SCAR'S OF THE BETRAYED MAFIA DON

Chapter 4: Travelling Back To Chicago

The gunshot cracked so close that Lorenzo's ears rang before his mind caught up to what had happened.

He spun, gun already rising, and saw the man first one of King's, half-crouched at the mouth of the corridor, a pistol swinging up toward Lorenzo's chest. There wasn't time to think about it. There wasn't time to do anything except watch the second shot come from somewhere off to his right, and watch the man buckle sideways into the wall and slide down it, leaving a dark smear on the plaster.

Julian was already moving toward him, gun still smoking, jaw tight. "You need to stop standing still in the middle of a firefight."

"Noted." Lorenzo's voice came out flatter than he meant it to. His heart was still catching up to what almost happened.

"Car's out back. Now."

Behind him, he heard Raine make a small sound not quite a gasp, something swallowed halfway and when he turned she was already straightening up from the floor, the photograph nowhere in sight, her hand pressed flat against her apron like she could hold it there through sheer force of will. He didn't have time to ask about it. He filed it away instead, the way he filed everything, for later.

"Move," he said, and pulled her by the wrist toward the stairwell.

The back exit spilled them out into an alley slick with rain that had started sometime during the chaos, red and blue light bleeding faintly off wet brick from patrol cars that hadn't made it close enough yet. Julian's black SUV was already running, back door open, engine idling low and urgent. Two more of Lorenzo's men peeled off toward a second vehicle, weapons still drawn, eyes scanning the rooftops.

"Get in," Lorenzo said.

Raine didn't argue. She climbed in first, and he came in right after her, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched, close enough that she could feel him still breathing hard from the adrenaline. Julian threw the SUV into gear before the door had even fully shut, and the club dropped away behind them, neon smearing into streaks against the wet glass.

Nobody spoke for almost a full minute. In the side mirror Raine could see King's men scattering, running for cars of their own, abandoning whatever was left of tonight's plan now that half of them were bleeding out on a nightclub floor. Whatever this had been about Reyes, the port deal, King's grudge had nothing to do with her, and everything to do with the fact that she was now sitting eighteen inches from a man who thought her family had killed his father.

"You're coming to Chicago," Lorenzo said finally, not looking at her, his eyes fixed on the window.

"What?"

"You heard me."

"I have a life here." Her voice cracked in a way she hated. "I have a job. I have"

"You have nothing here that matters as much as what you just walked into." He turned to look at her then, and whatever softness had cracked open upstairs was gone, sealed back behind something colder. "A man just tried to kill me twenty feet from where you were standing. You think I'm going to leave you here to talk to whoever you want, whenever you want, after that?"

"I'm not talking to anyone."

"Then it won't be a problem, will it?" He said it was like a door closing.

She stared at him, and for a second all six years collapsed down into this one small, ugly moment, him deciding things for her, again, the way he always used to, except now there was no love underneath it, just suspicion, just control. She hated how much it still felt the same.

"My mother," she said, quieter now, because she needed this more than she needed to win the argument. "She's in a facility. She has dementia. She doesn't she can't be moved, she doesn't understand

"Then she stays." He didn't even look at her when he said it.

"Lorenzo." His name came out cracked, desperate, six years of pride gone in an instant. "Please. She's all I have left besides" She stopped herself half a syllable too late, the word *Luca* dying somewhere behind her teeth, swallowed whole.

Something flickered across his face. She wasn't sure if he'd caught the almost-slip or not but whatever it was, he didn't chase it. He looked out the window instead, jaw working, and for a long moment the only sound in the car was tires on wet asphalt and Julian's quiet voice up front, murmuring instructions into a phone.

"I'll have her moved," Lorenzo said finally, flat, final. "Private care. Chicago. It's not for you." He glanced at her, cold again. "I don't leave loose ends sitting somewhere I can't watch them."

It wasn't kindness. She understood that. But it was enough, and she pressed her lips together and looked away before he could see how much it cost her to be grateful to him anyway.

The jet was quieter than the car had been, quiet enough that every unspoken thing between them seemed louder. Raine sat by the window, watching the lights of Miami shrink and scatter beneath them, thinking of the little house with the broken wind chime, of Stella, of a life she'd built out of almost nothing and was now leaving behind for the second time in six years, except this time she wasn't running from the Vittorios.

She was being taken by one.

Across the aisle, Lorenzo sat with a folder open on his lap that he wasn't reading, his eyes fixed somewhere past the pages. She watched him for longer than she meant to the same jaw, the same restless hands, six years older and harder in ways that made her chest ache in a way she didn't have room for right now.

"Why didn't you shoot me," she said finally, surprising herself.

He looked up.

"Upstairs. In the VIP room. You had a gun in your hand before Julian even got through the door. You could've just" She didn't finish it.

"You think I brought you into my house to put a bullet in you." It wasn't a question.

"I don't know what you brought me here to do."

He was quiet long enough that she thought he wouldn't answer at all. Then: "Neither do I."

It was the most honest thing he'd said to her all night, and it scared her more than anything he'd said in anger.

Chicago came up gray and glittering beneath heavy clouds, the estate sprawling out past the wrought iron gates like something out of a life she used to imagine for herself, a long time ago, before any of this. The car slowed at the gate, and it opened for them without anyone saying a word, swallowing the vehicle whole into a driveway lined with old, dark trees.

Raine's stomach tightened as the mansion came into view, stone and ivy and windows lit gold against the gray morning, more house than she'd ever set foot in even during the years she'd let herself dream about a future with Lorenzo. The car rolled to a stop at the base of wide stone steps.

And there, waiting at the top of them, stood three figures she'd never seen before, silhouetted against the open door, one of them older, steady, watching the car with the patience of a man who'd waited out worse storms than this. Another, a woman close to Lorenzo's age, arms crossed, her expression already sharp with something Raine recognized instantly, because she'd worn that same look herself once, staring down at people she blamed for things they hadn't done.

The gate closed behind them with a low metallic groan, sealing shut, and Raine understood, with a cold certainty settling into her chest, that whatever waited for her inside that house, there was no walking back out through it the same way she'd come in.