Sold to the Mafia King

Chapter 3: The Climber

The lock turned behind him with a sound like a bone snapping.

I sat in the chair for thirty seconds, counting in my head, waiting for the echo of his footsteps to fade. The apartment was too quiet. No traffic noise. No neighbors. Just the hum of the ventilation system and the distant throb of the city below, muffled by glass thick enough to stop a bullet.

I stood up. My knees hurt from the zip ties. My wrists burned where the plastic had sawed into skin. I needed to move. I needed to do something that wasn't sitting in a chair, signing my name in blood, and waiting for a man in a black suit to decide whether I lived or died.

I started with the door.

Solid wood. No handle on my side. Just a smooth plate where the handle should be, and a thin seam where the door met the frame. I pressed my ear against it. Nothing. I knocked. The sound died immediately, swallowed by whatever insulation lined the walls.

I moved to the windows.

Floor-to-ceiling glass. The city spread out below like a circuit board, all lights and distance. I pressed my palm against it. Cold. Thick. I made a fist and hit it. The glass didn't move. My knuckles screamed. I hit it again, harder, with my elbow. A dull thud. Nothing. Not even a c***k.

I swore under my breath. The pain in my elbow was sharp, specific, and useless.

I turned back to the room.

The desk. Dante had taken the contract with him, but the drawer—the one he'd pulled the gun and the first-aid kit from—was still there. I walked over and tried the handle. Locked.

I opened the first-aid kit. Metal scissors. Tweezers. A roll of tape. I took the tweezers. They were thin, stainless steel, with a sharp point. I knelt in front of the drawer and slid the tip into the keyhole.

It took four minutes. My hands shook. The tweezers bent. But the lock was cheap, probably meant to keep honest people out, not desperate ones. I felt the catch give, and the drawer slid open with a whisper.

Inside: the gun. A black Glock, matte and heavy. A magazine beside it. And a phone. Dead screen. No charger.

I picked up the gun. It was heavier than it looked. I wrapped my hand around the grip. My palm was too small. The metal was cold. I found the safety—small lever, stiff—and toggled it. Off. Then on again. I didn't know what I was doing. I just needed to know I could.

I put the gun back exactly where I'd found it. But I took the tweezers. They fit in my palm. A weapon, even if a small one.

I closed the drawer. The lock clicked.

I went to the bathroom.

It was white marble and chrome. Sterile. A shower with a glass door. A toilet. A sink. And above the sink, set into the wall: a vent. Rectangular. Metal grille. Four screws.

I dragged the desk chair into the bathroom. Stood on it. The screws were standard Phillips head. I didn't have a screwdriver. But I had the tweezers.

The first screw took three minutes. The second took two. My fingers cramped. Sweat dripped into my eyes. By the third screw, my hair was plastered to my forehead, and my heart was hammering so hard I could feel it in my throat.

I pulled the grille free. The vent was dark. A shaft of black metal, maybe eighteen inches wide. Dust. The smell of old air and something else—chemical, sharp.

I didn't think. I gripped the edge and pulled myself up.

The metal cut into my palms immediately. I was wearing scrubs, thin cotton, and the shaft tore my knees as I crawled. I didn't care. I moved forward on my elbows, into the dark. The shaft sloped upward, then leveled out. My breath was too loud in the enclosed space. Every scrape of my knee, every gasp, echoed.

I crawled for what felt like twenty feet. Then I saw light.

A grille ahead. Below it, a room. I inched forward, my cheek pressed against the dusty metal, and looked down.

Dante's bedroom.

It was larger than the study. Dark walls. A bed with black sheets, unmade. A dresser. And Dante.

He stood with his back to me, shirtless, facing a mirror. The light in the room was low, just a single lamp on the nightstand, but it was enough.

Enough to see the scars.

They covered his back. Not neat surgical lines. Not tattoos. Burns. Old ones. The skin was twisted, white and pink, stretching from his left shoulder blade down to the small of his back in a patchwork of destruction. Some areas were smooth and shiny. Others were ridged, like melted wax. I'd seen burns in clinical rotations. Third-degree. The kind that required skin grafts and months of rehab.

His hand—the one with the burn on the thumb—was nothing compared to this.

