THE HUNTED VALENTINO HEIRESS

Chapter five

DANTE

The gym was empty when Alessandro arrived at noon. I was in the ring, working the heavy bag like it owed me money, trying to exhaust myself into not thinking about tonight.

Alessandro climbed into the ring, tablet in hand. "She took the bait."

I stopped mid-punch. "Show me."

He turned the screen toward me. Server logs. Timestamp: 11:47 PM last night.

User disconnected from TrackedNetwork_Valentino

5G search: "Russo Southwark"

Article accessed: ThomasRusso_ElectricalFire_Archive_2004

Duration: 4 minutes 32 seconds

Article removed from cache: 11:52 PM

"She disconnected from her father's WiFi first," Alessandro said. "Smart girl."

"How long was the article live before she found it?"

"Exactly thirty-seven minutes. Our journalist contact posted it at 11:10 PM, right after you sent your first text. Buried it deep enough that only someone specifically searching 'Russo Southwark' would find it. Including updating old posts with the text and photos."

I stared at the timestamp. Four minutes and thirty-two seconds. That was how long Sienna Valentino spent staring at my father's obituary, at the funeral photo, at ten-year-old me with pitiful eyes.

"And she still confirmed dinner," I said quietly.

"She still confirmed dinner." Alessandro set down the tablet. "So now we know."

"Know what?"

"That she's either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid. She suspects you're connected to a family her father destroyed, and she's still going to meet you alone." He paused. "Or she thinks she can handle you."

I thought about that. Sienna disconnecting from her father's surveillance. Finding exactly what we wanted her to find, enough to make her suspicious, not enough to give her the full picture.

"She's testing me," I realized. "She's going to dinner to see if I'm dangerous."

"And you're testing her," Alessandro countered. "To see if she's loyal to her family or curious enough to betray them."

He was right. The article was the first real move in our game. We gave her just enough truth to see what she'd do with it.

She chose to hide it from her father.

She chose to meet me anyway.

"The article," I said. "You're sure it's gone?"

"Scrubbed from every cache, every archive, every search engine. It existed for exactly forty-three minutes. Long enough for her to find it if she was looking, short enough that if she tells her father, he'll think she's paranoid. His investigators won't find anything."

Brilliant. Alessandro was always brilliant.

"So now she's coming to dinner with suspicions she can't prove and can't share." I started unwrapping my hands.

"But Dante, the name on the card. You took a risk. If she had handed that card to Marcus immediately..."

"She didn't," I cut in, wrapping my hands with slow, deliberate movements. "Because I gave her a puzzle to solve. I introduced myself as Rossi, but gave her the card that said Russo. A slip of the tongue? That's what I wanted her to think."

Alessandro raised an eyebrow. "You wanted her to catch you in a lie?"

"I wanted her to get curious. If I just told her my tragedy, she'd think I was selling something. But by letting her 'discover' the discrepancy, by letting her dig up the dead father and the fire on her own... she feels like she holds a secret piece of me."

I turned to the heavy bag, throwing a sharp jab. "She doesn't see a threat anymore, Alessandro. She sees a wounded boy hiding from his past. She's not looking at me with suspicion. She's looking at me with pity."

"And pity," Alessandro finished, "is the quickest way to lower a woman's guard."

I nodded.

"You look terrible," my brother observed, leaning against the ropes.

"Thanks."

"Did you sleep?"

"No." I threw a vicious combination. Jab, cross, hook, uppercut. The bag swung wildly. "I was planning."

"Planning what? Your escape route when Vincent Valentino's investigators discover who you are? Or how you're going to convince his daughter to betray her family for a man she's known for forty-eight hours?"

I stopped hitting the bag. "Both."

Alessandro climbed into the ring, which he never did unless something was seriously wrong. He wasn't a fighter. He was the strategist, the planner, the one who thought ten moves ahead while I was busy with the immediate violence.

"Dante." He gripped my shoulders, forcing me to look at him. "I need you to be honest with me. Are you still committed to this? Because if you're having doubts..."

"I'm not having doubts."

"You're a terrible liar." He released me. "Papa used to say it was your greatest weakness. You feel everything too much. Care too much. That's why you were good at fighting. You could channel it into controlled violence. But this?" He gestured vaguely. "This requires you to not care. To use someone's feelings against them without flinching. Can you do that?"

