Page 84 of Mine Again (Mafia Bride #2)

Chapter Eighty-Three

Luca

A guard leads me through a quiet wing of the estate that doesn’t feel like a house at all.

The air hums. The walls glow with reflected light. When the door opens, I step into a room that could belong to an FBI cyber command center.

Rows of workstations. A wall of screens stitched into a panoramic grid. Server racks breathing in the corners.

I stop in the doorway to take it all in.

Whatever Maximo paid for this, it wasn’t pocket change. He’s not dabbling. He’s arming up for a different kind of war, and I underestimated how far he’d go to set himself apart from his father and the men still tied to the old ways.

Footsteps sound behind me, followed by a familiar voice I haven’t heard in years.

“Luca.”

I turn. Uberto crosses the floor with that same measured stride, lean and compact, dark hair shorter than I remember, early thirties now but with the kind of face that maintains its edge. There’s a faint scar on his jaw that’s new and a tiredness around his eyes that isn’t .

We stop an arm’s length apart.

“You look alive,” he says.

“So do you.”

A corner of his mouth lifts. “I suspected you were the Venom all along. Not many out there write with that kind of precision. When you joined me at fourteen, I thought I was taking on a stray with sharp eyes. Four years proved I had it backward. You were the one teaching me how far code could bend. Now you are the best.”

“I had a good teacher,” I say. “The rest I learned alone.”

“Alone can sharpen.” He tips his head, studying me. “Alone also cuts.”

“It kept me breathing.”

He accepts that without argument, his gaze warming.

“We hired the Venom for a couple of jobs, but there’s something I never thanked you for.”

I know what he’s talking about, but I wait to let him speak.

“Two years after you left, a dead-drop server of mine was burned. Molinaro’s team planted a leak, and I thought they had me. You ghosted my system from a continent away and rewired the path in under a day. The trace landed in Molinaro’s lap. My people walked. I did not forget.”

“I did what was needed.”

“And I’m glad you did.” He nods to the screens. “Let’s get your girl back.”

We move, chairs scrape, and the grid brightens. His team of specialists takes their stations without chatter, hands already on keyboards, eyes locked, waiting for orders.

Maximo appears in the glass, watches for a minute, and disappears again, like a shadow testing the temperature of the room.

Hours blur. Then a day.

Then two.

Maximo’s hackers pushed on the obvious doors and were swallowed whole. I tried ghosts, false trails, surgical touches.

Every time we found the edge of a seam, it resealed. Hale’s fortress didn’t just block us. It taunted us. Adaptive, recursive, self-healing. The thing grows back even while you watch it.

At one point, Uberto leans back and rolls his neck.

“If I were Hale, I’d want you to feel this. Not just the wall. The insult.”

“He likes the game,” I say. “He thinks time belongs to him.”

Around us, men trade shifts, passing chairs like runners pass a baton. Coffee goes cold and gets replaced. Someone brings in food. Most of it remains untouched. The screens keep breathing.

I’m used to working alone. The noise of the team grated on me the first day. Now it threads into me like a second pulse.

I can pass a task and know it will be handled or step away for five minutes and Hale’s mansion will still be watched. I don’t have to carry everything by myself.

Uberto’s presence, in particular, changes the room. He sees diagonals quickly and misses nothing.

Still, we fail in a dozen different ways and keep going.

Near midnight on the second day, I rub the bridge of my nose and exhale. My spine burns. My jaw aches from clenching it so much.

This is what Hale wants. Me trying and failing. Fatigued. Wasting my time.

Uberto taps a slow rhythm at his console. “We’re missing something small. He knows you’re a surgeon with code. So he built a wound that leaves no scar.”

He did. Knowing my skills, Hale built a system with no obvious vulnerabilities. But there’s a weakness somewhere. And I will find it.

My gaze sweeps over the monitors, the fan noise louder in my ears than usual. It’s telling me something. But what?

My attention snags on the far-left grid, a column of feeds looping in grayscale, audio bars flattened to an unbroken line. Background channels. Boring.

And boring gets left alone.

I study the loops a fourth time, then a fifth. A small, repeatable artifact lingers there like a cough behind a door. Not a code flaw. Just an ordinary thing mishandled.

“Mute the primary grid,” I say, sitting up straighter.

The room quiets to a low hum. I slide my chair closer, isolating a side camera feed and its sound bed. Not a door. Not a window. The seam is in how this system treats what it assumes doesn’t matter.

I ride the flaw the way you ride the seam of a wave. No drama. No alarms. A quiet pass through a quiet place. The screen hesitates. Then the picture jumps like a heartbeat.

A hallway comes into focus. A crisp feed, every detail clear… a decorative archway, a closed door.

I track right. Another room. Opulent. High ceiling. Heavy curtains. A bed like a throne.

My heart stutters so hard it misses a beat. For a second, the room tilts, every noise dropping out except the rush of blood in my ears.

There she is.

Relief slams through me so hard it almost hurts. My chest pulls tight, my grip locking on the edge of the console like I need something solid to anchor me.

Isa is alive.

Two days of static, of dead ends, of nothing but that red dot. And now… breath, pulse, proof.

Persistence pays. Like water grinding down stone, I kept at it, hour after hour, refusing to stop. And this is what it bought me, my Isa, right in front of me.

She lies on her side, covers to her waist, her hair loose over the pillow like a dark spill of silk.

No restraints. No visible guards. Her chest rises and falls in a steady rhythm that punches the breath out of me.

There’s tension in her shoulders even in sleep.

I know that line better than my own reflection.

I don’t realize I’ve moved until my fingers touch the glass.

“Got you,” I whisper.

The silence holds. The feed doesn’t shutter. Nothing screams. No system flares to meet us.

I freeze the frame, isolate the route, and set a silent tag that will follow any handoff. I take a breath, let it out slowly, and unfreeze. The picture stays.

Uberto stands at my shoulder. He doesn’t speak.

“Interior layouts confirmable,” I say, finding my voice. “Motion feeds will sync. I can get us live eyes on his patrol patterns in under a minute.”

“Do it,” Uberto says.

I work. The grid fills with other rooms in quick, patient flashes. A stairwell. A private corridor with a shuttered window. A kitchen humming at low power. A guardroom with three men half-asleep and one awake. A service elevator that opens onto a short hallway and a hidden door.

“Visuals secured,” I say.

We keep listening. Still no alarms. No countermeasure, no retaliatory worm, and no re-route to a decoy. Either Hale hasn’t noticed, or he thinks it doesn’t matter. He’s arrogant enough for the second.

Uberto finally speaks. “Trap?”

“If it were a trap,” I say, “he’d have fed us something louder. He’d have nudged us into a brittle place and closed it on our hands. He’d have tripped a bell to watch us run. This is quiet. This is real.”

“What tells you that?”

“The air.” I nod to the small audio bar at the bottom of the screen.

“You can hear a low return. A room that size breathes. The light shift on the curtain is consistent with late night. The guard in the chair checked his watch, and the second hand matched the server time. That’s not a loop.

That’s a man who assumes no one can see him. ”

Uberto watches Isa for a long beat, then glances at me. There’s a ghost of a smile. “It’s not a trap, then.”

“No,” I say, eyes on the bed. “It was an opening.”

Uberto picks up the phone, calling Maximo.

“We’re in. We’ve got eyes on her.”