CHAPTER 25 - TAKEN

The call came through at 4:47 in the afternoon, and Elias would remember, for a long time afterward, the exact way the number on his phone had looked lit up against the dim interior of the meeting room, ordinary, unremarkable, nothing in its shape to warn him what waited on the other end of it.

"Report," he said, stepping away from the table where Luca sat still finishing the details of the day's negotiation, expecting a routine confirmation, Elena delivered safely, the visit concluding without incident, Marchetti's usual clipped efficiency relaying nothing more urgent than travel time.

What he got instead was a voice ragged with pain, barely holding together, sentences that rearranged the entire shape of the afternoon before Elias had even finished processing the first of them, and a name, delivered with the flat, uncomplicated certainty of a man who had seen exactly what he claimed to have seen.

Elias's hand went very still on the phone.

Across the room, Luca had been reviewing a contract, his attention absorbed in the fine print of a deal that had occupied the better part of three days, and something in Elias's sudden, absolute stillness must have registered even before he spoke, because Luca's head came up sharply, his eyes fixing on Elias with an intensity that demanded an answer before Elias had fully found the words to give one.

"Location," Elias said into the phone, already reaching for the notepad he kept in the inside pocket of his jacket, his voice staying level through sheer force of will. "Everything you can give me. Now."

"What's happened." Luca's voice, low, controlled, and entirely unwilling to wait any longer for an answer.

Elias held up one hand, still listening, gathering the mile marker, the direction the second cars had gone, every fragment of detail Marchetti's battered mind could still supply, and relayed it in short, clipped bursts even as he processed the growing, sickening shape of the whole picture at once.

"Elena's been taken," Elias said finally, lowering the phone, his own voice thinner than he wanted it to sound. "Ambush on the road to the hospital. Marchetti's hit, Torres is down. Her father was involved. He wasn't a victim, Luca. He walked to his own car afterward and drove away."

The silence that followed lasted less than two seconds, but Elias would remember it for years, the particular, terrible stillness that came over Luca's face, not rage, not yet, something colder and more absolute settling into his features, a man recalculating every assumption he'd built his empire on in the space of a single breath.

Luca was already rising from the table, the contract abandoned mid sentence, the men on the other side of the negotiation exchanging uncertain glances that neither Luca nor Elias had any attention left to spare for. "We leave. Now."

"I'll have the car brought around," Elias said, already moving toward the door, relaying the order to the driver waiting outside as he went, the vehicle pulling forward from where it had sat parked for the better part of three days, everything they'd traveled north to accomplish abandoned without a second thought the moment the engine turned over. "There's more, Luca. Marchetti says he identified the men who hit them."

"Who?"

"Dante's crew. He saw the mark, snake and blade, the same ink his men wear. He's certain of it."

Luca's expression didn't shift immediately into anything Elias could easily name. Confusion, first, genuine and unguarded, the particular blankness of a man running through a mental ledger and failing to find the entry that would make the name fit the crime. "Dante?" he repeated, slow, testing the shape of it. "Why would Dante do this."

"I don't know yet."

"We've done business for years." Luca's jaw tightened, his mind visibly working through it, searching for the thread that would connect a name he associated with shipments and margins and the ordinary, forgettable friction of commerce to the woman who'd just been dragged off a roadside at gunpoint. "There's nothing recent between us worth this. No debt outstanding, no dispute on the books significant enough to justify an ambush, two men shot, a father bribed into betraying his own daughter. Dante pulled out of a shipping arrangement we'd been finalizing, three, four months back. Abrupt about it. No real explanation offered." He shook his head slightly, more to himself than to Elias, still turning it over. "I assumed it was pride. Some slight he imagined, or a better offer elsewhere he didn't want to admit to. I let it go because it wasn't worth the aggravation of chasing down a man who'd apparently decided he didn't want my business anymore."

Elias felt something cold settle into his own chest, a memory surfacing that he'd let sit unexamined for months, filed away the way he filed most things that didn't seem urgent at the time. "The wound wasn't business, Luca."

Luca looked at him sharply. "Say it plainly."

"His wrist." Elias held his gaze, unwilling to soften it now, of all moments. "The night he tried to touch Elena in your sitting room. You broke it in front of mens who all still talk, carefully, about what they watched happen that night. He pulled out of the shipping deal not long after. I remember thinking, at the time, that the timing was close. I didn't chase the thought any further than that. There didn't seem to be a reason to."

Something shifted across Luca's face then, slow and cold, memory reassembling itself into a shape he clearly hadn't allowed himself to see until this exact moment.

Elena, pouring wine at the low table. Dante's hand rising toward her face, easy, entitled, certain of never once having been told no. The wet, sudden crack of bone giving way beneath his own grip, a sound that had satisfied him at the time in a way he'd never bothered to examine too closely afterward. He had walked away from that night considering the matter closed, a boundary defended, a lesson delivered, the kind of correction this world required occasionally and rarely repeated twice on the same man.

He had never once considered that Dante might have walked away from it carrying something closer to obsession than humiliation.

