Page 48 of Twilight Mask

The bacon’s sizzling nicely, but there’s no response from Laura. I check the cameras a second time, and everything’s exactly as I left it. I linger on the laptop feed and stare at the room: her bed is made and I can tell her shower is still damp. Which means she’s awake and showered already, but it’s only a little past eight in the morning.

Where is my girl going?

I’m too curious. I grab my laptop from my office and set it up on the island as I cook. Since I hacked her phone and cloned its SIM data, I can tap into her tracking information. It only takes a few minutes for my automated programs to start spooling data onto my screen, and a dot appears on a map of Chicago. I zoom in, frowning, and zoom in again, and a cold, sinking feeling fills my body.

That can’t be right. I double-check the information, triple-check, go over every little detail, but nothing changes.

Laura’s phone is inside my building.

I can’t tell where she is exactly. The tracking doesn’t give me that much detail. I’m on the top floor, and she could be anywhere nearby. But that’s not possible—there’s no way she knows that Jackal lives here.

I’ve been careful. She hasn’t seen my face. And even if she did, that wouldn’t necessarily give her enough information to track down where I live. My head’s spinning and I forget all about breakfast until the smell of burning bacon fills the kitchen. I yank the pan off the heat, cursing, on the edge of panic.

Valentina’s sleep voice floats in from the living room. “Are you cooking? Smells like it burned.”

I’m about to tell her everything’s fine when someone knocks on the door.

Chapter 22

Laura

Ipark the car outside of a condo building at the edge of the lake and wonder if this is a terrible idea.

Marco Vitale’s dossier is spread out on my lap. I flip through the pages, skimming them briefly, and it quickly becomes obvious that nothing good will come of this.

But my fingers brush across his image. It’s a candid shot, taken a few years back. He’s sitting near the window at a restaurant talking to a young man. His face is serious and intense, with that square jaw I remember, and the same nose, and those lips—the lips I need to taste again—and his head of thick, dark hair.

It has to be Jackal. Of all the profiles my brother gave me, Marco fits it the best, and his face looks like it’s right. I can’t be totally sure, but he fits. Right age, right build, right height, right skin color. Everything about him fits.

With one glaring exception.

He was a top Capo in the Santoro Crime Family.

And back before Luciano Santoro was killed by my father’s hands, we were mortal enemies with his organization.

Santoro caused my family so much pain and suffering. Davide’s permanently scarred because of him, both physically and emotionally. Simon drove himself crazy taking down those bastards, and Santoro’s the one that started the attack on the oasis that nearly ripped my family to pieces.

Ever since he was killed, our lives have been better. We don’t have to look over our shoulders anymore. Simon won the war, but he didn’t do a good job rounding up the remnants of the old family.

This is beyond stupid. Marco is my enemy. Or at least, he should be my enemy.

But he’s not a Santoro anymore. The dossier is light on what he’s been up to these last two years, but it mentions a lot of freelance hacking and IT work for various minor crime outfits, which makes a lot of sense. There’s nothing in his profile about hurting or killing specific members of the Bianco Famiglia, which is good, but he clearly was complicit in all the crimes his boss committed against my family.

I should hate him. He’s a Santoro. Except there is no more Santoro Famiglia anymore, and Marco has known about me for a while now. If he wanted to hurt me, he had all the opportunity in the world.

And yet he didn’t. He should hate me the same way I hate him, but he doesn’t.

Now I have to go up there and find out why.

I push open my car door. I’m shaking with nerves as I head to the building. I get lucky, and an old man’s on his way out to walk his dog as I approach. He holds the door for me and I give him a friendly greeting. The front desk is empty, which means I can head straight for the stairwell, and I start climbing up to unit 305.

He can’t be that bad. If my brother knows about him and hasn’t killed him yet, then maybe I don’t have to hate him. If I’m being honest with myself, at this point I’m looking for any excuse to keep moving this relationship forward, because that’s what I want. I can ignore the evidence in front of my eyes for a while if that helps. But there’s a voice in the back of my head whispering with each step: this is going to end badly.

Because how else can it end?

Marco’s my enemy. I keep coming back to it. He was a Capo in a Famiglia that went to war with my brothers, and the second anyone finds out that I’ve been seeing him, all hell will break loose.

I reach the third floor and find his door. My heart’s in my throat as I stand there staring, and a thousand reasons to turn around and run away rush through my brain. Even if this isn’t going to end in disaster—which it totally is—the moment I knock on that door is the moment our game ends and reality takes its place. And how can we make this work in the real world? He’s a Santoro. I’m a Bianco. We hate each other, and that’s the end of that.

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