew it in her bones.
Long after the police were gone, Juliette sat in the encroaching darkness, the sense of being watched clinging to her like a shroud. Her gaze fell on the blank screen across the room, the title of her article mocking her.
The Man Behind the Flame. She was beginning to think she had no idea how true that was, or what kind of fire she had been foolish enough to poke.
***
The clang of steel on steel echoed in the cavernous, empty kitchen of La Fiamma Nascosta. Sandro methodically sharpened his favorite chef’s knife, the rhythmic shing-shing-shing a meditation against the chaos roaring in his head.
Enzo’s words from the night before were a brand on his soul.
Riccardo. A coup. Everyone gone.
He had spent his entire adult life believing a lie, a comfortable tragedy that allowed him to sever himself from the De Luca name. He’d told himself he was the sole survivor of a rival family’s ambition.
The truth was uglier, more intimate. The poison was in the bloodline. His own cousin, the boy he’d grown up with, had slaughtered their family for a crown Sandro had never wanted.
He pressed the blade harder against the steel, the sound growing sharper, more violent. He had refused Enzo.
He had told the old man to disappear, to let the ghosts of the past stay buried. He had a new life here.
A life of discipline, control, and anonymity. A life built dish by perfect dish, a wall of culinary excellence to keep the savagery of his heritage at bay.
Then, the review.
Juliette Monroe.
Even now, her name was a splinter under his skin. He had expected outrage, professional disagreement. He had not expected to be seen.
“Technically perfect, but emotionally hollow… a masterpiece from a ghost.” She had peeled back the layers of his craft and found the precise, empty space where his heart should have been.
Her words had been a public accusation of the very truth he lived with every day.
And when she’d sat in his office, defiant and unflinching, he had felt something shift inside him. An infuriating, unwanted connection to this woman who saw too much.
He hated her for it. He respected her for it. And now, he couldn’t get her out of his mind.
A burner phone, a relic of a life he’d sworn off, vibrated on the stainless-steel prep table beside him. He stopped sharpening the knife, the sudden silence deafening.
He knew it was Enzo. He had told the man not to contact him.
With a curse under his breath, he wiped his hands on his apron and answered. “What?”
Enzo’s voice was gravelly, urgent. “He made a move.”
Sandro’s entire body went rigid. “Who? Where?”
“Not on you. Not directly. One of my eyes near the critic’s building. He saw two of Riccardo’s men. They went into her building about an hour ago. Stayed for twenty minutes. Left without carrying anything.”
The knife slipped from Sandro’s numb fingers and clattered onto the floor. The sound was like a gunshot in the silent kitchen.
He didn’t need to ask what they did. He knew the protocol. He knew the language of intimidation as well as he knew the five mother sauces.
A subtle search. A message left in disturbed belongings. A quiet declaration of power. We know who she is. We know she’s important to you. We can touch anything, anyone, you care about.
But he didn’t care about her. He couldn’t.
She was a complication, a journalist who had stuck her nose where it didn’t belong and inadvertently lit a beacon on his hiding place. She was a stranger.
The lie crumbled into ash the moment it formed in his mind.
A wave of cold, nauseating guilt washed over him. This was his fault. His past, a toxic sludge he thought he’d scraped from his boots years ago, was now seeping into her life, staining her safety.
Riccardo wasn’t just hunting for him anymore; he was circling, testing the fences, looking for a weak point. And he had found one in a woman whose only crime was writing an honest review.
The war inside him ignited, a conflagration of his two selves. The chef, Alessandro De Luca, screamed at him to stay put, to lock the doors, to sever the connection and let her deal with her own problems.
She wasn’t his responsibility. Protecting her meant engaging, stepping back onto the bloody stage he had fled. It meant becoming the one thing he despised.
But the ghost of Alessandro De Luca, the son of a capo, the man raised on codes of honor and violence, knew better. In his world, there was no such thing as an innocent bystander; there were only assets and liabilities, pawns and players.
Riccardo had just declared Juliette Monroe a pawn in their game, and Sandro’s inaction had placed her on the board. The need to protect her was primal, absolute, a force that tore through his carefully constructed peace with the force of a hurricane.
He looked around his kitchen—his sanctuary, his temple of control. It was all a lie.
A gilded cage. He had built it to keep the monster out, but the monster was inside him, and its shadow was now falling on her.
He had wanted a life of peace. Riccardo had just made it brutally clear that was no longer an option.
He couldn’t hide. Not when hiding meant letting an innocent woman pay the price for his name.
Sandro bent down and retrieved the knife. His grip was steady now, his knuckles white.
The internal conflict was over, settled not by choice but by necessity. He walked to the small locker where he kept his street clothes, his movements economical and precise.
The chef was gone. In his place stood something older, colder, and far more dangerous.
He grabbed his keys, his face a mask of grim resolve. He had to go to her.
He had to pull her out of the line of fire. He had created this unwanted connection between them, and now, by God, he would be the one to deal with the consequences.