Bloodhound

ChapterTwo

GONE

Rosa took the stairs two at a time. The folder was still pressed against her chest. Enzo’s voice followed her, low and calm.

“Rosa”

She didn’t stop. Her phone was still ringing when she reached her room. The screen lit up on the nightstand. For a second she hoped it was her father.

It wasn’t. UNKNOWN NUMBER.

She answered anyway. Her hand wasn’t steady.

“Hello?”

Just breathing. Slow. Patient.

“Who is this?”

“Ask your father,” a man said, “what he took from people who don’t forgive easily.”

The line went dead.

She stood there with the phone still against her ear. The dial tone hummed. The room felt off, like the floor had shifted under her.

Downstairs, Enzo’s men spoke to each other in low Italian. They didn’t sound rushed. Enzo hadn’t followed her up. She didn’t know if that was on purpose or not, and she hated that she couldn’t tell.

She looked at the window. The sun had cleared the hedges. Thin light spilled across the floor. Sunrise. Her father hadn’t come back.

Not unless I’m not back by sunrise.

Her hands started shaking. The same way he had the night before. She sat on the edge of the bed and opened the folder.

The letter was in a plain envelope. Her name on the front in her father’s neat handwriting. Just Rosa, Nothing else. She turned it over twice before she broke the seal.

My darling girl,

If you are reading this, it means I did not come home, and I am sorry for that more than I can put into a letter written in the dark with too little time.

I discovered something three weeks ago that I should have looked at four years earlier. Someone close to me, someone I trusted with everything, has been giving away pieces of this family for a long time. I don’t yet know all of it. I know enough to be afraid, and I have not been afraid of anything in a very long time, so please take that seriously.

I need you to hear this clearly, because I know what will happen once I’m gone. People will come to you offering protection. Some of them will mean it. Most of them will not. Do not trust anyone who tells you they’ve come to save you. Especially Enzo Marchetti.

I cannot explain why in a letter. Some things I have kept from you your whole life, and I regret that more now than ever, but there is no time and there may not be safety in writing them down at all.

Trust Marco, if you can find him. He is the only one outside this house who knows what I know.

I love you. Whatever you hear about me, whatever they tell you, I did, know that everything I have done, I have done to keep you safe from a debt I created long before you were born.

Papa

Rosa read it twice. Then a third time, her eyes kept catching the same line, especially Enzo Marchetti.

She thought of him standing in her front hall not twenty minutes ago, saying her name like he had a right to it, telling her to pack a bag like it was already decided. Your father’s enemies aren’t the only people looking for you. He’d known exactly what to say. She hated that it worked.

She folded the letter back into the envelope and pressed it flat against her palm.

When she came back downstairs, Enzo was standing in the same spot. Hands loose at his sides. Watching the stairs like he’d known she would come down again. One of his men, older, grey at the temples, stood near the door. He looked like the kind of man who noticed everything and said nothing.

“Who’s Marco?” Rosa asked.

Something moved across Enzo’s face, quickly, then gone.

“Where did you hear that name?”

“Answer the question.”

“I’ll answer it,” Enzo said, “once you’re somewhere that isn’t an unlocked house with the lights out and no one watching the road.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you until you tell me why my father wrote your name in a letter telling me not to trust you.”

The older man by the door went still. Enzo didn’t. His face stayed carefully blank, like he was deciding how much to say.

“Your father has written a lot of things about me over the years,” he said. “Most of them were true. I imagine that letter is the same.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I’m giving you in a house with its power cut and, after a phone call, you have already taken by that window.” He nodded toward the driveway, where one of the black cars was still idling. “You could be angry with me in the car. You can be angry with me for the rest of your life if you want. But you will not be angry with me here. It isn’t safe here, and I didn’t come to argue about it.”

“You don’t get to make that decision for me.”

“No,” Enzo said. “But your father did, three weeks ago, when he came to see me.”

Rosa stared at him. “He came to you?”

“Pack a bag,” Enzo said. His voice had lost whatever patience it had. “We don’t have the morning for this.”

She wanted to refuse. Everything she’d been taught in this house told her to slam the door and call someone who wasn’t standing in her front hall with two men and a running car. But the letter was still against her chest. The man on the phone had known things he shouldn’t. Her father was out there somewhere, missing. Staying here didn’t feel like an option anymore.

“Ten minutes,” she said.

Enzo gave a small nod. “Five.”

She was halfway up the stairs when the older man by the door spoke for the first time. Quiet, but clear enough to hear.

“Boss. You should see this.”

He was crouched by the side table near the entrance, where his father kept a bowl for his keys. He held something up between two fingers. Small. Catching the light.

A single earring. Not hers.

Enzo crossed the room fast and took it from him. He turned it over once in his palm. For the first time since he’d walked in, something that looked like fear crossed his face.

“Whose is that?” she asked.

He didn’t answer. He closed his fist around it. When he looked back at him the expression was gone

, "Four minutes he said