Page 77 of Mine Again (Mafia Bride #2)

Chapter Seventy-Six

Luca

T he cellar is cool, the air vibrating with the hum of machines. Fans whir in steady rotation, hard drives tick and purr.

It’s the sound of power. Contained, controlled, always working.

The glow from numerous monitors washes pale light over the concrete walls, stark against the shadows. Each screen reflects back a hollowed version of me. Hair disheveled. Jaw locked. Eyes too focused to blink.

Beneath my fingers, the old mechanical keyboard clacks like distant gunfire, each strike cutting through the monotony of the hum. Familiar. Steady. My pulse is not.

I haven’t moved in hours, my body stiff from sitting so long, joints aching from disuse. My mind, though, is working overtime.

The node is wired into the backup power. Offline, untraceable. I buried it here a year ago for exactly an eventuality like this.

No one knows about this node, because it contains everything.

Old test builds. Half-broken decryption tools. Obsolete backdoors I never dared use again.

Scraps of code from my darkest jobs, preserved like fossils. And now, also one encrypted bank of logs from Brazil I brought with me, the only uncensored record of that month-long descent into pride and paranoia.

That job was supposed to crown my reputation, not damn it.

And now Hale has used it to shut down a pharmaceutical logistics hub in Delaware, spoil millions of dollars in critical medications, and trigger the death of a transplant patient, all while making it look like I pulled the trigger.

He didn’t just mimic my style.

He used my actual weapon.

“Come on,” I mutter, eyes darting across the screen as I isolate an IP string buried inside the Delaware server dump I found in a ghost cache Hale left on the darknet.

I run a comparison scan against my old Brazil job data.

Nothing at first… still nothing… more nothing.

Then, a flicker. A match.

“There you are.” Triumph pulls at my lips. “Now, are you real?”

I dig deeper, my smile widening. “Yes, you are.”

It’s a routine I coded to override container grid logs in S?o Paulo. A stealth redirect loop that rerouted container manifests without altering their timestamps. I never deployed it because it was too unstable.

But Hale used it. Modified. Refined. Weaponized.

And worse?

He left in my signature.

Not my name. Not a tag. Nothing that obvious.

Just a subroutine buried inside a nested shell, one line written in Italian.

Se non ritorno, sappi che ho provato. If I don’t return, know that I tried.

I added it during a low point of missing Isa so much it hurt on a job years ago. Sloppy. Personal. Human.

“You bastard…”

My hands curl into fists.

It’s not just a setup. It’s a message. Hale wanted me to find this. He wanted me to know it was my hands that made the gun, even if I never pulled the trigger.

The weight of it presses on my chest like lead.

I armed the man who tried to take Isa, who’s trying to destroy me.

The hacker world will believe I did it. The media will. And the agencies that already had me on quiet watchlists will have a reason to turn whispers into manhunts.

Fuck.

But then…

My eyes catch on something, and the more I study it, the more it stands out.

A flaw.

A vanity error code, buried in the Chicago relay Hale used to scrub his trail.

Sloppy. Overconfident. A kernel that doesn’t match the rest of the architecture.

I push harder, tearing at the seams, and suddenly I see a path.

His path.

A trace he didn’t mean to leave, I’m sure.

My pulse spikes.

This isn’t just proof he stole my code. It’s his fingerprint. Something I can compile, replicate, weaponize. Enough to show the authorities, to clear my name if I choose. Or enough to hold over his head and bait him out into the open.

A feral grin cuts across my face. For the first time since Delaware, the balance tips back my way.

“Got you.”

The words echo in the cellar.

The path opens up, raw and unguarded. Not just proof. Leverage.

My veins buzz, the thrill of outplaying him better than any drug, sweeter than victory itself.

For the first time in years, the hunt feels alive again, and I revel in it.

I start locking everything down. Encrypting, duplicating, burying backups inside redundancies no one but me could unravel. A dossier is already taking shape. Evidence. Ammunition.

Buzzing with a high that only comes from winning, I check the system clock. Exactly twelve hours and twenty-five minutes have gone by without me noticing.

I should be exhausted. Thirty-six hours without sleep, yet I feel sharp, wired, alive.

And I like it. The hunger, the edge, the high of the chase.

Isa.

The win is nothing on its own. I need my butterfly’s eyes on me when I tell her, need her to know I’ve secured our future. Without her, this triumph is empty.

I shove back from the desk, the chair rolling into the wall in this tiny cell, and climb the ladder two rungs at a time. The node is sealed, secured. Isa is all that matters now.

“ Farfalla ,” I call as I climb through the metal door, locking it behind me.

I expect her bright face to swing open the wardrobe door, teasing me about returning from Narnia, but silence greets me. A silence that’s too heavy, too absolute.

The room is empty.

“Isa?”

No response.

Something twists low in my gut, making my chest seize, a warning my body knows before my mind catches up.

The bathroom. She has to be in there.

I cross to it in three strides and throw the door open.

Empty.

The cold in my stomach spreads to my chest. My pulse kicks hard.

I spin back, scanning every detail of the one-room setup. A broom is propped against the bed. A pile of rags lies abandoned on the kitchen counter. The balcony door is open, curtains breathing in the faint breeze.

“Isa.” Her name is a warning now, edged with fear.

Silence .

I move to the balcony, slow but lethal, picking up the pistol I gave her from the bed on the way.

My every sense is sharpened to a point. My eyes sweep the space, every shadow, every angle. Nothing moves.

I turn, and my foot kicks something on the tiles. It rolls a few inches.

Near my feet lies a small metallic object.

A dart.

My blood runs cold. My pulse thunders.

I crouch, staring at it, unblinking, the truth clawing its way through me.

The world tilts, sound thinning, blood draining from me as if the floor itself has dropped away.

Isa is gone.

Taken.

A roar, more beast than man, rips from my chest, Isa’s name buried somewhere inside it.

Birds scatter from the roof, startled into flight by the eruption.

A fresh surge of adrenaline hits, white-hot, spiking through my body like a live wire. The high is back, but now it’s fury, not victory, burning me alive from the inside out.

My hands flex open and closed, fighting the urge to smash something, to kill someone.

Whoever touched her is still alive only because I haven’t found them yet.