"A marriage," I said now, pacing the length of my private study where I'd retreated after another fruitless strategy session. "Patrick is planning to marry her off to Alejandro Vega. A fucking cartel leader. A man known for his brutality, his treatment of women as property, his elimination of anyone who crosses him or fails to show proper respect."
Luca, seated in one of the leather chairs by the fireplace, watched my agitation with growing concern. "Connor couldn't confirm the timeline, but he believes it's happening soon. Within weeks, not months."
"Not happening at all," I corrected, my voice deadly quiet despite the violence evident in every line of my body. "I'll burnthe O'Sullivan estate to the ground with Patrick inside it before I let him sell her to Vega like property."
"That's exactly the kind of reaction he's hoping for," Luca pointed out, maintaining a calm tone despite the danger radiating from me. "Open aggression. A move we can't take back. Something that justifies whatever countermeasures he's already planning."
"I don't care," I said for what felt like the hundredth time in the past days. "I don't care what game he's playing, what trap he's setting, what consequences might follow. I'm not letting him do this to her. Not to Grace. Not to?—"
I stopped abruptly, the words catching in my throat. Not to the woman I love. The thought was there, undeniable, inescapable, despite my lifelong avoidance of that particular emotion, that particular vulnerability.
Love. The thing my father had beaten out of me, had taught me was weakness, was vulnerability, was a luxury men in our position couldn't afford. The emotion I'd buried so deeply I'd thought it excised completely, replaced with safer alternatives—desire, possession, control.
But this was love. This hollowing ache, this rage that threatened to consume me, this willingness to risk everything—family, empire, my very life—for one woman. This was what my mother had tried to teach me before my father's violence had silenced her forever. This was what I'd spent my entire adult life avoiding, denying, protecting myself from.
And now it had found me anyway, had ambushed me in the form of Grace O'Sullivan—stubborn, brilliant, defiant Grace, who had never stopped fighting me even as she'd surrendered to me, who had seen through my masks to the man beneath, who had made me question everything I thought I knew about myself, about what I wanted, about what kind of man I could be.
"Rafe," Luca said softly, breaking into my thoughts. "We'll find a way. We'll get her back before this marriage can happen. But we need to be smart about it. Strategic. The Rafe Conti way, not the Patrick O'Sullivan way."
The distinction—the reminder of who I was, of the reputation I'd built as the calculating, controlled counterpart to Dante's more direct approach—helped center me, helped pull me back from the edge of the rage that had been threatening to consume me for days.
"You're right," I acknowledged, forcing myself to stop pacing, to take a deep breath, to regain some measure of the control that had defined me for so long. "Reaction is what Patrick wants. What he expects. We need to do something unexpected. Something he can't prepare for because he can't imagine it."
Luca nodded, relief evident in his expression as he saw me beginning to think like myself again, to approach the problem with the strategic mind that had made me so valuable to the family, so feared by our enemies.
"What's the one thing Patrick O'Sullivan would never expect from a Conti?" I asked, my mind racing ahead, considering possibilities, discarding approaches that were too obvious, too predictable, too easily countered.
"Surrender?" Luca suggested, only half-joking. "A white flag? An admission of defeat?"
"Exactly," I said, a cold smile spreading across my features—not the expression of genuine humor or warmth, but the predatory grin of a man who has spotted his prey's fatal weakness. "Patrick expects retaliation. Expects aggression. Expects us to come at him with force, with threats, with the full weight of Conti power and influence."
"So we don't," Luca concluded, following my reasoning. "We do the opposite. We... what? Apologize? Offer concessions? Pretend we don't care that he's taken her?"
"We negotiate," I said, the plan taking shape in my mind with crystalline clarity. "We request a meeting. Formal, respectful, through proper channels. We acknowledge his right to retrieve his daughter from those who took her against her will. We express regret for the misunderstanding, the complications, the disruption to family relations."
Luca's eyebrows rose in surprise. "You want to apologize to Patrick O'Sullivan? The man who abandoned his daughter for months, who's now planning to marry her off to a cartel leader against her will? The man who?—"
"I want him to think I'm apologizing," I corrected, my voice hardening. "I want him to believe he's won, that he's broken me, that I'm willing to accept defeat in order to salvage what remains of the relationship between our families. I want his guard down, his suspicions eased, his attention focused on his victory rather than on protecting what he's taken."
Understanding dawned in Luca's eyes. "A Trojan horse approach. You get inside his defenses by appearing to surrender, and then..."
"And then I take back what's mine," I finished, the possessive pronoun slipping out before I could catch myself. "What should be hers," I amended, acknowledging—if only to myself—that Grace was not and had never been a possession, a prize to be won or lost in games between men who saw women as commodities rather than people.
She was a person. Brilliant, stubborn, fierce Grace, who deserved the right to choose her own path, her own future, her own fate—even if that choice led her away from me, even if she decided that freedom meant a life without Rafe Conti in it.
The thought sent a fresh wave of pain through me, but I pushed it aside, focusing on the plan taking shape, on the steps needed to implement it, on the myriad details thatwould determine success or failure in this most important of operations.
"I'll need Dante's approval," I acknowledged, knowing that a direct approach to Patrick O'Sullivan, even under the guise of negotiation, would require the family head's explicit support. "And his participation, to make it convincing."
"He'll give it," Luca assured me. "He sees how important this is to you. How it's... changed you."
The observation hung between us, loaded with implications neither of us was quite ready to articulate fully. How Grace had changed me. How my feelings for her had transformed me from the cold, calculating enforcer to something more complex, more human, more vulnerable than anyone in the family had seen since our mother's death.
"I'll talk to him," I said, already moving toward the door, energized by purpose, by the first real plan that felt like it might succeed, might bring Grace back before Patrick could implement whatever he had planned for his suddenly valuable daughter.
"Rafe," Luca called as I reached the door. "What if she doesn't want to come back? What if, given the choice, she chooses neither Patrick nor you? What if she just wants to be free of all of this?"
The question stopped me, forced me to confront the possibility I'd been avoiding since learning of her abduction. That Grace might not want to return to me. That she might see this as an opportunity for a different kind of escape, a different kind of freedom than either man in her life was offering.