He moved. The scars moved with him, pulling at the muscle underneath. He reached for a bottle on the dresser. Poured something into a glass. Whiskey, maybe. The liquid caught the light.

I stared. I couldn't stop. The man who had bought me, who had gripped my jaw and called me property, was made of damage. And he was alone in the dark, drinking alone, with his ruined back to the world.

My knee slipped.

The metal under my weight groaned. A soft sound. A whisper.

But he heard it.

Dante turned. Not fast. Slowly. His eyes lifted to the ceiling, to the vent, and for one terrible second, I thought he was looking directly at me. His face was blank. Then it wasn't. His mouth tightened. His hand went to the dresser drawer.

I scrambled backward. No grace. No silence. My elbow hit the shaft wall. My knee scraped raw. I crawled backward as fast as I could, dragging myself through the dark, my heart trying to climb out of my chest.

I fell out of the vent.

I hit the bathroom floor hard, the grille clattering beside me. I grabbed it, shoved it back into the wall, kicked the chair away. I turned on the faucet. Splashed water on my face. My hands were shaking so badly I could barely cup the water.

The door opened.

I froze. Water dripped from my chin onto the marble.

Dante stood in the doorway. He was wearing a fresh shirt. Black. Buttoned to the collar. His hair was damp, like he'd showered in the thirty seconds it had taken me to crawl back.

He looked at me. At the water running in the sink. At the chair, still tilted against the wall. At my knees, where the scrubs were torn and blood was welling up in thin red lines.

He stepped inside. I pressed back against the sink. My hand found the tweezers in my pocket. I gripped them so hard they cut into my palm.

Dante didn't look at my hand. He reached past me, turned off the faucet, and pulled a hand towel from the ring. He threw it at my chest. I caught it by reflex.

"Clean your knee," he said. "You're no use to me infected."

I didn't move. I just stared at him. At the shirt that covered what I'd seen. At the face that gave nothing away.

"You knew," I said. It wasn't a question.

He tilted his head. "Knew what?"

"That I was up there."

He reached into his pocket. Pulled out his phone. Held up the screen. It showed a grainy, green-tinted image—the inside of the ventilation shaft. And me, crawling, my face turned toward the camera like a ghost in the dark.

"Motion sensor," he said. "Triggered at 2:47. I was in a meeting with Marco. I watched you crawl. I watched you stare. I watched you run."

He put the phone back in his pocket. Took a step closer. Close enough that I could smell him again—gun oil, wool, and now something else, soap, clean skin.

"You're not a fighter, Elena. You're a climber. You see a wall, you go up. You see a lock, you pick it. You see a vent, you crawl through dust and blood rather than sit still." His eyes dropped to my knee. "Last night, I called you property. I was wrong. Property doesn't bleed on my marble trying to escape. You do. That makes you something else."

"What?" My voice came out rough.

"I don't know yet." He reached out. I flinched, my hand tightening on the tweezers in my pocket. But his hand went to my hair. He pulled something from it—a piece of dust, a metal flake from the vent. He held it between his thumb and finger, then dropped it in the sink. "But I'll find out."

He turned and walked out. The door didn't lock this time. It just clicked, soft and final, like a warning.

I stood in the bathroom, the towel in my hand, blood dripping down my shin. I looked at the vent. At the chair. At the phone in his pocket that had watched me the whole time.

I wasn't just a prisoner.

I was a test. And I had failed before I even knew the rules.

But I had seen his back. I had seen the burns that matched his hand. And I had seen the look on his face when he'd turned toward the vent—not anger.

Fear.

He wasn't afraid of me. He was afraid of what I'd seen.

And that meant his scars were a secret. Which meant they were a weakness.

I pressed the towel to my knee. The blood was warm. My hands had stopped shaking.

I tucked the tweezers deeper into my pocket. I didn't know what the burns meant. I didn't know why a man who owned cities would hide his own skin in the dark.

But I knew one thing now.

He watched me. He tested me. He let me crawl through his vents just to see what I would do.

Which meant he needed to know what I was capable of.

And that meant he wasn't sure.

I walked back into the study. The city lights pulsed below, indifferent and far away.

I wasn't free. I wasn't safe. I was still property.

But I was a property that had his attention.

And attention was the only weapon I had.