Trapped BY My Reckless Mafia Lord

CHAPTER 4: BLOOD AND SECRETS

"That's my father's house."

The words came out of me in a whisper so thin I wasn't sure I had actually said them out loud until Dante's eyes snapped to my face.

"What did you just say?" His voice was completely flat.

"That house in the photograph." I pointed at the screen with a finger that wouldn't stop trembling. "The cracked blue wall. The window with the broken shutter on the left side. That's my father's old house. He died when I was twelve and the house has been empty ever since." I looked up at Dante. "Nobody goes there. Nobody even knows it exists anymore."

Dante stared at me for a long moment. Something was happening behind his eyes. Something complicated and dark that he was working very hard to keep off his face.

"Are you absolutely certain?" he asked.

"I grew up in that house," I said. "I am certain."

He turned away from me and made a call immediately. It connected on the first ring.

"Get me everything on a property." He rattled off the address I gave him from memory without even asking me to repeat it. "I need it in ten minutes. And wake Ricci up. Tell him we move in thirty."

He ended the call and was already moving toward the bedroom on the right side of the suite.

"Wait," I said, following him. "What are you doing?"

"Getting ready." He pulled open the wardrobe and reached toward the back with the ease of someone who kept things in hotel rooms permanently. He withdrew a black tactical jacket and a gun holster that made my throat tighten.

"You're going there," I said. "You're going to that house."

"Marco is my brother," he said simply. "I don't leave my brothers behind."

"Then I'm coming with you."

He turned around so fast I nearly walked into his chest. "No."

"That is my father's house, Dante."

"Which is exactly why you're staying here."

"Those men had a photograph of me," I said, pushing the words out before he could interrupt. "They knew my face. They chose my father's house for this. Whatever is happening tonight, it is connected to me whether you want it to be or not." I held his gaze steadily even though my heart was slamming against my chest. "You need me there. I know every corner of that house. Every room. Every hiding place. Every way in and every way out."

He studied me with those dark calculating eyes. I could see him weighing it. Measuring the risk against the advantage.

"You do exactly what I say," he said finally. "The moment I tell you to get down, you get down. The moment I tell you to run, you run. No arguments. No questions."

"Agreed."

"I mean it, Kisarel. This is not a negotiation."

"I said agreed."

Something moved through his expression. Not quite approval but close to it.

He handed me a dark jacket from the wardrobe. It swallowed me completely, the sleeves falling past my hands, but it was better than the pale blouse I was wearing which might as well have been a target in the dark.

Twenty minutes later we were in a different car. Darker. Lower to the ground. Three other vehicles moved with us in formation, each carrying men I hadn't seen before. They were quiet and professional in the way that told me they had done this kind of thing many times.

I sat beside Dante in the back seat and watched the city give way to the older part of town. The streets grew narrower. The lights grew dimmer. I knew this route in my bones even after all these years.

"Tell me about your father," Dante said quietly beside me.

I looked at him. "Why?"

"Because I need to understand why that house matters to someone like Viktor Razin."

The name landed in the car like a stone dropped into still water.

"Viktor Razin," I repeated slowly. "That's who sent those men tonight."

It wasn't a question but he nodded once.

"Who was your father, Kisarel? What did he do?"

"He was an accountant," I said. "A simple man. He worked for a shipping company downtown. He never talked about his work at home. He was quiet and gentle and he used to make terrible jokes at breakfast every morning." My voice caught slightly on the last part. "He died in a car accident when I was twelve. At least that's what I was told."

Dante went very still beside me.

"At least that's what you were told," he said carefully. "Do you have reason to believe otherwise?"

I opened my mouth to say no. To say I had never questioned it. To say it was a tragedy but a simple one.

But then I remembered something I hadn't thought about in years. A memory so small I had buried it under two decades of grief without realizing.

"Three days before he died," I said slowly, "I woke up in the middle of the night. I heard him on the phone in his study. I crept to the door and listened because I was eight and curious." I stared at my hands in my lap. "He was speaking to someone and he sounded terrified. I had never heard my father sound terrified before. Not once." I paused. "He said... he said 'I have it hidden where no one will ever find it. I promise you. It will never see the light of day unless something happens to me.'"

The car was completely silent.

"I never told anyone," I continued. "I was a child. I didn't understand what it meant. I convinced myself I had dreamed it." I looked up at Dante. "But I didn't dream it. Did I."

Dante's jaw was tight. His eyes were fixed on the road ahead. "No," he said quietly. "I don't think you did."

"What was my father hiding?"

He turned to look at me and for the first time tonight I saw something in his expression that looked almost like conflict. Like he was choosing between telling me the truth and protecting me from it.

"Dante. What was my father hiding?"

Before he could answer the car stopped.

"We're here, sir," the driver said.

I looked out the window. My father's house sat in the darkness at the end of the overgrown path exactly as I remembered it. The cracked blue wall. The broken shutter hanging at its familiar angle.

But every window was dark and the front door was wide open, swinging slowly in the night breeze.

"Something is wrong," one of Dante's men said from the front seat. "The team we sent ahead should have signaled by now."

Dante's hand closed around my wrist. "Stay in the car."

"But you said..."

"Kisarel." His voice was low and urgent. "Stay in this car and do not move no matter what you hear outside. Do you understand me?"

The fear in his voice scared me more than anything else that had happened tonight. Because Dante Stark did not sound afraid. Ever.

"Okay," I whispered.

He held my gaze for one more second. Then he was out of the car, moving toward the house with his men fanning out silently around him like shadows.

I watched through the window, barely breathing.

They reached the front door. Dante held up a fist and everyone stopped.

He looked down at something on the ground just inside the doorway.

Even from inside the car I could see what it was.

A hand. Unmoving. Palm facing up.

Belonging to someone who was lying just out of sight inside the entrance.

Then from somewhere deep inside the house came a sound that turned my blood completely cold.

It was my name.

A woman's voice. Cracked and desperate and unmistakable.

Calling my name from inside my dead father's house.

And I knew that voice better than I knew my own heartbeat.

It was my mother.