"I didn't think he had it in him," Luca said, quiet now, something dark moving beneath the words. "A broken wrist. Wounded pride. The kind of grudge that curdles into avoiding a man's business for a season and eventually fades once there's money to be made again. That's the version of Dante I've done business with for years. Careful. Calculating in the way small men calculate, always weighing the cost against the satisfaction." His voice hardened, the last of his composure visibly cracking beneath the weight of what he was piecing together in real time. "I never imagined he'd go this far over it. A woman he considers nothing more than something I own, and he's willing to burn down years of business, risk a war he cannot possibly win, over the memory of a wrist that healed wrong."

"He's not thinking about winning," Elias said. "Men like that rarely are, once it stops being about the money and starts being about the humiliation. He's not calculating a return on investment anymore. He's settling a score he's been carrying since that night, and he's decided Elena is the most direct way to make you feel exactly what he felt."

The drive back stretched into hours that felt, to Elias, considerably longer than the four they'd spent traveling north that morning, every mile crawling past at a pace that seemed to mock the urgency clawing at both of them.

Elias spent most of it on the phone, coordinating search teams, reviewing scattered, partial footage from traffic cameras along the route, piecing together the movements of the vehicles involved in the ambush with a grim, methodical focus that gave his hands something to do besides shake. Luca said little through most of it, staring out the window, his knuckles pale where his hands rested against his knees, his phone occasionally buzzing with updates he read in silence before handing them wordlessly to Elias for further action.

It was only when they finally reached the site of the crash, the road cordoned off, emergency vehicles still parked along the shoulder, the wrecked car sitting exactly where Marchetti had described it, tilted into the shallow ditch, glass scattered across the asphalt catching the last of the fading daylight, that Luca finally spoke again, his voice low, edged with something that had finally, fully broken past the careful control he'd worn the entire drive.

"He's out of his mind." Luca walked the length of the wreck slowly, unhurried even now, taking in every detail with the same cataloguing attention he brought to everything, the shattered windshield, the dark stain on the driver's seat where Marchetti had bled, the ditch where a second set of tire tracks veered off toward a side road local police had already begun tracing. "He broke off a shipping arrangement worth more than his entire operation makes in a year, quietly, and I let it go because it wasn't worth chasing down. And instead of letting the grudge stay quiet, instead of simply nursing it somewhere I'd never have to think about it again, he plans an ambush. He buys off a desperate, worthless father. He takes the one thing in this world he had to know I would burn everything to get back." He shook his head once, disbelief threading through a fury that had finally, entirely hardened into something absolute. "This isn't a man protecting his pride anymore, Elias. This is a man who's decided he doesn't want to keep breathing. He's picking a fight he cannot win, over a debt that was never his to collect in the first place, and he's dragged her into the middle of it because he thinks that's the only leverage sharp enough to hurt me."

"Then let's make sure he's right about the not breathing part," Elias said.

Luca turned to look at him, and for the first time since the phone call hours ago, something like grim, focused purpose settled fully across his face, replacing the raw, unguarded fear that had cracked through earlier, standing over the wreckage of a car that had nearly cost two men their lives and had already cost Elena hers, in every way that currently mattered.

"He wants to remind the world what happens to a man who touches something of mine," Luca said, his voice dropping lower, colder, absolute. "Fine. I'll remind him considerably more thoroughly. Find where he's keeping her, Elias. I don't care what it costs, what it takes, who we have to go through to get there. I want her back, and I want Dante Conti to understand, in whatever time he has left after that, exactly how badly he miscalculated."

One of Luca's men jogged over from the edge of the scene before Elias could answer, his expression grim. "Two vehicles left the crash site heading east, toward the old logging routes. No plates confirmed yet, tread doesn't match anything registered locally. Professional crew. And her father's car, gone without a trace past this point. He knew which roads wouldn't have coverage."

"He didn't plan this alone," Luca said, more to himself than to either of them, his eyes fixed on the tire tracks disappearing into the tree line. "A man like Marco Rossi doesn't have the nerve or the resources to arrange something this coordinated. He was paid, and pointed, and told exactly where to stand." His gaze lifted, hard and distant, toward the darkening road ahead. "Every hour Dante keeps her is an hour he's convinced himself he's still winning something. I want that hour to end tonight."

Elias nodded, already dialing the next number on his list, already setting the machinery of search and retrieval into motion with the same brisk efficiency he brought to everything. But some quiet, treacherous part of him, walking back toward the car, replayed the words Luca had said back on the road before they'd even reached the wreck. 'I want her back' . Not 'I want my property returned'. Not the clipped, ownership soaked language Luca had used about her for four straight months, in front of staff, in front of business partners, in front of Elias himself more times than either of them could count.

Just that. Raw, and simple, and utterly, damningly human, and Elias understood, dialing the next number with hands that weren't quite steady, that the ground beneath all three of them, Luca, Elena, and the careful, patient plan Elias himself had spent six years building toward, had just shifted in ways none of them could yet fully see the shape of.

Somewhere, in a locked room he had no coordinates for yet, Elena was waiting. And somewhere in Elias's own chest, tangled hopelessly now with a mission he'd sworn his loyalty to long before he'd ever met her, sat a fear he had no right to feel this deeply, and no way left of pretending, even to himself, that he didn't.