Mine to Protect

Chapter 4 — Before the Storm

Luca

She was still awake.

Luca knew this the way he knew most things not because anyone told him, but because he paid attention. The suite's internal system showed the bedroom light on at 3 AM, then 4, then still burning at half past five when the rain finally stopped and Chicago exhaled into a pale, exhausted dawn.

He sat in the building's private office two floors below, a glass of whiskey untouched on the desk beside him, and thought about the look on her face when the elevator doors opened.

He'd been in this business long enough to know what guilt looked like. Fear looked like. The particular expression of someone holding something back behind their eyes like water behind a dam.

Sofia Carver had been holding something back.

He turned the thought over slowly, the way he turned over all things that mattered — carefully, without rushing, the way his father had taught him before everything his father had built turned to ash and obligation.

"You notice everything," his father had told him once, when Luca was twelve and had pointed out that their dinner guest's watch was twenty minutes slow. "That's good. But noticing isn't enough. You have to understand what you're seeing. Anyone can look. Very few people truly see."

Luca had been seeing ever since.

He'd seen Sofia in that alley — the way she'd flinched at the right moment, stayed standing when most people crumpled, lifted her chin at him like she had something to prove to the universe. He'd seen the intelligence behind the fear in her eyes. The stubbornness that kept her mouth running even when every logical instinct should have told her to be quiet.

He'd seen, in the elevator on the way up, the exact moment she'd made her decision — not to trust him, but to wait. To watch. To gather information before she moved.

Smart, he'd thought. Dangerously smart for someone who was supposed to be nobody.

He picked up his phone and pulled up the file Marco had compiled in under two hours. Sofia Marie Carver, born April 9th, Chicago. Raised by a single mother — schoolteacher, retired. One younger brother, currently finishing a degree downstate. Waitress at Rosario's for fourteen months. Before that, two years at a community college studying journalism before the money ran out.

Journalism.

He set the phone down.

"You should have been a journalist," he said to the empty room.

Marco appeared at six fifteen, letting himself in with the quiet efficiency of a man who had worked for Luca long enough to know that knocking was sometimes an interruption and sometimes a necessity, and had learned to tell the difference.

He was forty-two, lean, with silver at his temples and a face that was entirely forgettable in crowds, which was exactly why Luca had hired him eleven years ago. He set a folder on the desk without being asked.

"Renko's people are moving," Marco said.

"How fast?"

"Fast enough. Word got out about Petrov — not the details, but enough. There's chatter about a witness." He paused. "My source says Renko's already tasked someone with finding her."

"Who?"

"Doesn't have a name yet." Marco's jaw tightened slightly — a tell Luca had learned to read as concern disguised as professionalism. "But the description they're circulating — young, female, dark hair, seen near the Lakeshore District late last night. It's close enough."

Luca was quiet for a moment.

"And our other problem?"

Marco glanced at the door briefly — old habit. "Surveillance picked up a shadow in the building's east stairwell between one and two AM. Whoever it was knew exactly where the cameras weren't."

"Exactly," Luca repeated.

"Exactly."

That narrowed it considerably. There were perhaps four people in Chicago who knew the blind spots in this building's security system. Three of them worked for Luca. The fourth was someone he'd hoped not to deal with for considerably longer.

"Aleksander," Luca said. It wasn't a question.

Marco nodded once.

Luca picked up his whiskey, finally, and took a single measured sip. Aleksander Volkov. Twenty-nine years old. Former FSB, if the rumors were accurate and in Luca's experience, rumors about dangerous people tended toward understatement rather than exaggeration. Currently operating independently, or so he claimed, though independently in this world was a polite word for allegiance undisclosed.

He'd been circling the Renko situation for months. A ghost at the edges of something that was already complicated enough without ghosts.

"What did he want with her?" Luca asked, though he was already building the answer in his mind.

"Best guess? The same thing everyone wants. Leverage."

"She doesn't have leverage. She witnessed something she didn't understand."

"She doesn't need to understand it." Marco's voice was careful. "She just needs to be in the right place. Or the wrong one."

Luca set down the glass.

The bedroom light was still on upstairs. He could picture her — sitting against the headboard, knees drawn up, that expression on her face like she was doing mental arithmetic on a problem that kept changing its numbers. Running through what Aleksander had told her — because he had told her something, Luca was certain of it. The question was how much.

The question was what she'd do with it.

"Keep two men on the stairwell," Luca said. "And tell the kitchen to send breakfast up to the suite at seven thirty."

Marco paused almost imperceptibly. "She's not a guest, boss."

"No," Luca agreed. "She's a complication. Feed her anyway."

Sofia

She hadn't slept.

She'd tried — she'd lain in the enormous bed with its obscenely soft sheets and stared at the ceiling and tried to let her mind go quiet, and her mind had absolutely refused. Her mind had wanted to think about photographs and grey eyes and Viktor Renko and the very specific way Luca Moretti had taken the soap dish from her hands like it was something fragile.

At six AM she gave up and got dressed in the clothes she found in the wardrobe — dark jeans, a soft cream sweater, both fitting well enough to be unsettling — and sat on the floor with her back against the bed because the floor felt more real than anything else in the room.

