Page 278 of Rosetti Family New York
The algorithm continues tracking her movement, cameras handing off coverage as she navigates toward the Upper East Side. Standard surveillance until she stops at a café on 74th and Lexington.
My blood turns to ice.
Through the window, I can see her target. Silver hair, expensive suit, the kind of controlled menace that built criminal empires through systematic violence. Chase Callahan himself.
Not a subordinate meeting or intelligence handoff. A personal audience with the man who ordered my family's destruction.
I pull up additional camera angles, activate directional microphones, and route everything through enhancement protocols that turn distant surveillance into intimate eavesdropping. Every resource at my disposal focused on the woman who saved my brother's life twelve hours ago.
The conversation is too quiet for standard pickup, but lip-reading software fills in the gaps. Chase's accusations about divided loyalties. Mara's careful denials. The photograph he slides across the table that makes her face go pale.
Connor Callahan. Chase's nephew. The man responsible for coordinating European operations, money laundering, and enough human trafficking to earn multiple death sentences.
The man Mara will be dating tomorrow night.
Rage builds in my chest like molten steel, white-hot fury that makes rational thought nearly impossible. She warned me about Pier 17, and Chase's response is to parade her in front of other men? To use her as bait in whatever psychological warfare he's planning?
I access Bautiste's reservation system with casual illegality, confirming what I already know. Table twelve, VIP section, tomorrow at eight. Connor Callahan and guest. The same place where I took Mara three years ago, where she laughed at something I whispered and looked at me like I was worth falling for.
Now she'll sit there with my enemy, performing whatever role Chase has assigned, while I watch from digital shadows and slowly lose my mind.
The lip-reading software catches Chase's final threat:Seduce the Ghost, or become one yourself.
They're using her. Not just as an asset or intelligence gatherer, but as bait designed to exploit whatever feelings might remain between us. Chase knows about our history—has always known—and now he's weaponizing it.
My hands shake as I close the surveillance window, pulling up architectural plans for Bautiste instead. Sight lines, security protocols, escape routes—everything I need to ensure tomorrow night doesn't end with Mara's blood on marble floors.
She doesn't know I'm watching. Thinks she's walking into this trap alone, that she'll have to navigate Chase's demands and my potential reaction without backup. She has no idea that every camera in Manhattan has become my eyes, that I've been tracking her movements since the moment she set foot in the city.
The woman who saved my family thinks she's unprotected. She's wrong.
I pull up her file, the one I've built over three years of absence, a digital shrine to the spirit who haunts me. Location data fragments from Europe. Financial trails that disappear into cryptocurrency exchanges. Surveillance captures from CCTV networks I had no business hacking. All the breadcrumbs I've collected like a man possessed, trying to understand why she vanished.
The pieces never fit. Until now.
My phone vibrates. Leo, from his sick bed.
"Tell me you found her," he says, voice rough with pain medication.
"I found her."
"And?"
"She's with Callahan." The words taste bitter. "Setting up some kind of play with Connor."
Leo's silence speaks volumes. He knows what this means—that Mara's either been working for our enemies all along, or she's trapped in something she can't escape. Neither option erases the betrayal, but one might justify it.
"You going to kill her?" Leo asks with characteristic bluntness.
"I don't know yet."
"Bullshit. You know exactly what you're going to do. You're going to save her stupid ass, even if she's the one who put us in the crosshairs."
I don't respond. Don't need to. Leo knows me too well, knows that even as my brain calculates threat assessments and contingency plans, my heart is already committed to a different equation.
“Don’t tell the others. Don’t tell Dom. I’ll handle it, okay. Promise me.”
The silence down the line has me digging crescents with my fingernails into my palms until he finally speaks. “I’ll keep quiet for now. But remember, if she's playing both sides, it's not just your life on the line. It's all of us."
