Chapter 6

The next morning, Sofia disappeared. She had tossed her phone in the alley behind the club and left her car where it was. All she took were the clothes on her back. Less than ten minutes after Matteo got the news, almost every Rossi man he could spare had been sent out.

Drivers, club managers, dock workers, and informants in Brooklyn's criminal underworld fanned out in wider and wider circles. My father pulled half the Moretti family's patrol cars into the search too. My mother sat in the living room, making call after call.

No one asked what time I'd gotten home the night before. That afternoon, Matteo hurried out of the estate. From a second-floor window, I watched his convoy pull away, and a thought suddenly came to me.

I wanted to see it for myself.

How frantic would he get when a woman who was supposedly "just someone he owed his life to" went missing?

I had my own driver follow him. The car finally stopped outside an underground bar in Brooklyn. Every customer inside had already been cleared out.

I had barely reached the door when I heard glass shatter. Matteo had the manager by the collar and was pinning him against the bar.

"Say that again."

The manager's face had gone white with fear.

"Last night... last night Ms. Bellini came in. She had a few drinks with some guy. I swear I don't know who he was."

"Did they leave together?"

"No. I only saw them talking."

Matteo slammed his fist into the liquor shelf beside him. A few glasses crashed to the floor.

"Pull up the security footage for me."

Standing in that dim doorway, I suddenly felt like I didn't know the man in front of me. Matteo was very possessive. I had always known that.

When I was 17, all I did was talk to a boy for a little too long at a party. The very next day, Matteo went and challenged someone to a shooting match, and he came back with the backs of his hands scraped bloody. I called him childish. He didn't even pretend to be sorry. He said he just couldn't stand other guys staring at me.

As we got older, he never did anything that stupid again. But now he'd lost control, just like he had when I was 17. All because another woman might have had a few drinks with a stranger.

I didn't go in. I didn't call out to him either. As I turned to leave, my phone buzzed.

A message from an unknown number. I opened it. It was a photo.

Sofia was sitting by the window in a room I didn't recognize, safe and sound. A second text came in right after.

"He hasn't slept a wink since last night."

Then a third.

"Do you still think everything will go back to the way it was just because you woke up?"

I stopped beside the car, my fingers cold. I didn't reply. I just took a screenshot showing every message and saved it along with the number.

Thirty seconds later, she sent one last message.

"Elena, I can make them choose, right in front of you."

I stared at that line for a long time. This time, I didn't feel hurt. All I felt was a cold, clear wariness.

I moved the screenshots into an encrypted folder and decided to hand them over to my lawyer for safekeeping the next day. I wanted to know what she was really up to. But I wasn't going to play by her rules anymore.