Page 39 of The Assassin's Captive
She doesn't know about the prowler or Petrini, doesn't know that our temporary safety is evaporating faster than I can reinforce it. But she will, because I can't protect her from threats I haven't fully identified yet. And now, with a retired cop watching my every move, the options for dealing with those threats have become significantly more limited.
I close the door quietly and return to the kitchen where my coffee has gone cold and the security feeds continue their silent surveillance of a perimeter that no longer feels secure. The morning that started with routine checks has evolved into a fundamental shift in how I'll need to operate going forward.
No more bodies. No more violence that can't be explained. No more assumptions that this house represents sanctuary rather than exposure.
Everything just got much harder.
18
SERENA
The name Barone tastes foreign on my tongue now. Twenty-eight years I've carried it, twenty-eight years I've built my identity around the quiet professors who raised me with books and gentle corrections. Now it feels borrowed like a costume I've been wearing without knowing the performance was always temporary. The adoption isn't the problem. The problem is where I came from before the adoption.
I test every window latch in Lorenzo's house for the third time today. The kitchen window overlooks a garden, but the drop would break my ankle. The living room faces the front, but there's no cover between here and the road. Each potential escape route would end in failure, and the helplessness crawls under my skin.
Emilio Costa's daughter. The words play on repeat in my head until they lose all meaning. My biological father runs the syndicate I've spent years trying to dismantle, which seems less than ironic. Every case I've built, every corrupt official I've exposed, every thread I've pulled—it all leads back to him. To me.
The front door opens, and Lorenzo's footsteps reach down the hallway toward where I'm standing in the surveillance room, staring at the wall of monitors that show every angle of his property. Cameras everywhere, recording everything. Even me, probably.
He appears in the doorway, still wearing the black shirt from this morning, sleeves rolled up to reveal the tattoos that ink his arms. The scar down his right cheek catches the light from the monitors.
"What are you doing in my study?" he grumbles, glancing up at me as he loosens his tie and scowls.
"I'm trying to understand my situation." I turn to face him. "What am I supposed to do now? Pretend this changes nothing? Pretend I'm not the daughter of a criminal?"
Lorenzo moves past me and reaches for a tablet on the table next to one of the larger monitors, then heads out the door toward the bedroom. "You adapt. You survive."
"That's it? That's your advice?" I follow him, my voice rising. My feet slap against the floor, and it doesn't escape me that I'm asking a mobster for advice on how to live in my new reality. "Adapt to being Emilio Costa's bastard daughter? Adapt to having my entire life revealed as a lie?"
He pulls his shirt over his head and drops it on the floor the minute we're in the room, then sets his tablet on his dresser. The muscles across his back shift as he reaches for his belt. "Your life wasn't a lie. Your parents raised you. Your education, your career, your choices—those are yours."
"Built on false foundations." I watch him strip down to his boxers as I cross my arms over my chest indignantly. "Everything I am, everything I've worked for, it's all connected to him now. The prosecutors I work with, the judges who hear my cases—they'll all know whose blood runs through my veins."
"Then you make new connections. Build new foundations." He walks toward the bathroom nonchalantly. He couldn’t care less about this. To him I'm nothing but a job, and that hurts me even though I shouldn’t give a rat's ass what he thinks. "Costa isn't keeping you alive out of fatherly affection. You're useful to him now. That gives you leverage."
"Leverage?" I follow him into the bathroom, my hands shaking with frustration. "I'm a political tool. A weapon he can point at his enemies or use to legitimize his empire. There's no leverage in that."
Lorenzo turns on the shower, steam beginning to fog the mirror within seconds. "There's always leverage if you're smart enough to find it."
"Stop talking to me about this as if it's a business transaction." My voice cracks. "This is my life—my identity. Everything I thought I knew about myself is gone."
He hooks his thumbs in the waistband of his boxers. "Identity isn't blood. It's choices."
"Easy for you to say. You've always known who you were. The Costa family took you in when you were a kid. You chose this life."
"I chose survival." He steps out of his boxers, completely naked now. "Same choice you're making."
I stare at him, at the scars across his torso that mar his tattoos, at the way he moves through this conversation as if discussing my destroyed life is routine. "You don't understand. This isn't about survival anymore. This is about my future and my identity."
"You're Serena Barone, criminal prosecutor. A woman who put herself through law school and built a reputation taking down corrupt officials." He steps toward the shower. "Costa's blood doesn't change that."
"It changes everything." Tears burn my eyes, and I hate myself for crying in front of him. "It makes everything I've done meaningless!" My voice is raised, but he's still not listening to me. I feel like I'm screaming at a brick wall.
Lorenzo stops at the shower door. "You think Costa's enemies will see it that way? You think the families he's destroyed will care that you built cases against corruption instead of for him?"
The question hits me cold. I hadn't considered that. The rival families won't see me as an innocent prosecutor who happened to share DNA with their enemy. They'll see me as Costa blood. A target.
"You're right." My voice comes out small. "They'll come for me regardless."
