Chapter 4

Nico did not even pause. The second the stranger's shadow filled the doorway, Nico's survival instincts kicked in. He shoved past the man, ducked under his arm, and bolted down the hotel hallway without a single glance back at me.

Four years. Four years I gave him, and he ran like I was nothing. Like I was a mess he did not want to clean up.

Toretti did not run. He grabbed my hair instead and threw me sideways off the bed, and I hit the floor hard enough to feel it in my teeth. He stood over me, breathing heavy, his nose still bleeding from where I punched him.

"You just cost me a lot of trouble, sweetheart." He pulled his hand back.

The slap never landed.

A hand caught Toretti's wrist mid swing, and the grip was so tight I heard something crack. Toretti's face twisted, and he spun around to see the stranger standing right behind him, holding his arm like it was something he might decide to break.

"I do not remember giving you permission to touch her again." The stranger's voice was soft, almost gentle, like he was correcting a child who had just colored outside the lines. But his eyes were something else entirely. Dark. Flat. The kind of eyes that had watched worse things happen and did not flinch.

"Do you know who I am?" Toretti snarled through clenched teeth. "I am Victor Toretti. I handle the entire Northeast division of your—"

One punch. Just one. The stranger's fist connected with Toretti's jaw so clean and so fast that the older man's knees buckled like they were made of paper. He hit the floor in a heap, and the room went silent.

I stared at the stranger from the floor, my vision blurring, my body finally giving up the fight it had been losing all night. Relief washed through me so hard it felt like drowning. Someone came. Someone actually came.

Then the darkness took me.

I did not see what happened next, but this is what the stranger's men later pieced together.

The stranger was Dante Valentino.

And when Dante Valentino entered a room, people stopped breathing until he told them they could start again.

Toretti was on his knees now, not because he chose to be, but because the weight of the man standing over him made standing feel like a death wish. Blood ran from his nose and his lower lip, and his hand hung at an angle that said his wrist was not going to work right for a while.

Salvatore stepped in behind Dante, took one look at the scene, and positioned himself by the door without being told.

"Talk." Dante unbuttoned his suit jacket and sat on the edge of the bed, crossing one leg over the other like he was settling in for a boring meeting. "Who is the girl?"

Toretti wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his good hand. "She is nobody. Her boyfriend offered her to me. Caruso. Nico Caruso. He works under me in the logistics department."

"Offered her."

"I did not touch her. I swear on my mother's grave, I did not—"

"I did not ask if you touched her." Dante's voice did not rise. It did not need to. "I asked who she is."

"I do not know her name. Caruso just said she was his girlfriend and she had no one. No family. No connections. He said she would not talk."

Dante stared at him for a long moment, then looked down at me on the floor. My face was swollen, bruised on both sides, with a cut on my lip that was still bleeding. My dress was torn at the shoulder.

Something flickered in his eyes. Not anger. Something quieter than that.

He tilted his head slightly, studying my face the way a man studies a photograph he cannot quite place. In the back of his mind, a memory stirred. A dark alley. A fake police siren. A girl with sad eyes who told him that people hurt you for no reason, and a brown wig that smelled like cheap soap.

Could it be her?

He could not be sure. That night was a blur of blood and concrete, and her face had been half hidden in the dark. But something about the shape of her mouth and the small scar near her left eyebrow pulled at him.

Probably a coincidence. Probably nothing.

He looked back at Toretti. "Here is what is going to happen. You are going to disappear from this city by morning. I do not care where you go. Alaska. Montana. The bottom of a lake. But if your face shows up anywhere near this company again, I will personally make sure it is the last face anyone sees before I bury you. Are we clear?"

Toretti nodded so fast his neck looked like it might snap.

"Sal." Dante stood and adjusted his cuffs. "Get him out of my sight. Reassign him somewhere he cannot embarrass us. He is too useful to waste, but too stupid to trust."

"Yes, sir." Salvatore grabbed Toretti by the collar and hauled him to his feet like a bag of garbage.

Dante looked down at my unconscious face one more time. The bruises were already darkening, purple spreading under the skin like ink in water.

"And get her to a hospital." He straightened his tie without looking at Salvatore. "If her face is left like that, it will scar. Make sure it does not."

Salvatore paused mid step, Toretti dangling from his grip. In all the years he had worked for Dante Valentino, the man had never once asked him to take care of a stranger. Not once.

"Sir?"

"Did I stutter, Sal?"

"No, sir. Right away."

They left the hotel through the service entrance, Toretti stuffed into the back of a black sedan, and me carried gently by two of Dante's men toward a second car.

In the elevator going down, Salvatore cleared his throat. "Sir, about the file you requested on that girl, the one from the alley. It was delivered to your desk this morning."

"I know." Dante watched the numbers above the door count down. "I will look at it tomorrow."

A pause. Then Salvatore asked the question he asked every few months, not because he doubted his own answer, but because Dante always wanted to hear it.

"Sir. Would you ever betray me?"

Dante's mouth curved. Just barely. "That is my line, Sal."

"I know. But you have not asked it in a while, so I thought I would save you the trouble." Salvatore kept his eyes forward. "No, sir. I would not. Not for money, not for a woman, not for my own mother."

"Your mother is dead, Sal."

"Exactly my point, sir."

The elevator doors opened, and Dante Valentino, the illegitimate son of the Valentino family, the man who wanted nothing from his father's name or his father's money, only to burn down every relative who had spent the last decade trying to bury him, walked out in

to the cold New York night without looking back.