Page 5

Left side. Ribs. The kind of hurt that sits deep in the bone and pulses with every breath like a second heartbeat I didn't ask for. My head is worse — a slow, rolling throb behind my eyes that turns the darkness red at the edges, and when I swallow, the taste on my tongue is chemical. Bitter. Sharp enough to make my jaw clench.

Someone drugged me. Someone who got close enough to put a needle in my neck, which means someone I trusted, which means I am going to kill them when I get out of this chair.

The chair.

My wrists are locked to the arms — steel, not rope. Heavy links, industrial, cold enough that my skin has gone numb beneath them. My shoulders ache from the angle. My left one is wrenched wrong, a grinding heat in the socket that tells me it was yanked hard and recently. I shift my weight and the chains pull taut against bolts I can feel but can't reach.

I test them before I test anything else. Not because the pain doesn't matter. Because if the chains give, everything else is a problem I can solve standing up. If they don't, everything else is a problem I solve from this chair.

They don't give.

So. This chair.

The room comes into focus in pieces. Concrete walls. Concrete floor. A single fluorescent bar overhead throwing flat, white light that hums at a frequency I can feel in my teeth. No windows. No furniture except the chair I'm bolted to and—

Her.

Eight feet away. Seated. A chair that is not bolted to anything, positioned at a distance that was chosen, not guessed. Everything about the placement is deliberate — close enough to watch, far enough to stay out of reach. The distance of someone who has done this before.

She sits the way I sit. Still. Spine straight. Hands resting in her lap with the particular calm of someone who doesn't need to prove she's relaxed because tension is a language she stopped speaking years ago. Dark hair pulled back tight. No jewelry. No color. A face built from angles — sharp jaw, high cheekbones, Mediterranean skin — and eyes that hold absolutely nothing.

Not cruelty. Not warmth. Not even curiosity.

Assessment. Pure. Patient. The look of someone who has been watching me breathe for hours and has already learned everything she needs from the rhythm.

She watches me the way I watch rooms.

The recognition hits low in my gut — not a thought but a reflex, the way your body knows a blade is sharp before your brain names the metal. This woman is not a guard. She is not hired muscle. She is something I have only heard about in fragments — whispered names that made men like Emiliano go quiet, intelligence reports that stopped mid-sentence as if the paper itself was afraid to finish.

I know her name the way I know the names of storms. By the damage they leave behind.

"Isadora."

My voice comes out wrecked. Scraped raw from whatever they pumped into me, the single word catching on the dryness in my throat. But I don't make it a question. Questions give the other person power. I say her name the way you lay a card faceup on the table — confirmation, not inquiry. I know what you are.

She does not react.

Not a blink. Not a shift in her posture. Not the smallest flicker across those dark eyes. She receives my voice the way concrete receives rain — absorbs it, gives nothing back.

I should be afraid.

I know this the way I know my ribs are cracked — a fact my body holds that my brain hasn't fully processed. I am nineteen years old. I am chained to a chair in a room with no windows. The woman sitting across from me has been operating in shadows since before I was born. She has held men in rooms like this one and I do not know what happened to them afterward because the reports never say. They just stop. Like the men stopped.

I should be afraid.

Instead, I am thinking about Romeo.

It hits me the way it always does — not gradually, not building. A door opening in my chest and the whole thing flooding in at once. Last night. The penthouse. The sound of the television through the wall and Nova laughing at something Tomás said and Romeo on the couch with his arm thrown across the back, his head tipped toward her, that smile.

The real one.

Not the grin he loads like a weapon. Not the charm he drapes over himself like cologne. The one underneath — loose, unguarded, the smile of a man who has forgotten for five whole minutes that his father's ghost is still giving orders and a war is still eating through the walls. The smile that surfaces only when Nova's feet are in his lap and Tomás is arguing about something ridiculous and the penthouse sounds like a home instead of a crypt.

I saw it through the doorway. I was heading to the estate to run a check on the eastern perimeter — Fabio's sensors had a gap I wanted to close, a window of maybe thirty seconds where the rotation left a blind spot wide enough to drive through. I had my keys in my hand. I was three steps from the elevator.

Then I heard Nova laugh. And I looked. And Romeo was smiling.

I put my keys back on the counter.