Chapter 2 - The Ghost in the Mirror
“Lorenzo... don’t look at me,” Isabella gasped, her voice raspy, as if she hadn’t spoken a full sentence in weeks. She tried to wrench her arm free, but Lorenzo’s grip was unbreakable.
He pulled her toward him, his hand trembling as it hovered over her cheek, tracing the familiar curve of her jawline. His fingers felt her warm skin. Her pulse beat rapidly against his thumb.
This wasn’t a ghost. This wasn’t a hallucination born of grief and whiskey.
“Isabella,” he breathed, his voice breaking for the first time in ten years. “You’re... you’re alive.”
“I had to be,” she cried, tears finally breaking over her eyelashes, cutting tracks through the grime on her cheeks. “If they knew I survived the crash, they would have finished the job. Lorenzo, someone cut the brake lines on my car. It wasn't an accident.”
The mention of the crash instantly extinguished the shock, replacing it with a cold, terrifying clarity that defined Lorenzo DeLuca.
The blood roaring in his ears turned to ice.
“Who?” Lorenzo asked, his voice dropping into a deadly, lethal register.
Before Isabella could answer, a sharp metallic squeak echoed from the front of the warehouse.
“Boss!” Marcus’s voice rang out, urgent and strained, cutting through the cavernous space. “We’ve got company! Three unmarked black sedans just pulled up outside! They’re bypassing the front and coming through the alley!”
Isabella’s face drained of what little color remained. She grabbed the lapels of Lorenzo’s coat with desperate fingers.
“They found me,” she whispered in absolute terror. “They tracked the supplies I’ve been scavenging. Lorenzo, they’re here.”
Lorenzo’s mind operated with the ruthless precision of a master strategist. In a fraction of a second, all the pieces clicked together. The car crash two months ago. The sealed casket. The missing body that the coroner had verified through dental records—records that had been pulled and certified by a very specific, highly trusted member of his own inner circle.
The man who had handled his legal affairs.
The man who had managed his estate accounts.
The man who had stood right beside him at the funeral, placing a comforting hand on his shoulder while Lorenzo wept.
Vincent Moretti.
“Marcus!” Lorenzo barked into his lapel radio, his eyes locked on Isabella. “Get Sophia and the girl out through the service culvert in the back! Now! Do not use the vehicles!”
“Copy!” Marcus shouted back over the distant crunch of gravel outside.
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Lorenzo scooped Isabella into his arms, ignoring her weak protests, and ran toward the back loading bay where Bruno trotted closely behind them.
“You can’t stay here, Isabella,” Lorenzo said as he bundled her into the backseat of the Navigator, which Marcus had strategically maneuvered behind a concrete retaining wall. “And neither can I. Because tonight, someone is going to learn what happens when you try to bury a DeLuca twice.”