She made a mental list. It was something she'd always done when things spun out of control — journalism school had given her that, at least, before the money ran out and the dream folded quietly into itself. List the facts. Separate what you know from what you're assuming. Find the gap.

What she knew:

Luca Moretti was a mafia boss. She'd witnessed him in an alley. He'd brought her here instead of silencing her. He'd known where she lived before she'd told him.

A grey-eyed man named — she didn't know his name, she realized. He hadn't given her one. He'd claimed Luca was partnered with a human trafficker named Viktor Renko. He'd wanted her to open a safe. He'd disappeared when Luca arrived.

And on that table in that photograph — a picture of her.

What she was assuming:

That one of them was lying.

The gap:

She didn't know which one.

She was still sitting there when a knock came at the suite's main door — not the elevator, the secondary entrance she hadn't noticed before, set flush into the wall beside the kitchen.

She stood slowly. "Who is it?"

"Room service." A pause. "Mr. Moretti's instructions."

She opened the door.

A young man in a white jacket wheeled in a cart without making eye contact. Coffee real coffee, the kind that smelled like it had been ground approximately thirty seconds ago. Pastries. Eggs. Fresh fruit. Orange juice that was actually orange-colored rather than the pale yellow imposter she was used to at the diner.

He left without a word.

Sofia sat at the kitchen counter and poured coffee and tried to think about this objectively, like a journalist, like someone who dealt in facts rather than feelings.

He had a photo of you before the alley.

That was the fact she kept circling back to. Because everything else could be explained away coincidence, opportunity, a powerful man making a tactical decision. But the photograph meant the alley wasn't an accident. It meant she'd been on his radar before last night. It meant whatever this was, it had started before she'd known it was starting.

She was halfway through her second cup of coffee when the elevator opened.

Luca walked in looking like he hadn't slept either, though on him it just made the sharpness of his face more pronounced rather than smudged. Dark shirt, no tie, sleeves still rolled up. He stopped when he saw her at the counter and something in his expression shifted something she might have called relief, on anyone else.

He crossed to the kitchen and poured himself a coffee without asking and leaned against the counter opposite her, and for a moment they just existed in the same space with the morning light coming grey and new through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

"You didn't sleep," he said.

"Neither did you."

A beat. "No."

She wrapped both hands around her mug and looked at him directly. She'd decided, somewhere between 4 and 5 AM, that she was done being reactive. She was done being carried through this situation like luggage. If she was going to be trapped here, she was at least going to get some answers.

"Why did you have a photograph of me?"

The silence that followed was exactly one second long. She counted it.

His expression didn't change. Not a flicker, not a tell — and that, she realized, was its own kind of answer. A man who was surprised showed it, even briefly. A man who wasn't showed nothing.

He'd been waiting for this question.

"Sit down, Sofia," he said.

"I'm sitting."

"Then listen." He set down his coffee and turned to face her fully, and whatever careful distance he'd been maintaining since the alley contracted slightly. Not threatening. Something more complicated than threatening. "I'm going to tell you something true. And I need you to understand that telling you this is not something I do. Ever. With anyone."

Her heart was doing something unsteady in her chest. She kept her face still.

"Okay," she said quietly.

Luca looked at her for a long moment — long enough that she could see the decision happening behind his eyes, the internal calculation completing itself.

Then he said, "Your brother"

The secondary door exploded inward.

Not knocked open. Not pushed. Exploded — frame and all, wood splintering, a rush of cold air and noise and motion, and then there were men in the suite, three of them, dark clothing and covered faces, moving with the terrible efficiency of people who had done this before.

Luca moved faster.

He was between Sofia and the door before she'd fully processed what was happening — one hand on her arm pulling her behind him, his other hand already reaching beneath the counter for something she couldn't see.

"Stay behind me," he said. His voice was completely calm. "Don't move. Don't make a sound."

One of the men raised something.

"Luca—" Sofia breathed.

"I said don't—"

The shot was not a gunshot.

It was quieter. A compressed hiss of air, almost polite in its discretion.

Luca staggered.

Sofia caught him — or tried to, he was significantly larger than her and the stumble became a controlled descent, his back against the counter, his hand still gripping her arm, the other hand pressed to his neck where something small and dark was embedded in the skin.

"Luca." She grabbed his face. His eyes were losing focus, the edges going soft and strange. "Luca, stay awake—"

"The safe," he said. His voice was thick, slurring already, whatever they'd hit him with moving fast. "Don't — Sofia, don't let them — the safe—"

His eyes closed.

The three men looked at her across the ruined doorway.

The one in the center tilted his head.

"Ms. Carver," he said, in a voice she recognized immediately — not the words, but the quality of it. Measured. Accented. Precise.

Grey eyes, she realized, even through the mask.

"Time to open that safe," Aleksander said.

End of Chapter 4

Everything just shifted 👀

Aleksander wasn't asking anymore. Luca is unconscious. And whatever he was about to say about Sofia's brother just got cut off at the worst possible moment.

What we now know:

Sofia's brother is somehow connected to all of this

Aleksander was never really giving Sofia a choice

Luca knew Aleksander was in the building — but not fast enough