The Mafias Deadliest Rosé

Chapter 10 – The Truth Has Teeth

He was waiting for her in the parking structure two blocks from the estate, exactly where Rose had felt him watching for weeks now an older man, gray at the temples, standing very still beside a concrete pillar like he'd rehearsed this moment a hundred times and still wasn't sure he had the nerve to go through with it.

Rose had her blade out before she'd fully registered his face. Fourteen years of training didn't ask permission to protect her.

"I'm not here to hurt you," the man said quickly, hands raised, palms out. "I've been trying to find the right moment for weeks. I'm sorry for the necklace. The photograph. I didn't know how else to reach you without your father's people noticing."

"He's not my father," Rose said, and was surprised by how fast the words came, how certain. "Who are you?"

"My name is Thomas Reyes." He said it like it should mean something, and when her face stayed blank, something in his expression cracked with a grief fourteen years old. "I worked for your family. The real one. I was there the night Vittorio's men came for you."

The parking structure seemed to tilt slightly around her, the way it had in the dream, the way it had every time this truth pressed closer to the surface than she was ready for.

"Your mother's name was Sophia," Reyes said, quiet now, urgent, glancing once over his shoulder like he expected to be interrupted. "Your father was Daniel Carter. You had a rose garden out front that your mother tended every spring, and you used to steal cookie dough when she wasn't looking, and you had the loudest laugh I ever heard out of a five-year-old, and I have spent fourteen years trying to find a way to give you back even a piece of that without getting both of us killed."

Rose's hand had gone slack around her blade without her noticing.

"Why now," she managed. "Why not years ago?"

"Because I was a coward for most of them," Reyes said, and the honesty in it landed harder than any lie could have. "And because I heard you were finally close enough to someone in that house who might actually help you survive what comes next, once you know everything." He reached into his jacket, slow, careful, and produced a worn photograph, edges soft with age. "There's more. So much more. Your father wasn't just a name on a ledger, Rose — he made a mistake that got your mother killed and got you stolen, and the reason Vittorio has spent fourteen years burying every trace of it is—"

The shot took him mid-sentence, clean through the temple, and he was gone before his body had finished folding to the concrete.

---

Rose was moving before the echo of the gunshot had finished rolling through the parking structure, blade in hand, eyes scanning the shadows between pillars with a fury that came from somewhere far deeper than professional instinct. Whoever had fired was gone by the time she reached the upper level a rooftop across the street, empty now but for a single shell casing left behind with the kind of careless precision that spoke less of carelessness and more of a message.

*Stop looking.*

She went back down to Reyes' body, kneeling beside him in the gathering wail of distant sirens, and found the photograph still clutched in his outstretched hand a little girl, no older than five, laughing on a porch swing, a woman beside her with the same dark hair Rose saw every morning in the mirror.

Rose sat there a long time, not moving, memorizing a face that was somehow, impossibly, already familiar.

---

Luca found her twenty minutes later, having tracked her phone the moment Damien reported her missing from the estate without explanation and the sight of her sitting alone on cold concrete beside a dead man, photograph clutched white knuckled in one hand, undid something in his chest he didn't have words for yet.

"Rose." He crouched beside her, careful, the way he'd learned to be careful with her over these last weeks. "What happened?"

"His name was Thomas Reyes," she said, voice flat with shock rather than calm. "He knew my parents. He was about to tell me why your father stole me, and someone put a bullet through his skull before he finished the sentence." She held up the photograph, hand shaking now that the adrenaline had started to drain. "That's me, Luca. That's actually me. I have a mother. I had a mother, and somebody murdered her, and your father has spent my entire life making sure I never found out."

Luca didn't argue with her. Didn't defend his father, didn't reach for excuses because there weren't any left to reach for, not after the ledger, not after the locked file, not after watching his father's face in that security office go the color of old ash.

"I'm going to help you find the truth," he said instead, quiet and absolutely certain. "All of it. Whatever it costs, whatever it means about my family, about me. You deserve to know who you actually are, Rose. I should have said that weeks ago."

She looked at him for a long moment this man who was, by blood and by name, everything the lie had been built to protect and found, to her own quiet astonishment, that she believed him completely.