I thought about Sienna's smile last night. It would

be so satisfying to end her life as well, but could I?

"Yes," I lied.

Alessandro saw through it immediately. "She's getting to you."

"She's a means to an end."

"Is she?" He pulled out his phone, showed me a photo. It was from last night. Surveillance image of me and Sienna at the gallery. "You look at her like she's not the daughter of the man who killed our father."

I stared at the photo.

"I'm playing a role," I said. It was just our first time meeting and she had already started screwing with my head.

"Then play it better. If she screws you up, in thirty-six hours, Vincent Valentino's investigators are going to connect Dante Rossi to the Russo family. When that happens, they'll come for you."

"That would never happen. I have a plan for that." I walked to the bench and picked up my water bottle. "The background check is already a dead end. Literally."

"What do you mean?"

"I paid off a city archivist three years ago to alter the public records," I said, my voice steady. "If Vincent Valentino runs a check on 'Dante Russo,' he won't find a vengeance-seeking twenty-five-year-old. He’ll find a death certificate. According to the British government, I died fifteen years ago from respiratory complications caused by the fire."

Alessandro stared at me. "You buried yourself."

"I became a ghost. Vincent is an arrogant man, Alessandro. He’ll run the check on 'Dante Rossi,' find a clean gym owner with no criminal record, and dismiss me. And even if he digs deeper into the Russo family history, he’ll see that the only surviving son died as a child. He isn't looking for a man who doesn't exist."

"I hope so." Alessandro's voice went cold. "The plan was to seduce her, extract information, and use her as leverage. So um... keep your heart guarded. I heard half of the men in the city her obsessed about that bitch."

He was overthinking this.

There was no way a man like me would be obsessed over someone whose blood, and her family's, I wanted to spill so badly. She was attractive, I'd admit. I chuckled. Which made it all the more interesting.

"I can handle this," I said.

"Can you? Because I need to know right now if you're going to complete the mission or if I need to pull you out before you get yourself killed over a girl."

I scoffed, checking the wrap on my knuckles. "I guess you have no idea how dangerous I can be, brother. If you could see into the depths of my heart, you yourself would be terrified."

His eyes widened, then he composed himself. "She's Vincent Valentino's daughter. The enemy. The reason we've spent twenty years in the shadows while they took everything from us. Our restaurant, our territory, our family. Papa burned to death, Dante. Mama wasted away."

The words hit like physical blows. Because he was right. Sienna Valentino had benefited from my family's destruction every single day of her privileged life.

"She didn't choose that. She's as much a prisoner of her father's empire as we've been prisoners of our need for revenge."

"You're defending her?"

"I'm not defending her," I said quietly. "I'm using her. Exactly as planned."

Alessandro studied me for a long moment, then nodded. "Good. Because tonight, you need to make her fall completely. No more slow seduction. No more testing the waters. You have one night to make Sienna Valentino so in love with you that when the truth comes out, she'll choose you over her family." He headed for the ropes. "So don't fail."

He left, and I was alone in the ring with my thoughts and my guilt and the photo of me looking at Sienna like she was everything.

I pulled out my phone and started planning tonight. Not the seduction. The truth. Or at least, a version of truth that would bind her to me without completely revealing my intentions.

I would tell her about my father's death. The fire. The pain of losing him. I would make her see me as a victim of the same violent world she was trapped in. I would create intimacy through shared trauma, make her feel like we were both prisoners trying to escape.

It was manipulation. But it was also true. We were both prisoners.

The question was whether I was freeing her or just dragging her into a different cage.

My phone buzzed. Sienna.

"I can't wait for tonight. Is 8:30 too late?"

I stared at the message, at the innocent hope in those words, and felt something inside me break.

"8:30 is perfect. I'll make dinner."

"You cook?"

"My mother taught me. It's not fancy, but it's honest."

A pause, then: "Honest sounds perfect."

I set down my phone and looked at my reflection in the gym mirrors. Dark eyes, my father's eyes, filled with determination and doubt in equal measure.

"I'm sorry, Papa," I whispered. "I will do everything in my power to wipe out her entire family."