"And if we can't?"
Silence stretches through the room, and that silence tells me everything I need to know.
The walls are closing in. There's not much anyone is going to be able to do for me now.
I hear chairs scraping against the floor—the meeting is ending. Panic floods through me as I realize I need to get back to the reception desk before anyone notices I'm gone. Before Dante realizes I was listening.
I push myself up from the wall, but my legs feel weak, unsteady. The hallway stretches in front of me like a tunnel, and I have to concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other.
Three weeks.
Three weeks until they come for me, one way or another.
I make it back to my desk just as Dario returns from his phone call, giving me a casual nod as he takes his position by the elevator. Luca appears moments later, looking relaxed and unsuspecting.
Neither of them has any idea what I just heard.
I sit down at my desk and stare at the computer screen, but the words blur together. My hands shake as I try to type, and I have to grip the edge of the desk to steady myself.
This isn't about Vito's pride or maintaining power or even the ongoing war with the Costellos. This is about me being owed to them—like I'm some kind of debt that needs to be paid.
The question is: what am I going to do about it?
The old Sofia would have started planning her escape the second she heard those words. But the old Sofia didn't know what it felt like to cower behind a table while bullets flew over her head. The old Sofia didn't know what it was like to have someone willing to die to protect her.
Three weeks to figure out if there's any fight left in me.
Three weeks to decide who I want to be when this is all over.
If I survive long enough to find out.
CHAPTER 13
Dante
Three dayssince the council meeting, and Sofia's acting like a completely different person. Again.
The shell-shocked, compliant girl who barely spoke for a week after the attack has vanished, replaced by someone more reckless and desperate than I've ever seen her. It's like someone flipped a switch, and now she's operating on pure adrenaline and panic.
She doesn't know that I know she was eavesdropping. Dario and Luca got an earful for leaving their post, but Sofia herself has no idea I spotted that messy bun through the crack in the door. Whatever she heard in that meeting lit a fire under her ass, and now I'm dealing with escape attempts that are getting more creative and exponentially more dangerous.
Yesterday, she tried to climb out of the third-story window at RRE using a makeshift rope made from computer cables. The day before that, she attempted to hide in a laundry cart being wheeled out of the building. This morning, I caught her trying to pick the lock on Vito's gun safe.
"You know, princess," I tell her as I confiscate the bobby pin she was using, "if you wanted to learn lock picking, you could have just asked. I'm an excellent teacher."
She glares at me with those green eyes that have been flashing with renewed fire lately. "Don't call me princess."
"There she is," I say, unable to keep the grin off my face. "I was starting to miss the attitude."
The truth is, I'm relieved to see some fight back in her, even if it's making my job infinitely harder. The week after the attack, watching her move through life like a ghost, barely speaking or eating—that was worse than any escape attempt. At least now she's engaged, alive, even if she's driving me crazy in the process.
But there's something different about her desperation now. Before, her escape attempts felt almost playful, like a game between us. Now there's an edge to them, a franticness that has me on high alert twenty-four seven.
"Sofia," I say, my voice gentler. "Whatever you heard?—"
"I don't know what you're talking about," she snaps, but her eyes flicker away from mine.
Yeah, she definitely knows that I know.
