All Chapters of Play Thing Of The Enemy: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

Luca POVThe file was smaller than I expected.After everything Matteo had died protecting… After two years of Chiara running between safe houses with it hidden inside encrypted layers… the final data package sat on Kai’s screen as a single compressed archive.No larger than a few megabytes.Marcus leaned against the operations table with his arms folded, watching the progress bar inch forward while Kai’s decryption algorithms worked through the last of Matteo’s security layers.Elena stood near the far wall, silent, arms wrapped around herself.Chiara sat beside me with Nico asleep across her lap. The boy had fallen asleep halfway through the encryption process, his small hand still gripping the sleeve of my jacket like he was afraid I might disappear if he let go.I hadn’t moved, not once.Across the room, Damian stood near the window, his back to all of us.Kai exhaled slowly.“Last layer.”Her fingers moved quickly across the keyboard.Matteo’s code was elegant, even now. Every en

Damian POVI told Luca to wait in the car, he didn’t argue.That was how I knew he understood what this was. It was not a strategy or negotiation but something else.Something I couldn’t afford to do with anyone watching.The building was exactly what I expected—secure, quiet, forgettable. The kind of place designed to exist without drawing attention.It was fitting.My mother had always preferred control over presence, the door opened before I knocked.Of course it did, she had known I was coming.She was already inside the room when I walked in.Seated and waiting.Like she had been here the entire time, like she had never left anything unfinished in her life.I closed the door behind me.For a moment, neither of us spoke.I looked at her properly for the first time in years and there it was.The resemblance, not just physical, structure, stillness and control.Everything I had spent my life becoming—I got them from her.Everything except the one thing that mattered, she studied me

Luca's PovThe safehouse felt too quiet that morning, too quiet in the wrong places, too sharp in the rest.It was the kind of silence that came when everyone was already carrying too much and nobody had enough strength left to hide it. The halls smelled like burnt coffee, stale air, printer heat, gun oil. A place full of people, but stripped of comfort. We had turned it into a machine, and machines did not care how close their parts were to breaking.I felt it before I even stepped into the operations room.By the time I pushed the door open, the pressure was sitting in my chest like a stone.Screens covered one wall, feeding us route maps, transfer points, surveillance grids, schedule chains, fallback paths. Everything we had clawed out of blood, leverage, threats, and luck was pinned there in clean lines and glowing boxes. Looking at it should have made me feel better but it did not. It only reminded me how much had to go right.Kai was at the center station.For one second I just

Luca's Pov Europe went quiet around us, not truly quiet, even this high up, even behind thick glass and the kind of walls built by men with too much money and too many enemies, the world still made itself known. I could hear the low rush of traffic far below, softened by height. Somewhere in the distance, a siren rose and faded, wind.But inside our room, it felt quiet enough to hear every breath.The team had spent the day peeling apart across the continent.Marcus and Elena had gone first through the eastern route. Enough weapons and gear packed into diplomatic cases to start a war if anyone decided to open the wrong latch. I had watched them leave before dawn, both of them carrying themselves with that hard stillness people used when fear had to be folded into something useful. Marcus had looked paler than he should have, Elena had not looked back.Kai was somewhere in transit now, chained to three encrypted drives and the weight of an entire operation, her face set in that blank

Luca's Pov At 3:12 a.m., I gave up pretending sleep was still possible.The room in Paris was black except for the wash of city light bleeding around the curtains. Rain had stopped sometime before dawn. The glass no longer ticked with it. The silence that replaced it felt heavier, cleaner, like the whole world had pulled in one long breath and decided not to let it out yet.Damian was already awake.I knew it before I opened my eyes fully. I could feel it in the stillness of his body beside mine. For a minute I stayed where I was, half-curled against him, my cheek near his shoulder, listening to the steady beat under his skin. It might have been the last peaceful sound I would get for a long time. Maybe longer than that. I did not want to think too closely about what “long time” meant today.His hand moved once over my back when he felt me wake.“Morning,” I murmured.“It barely qualifies.”I huffed a quiet laugh, the sound dry and soft in the darkness. “You say charming things befo