Chapter 6 Shadows of the Past

Fynn drove the Bugatti Chiron through the sleeping streets of Puerto Rico with enough speed to make the city lights blur into long streaks of gold and white. His hands remained firm on the wheel as he followed the location pinned in the message that had appeared on his phone only minutes earlier. Every corner was taken with dangerous precision, every traffic signal ignored, every second shaved away by impatience. He hated leaving Isabelle behind, especially after only just returning from Russia, but the text had come from only one person bold enough to summon him at that hour.

And Estella never called without reason.

When the Bugatti finally came to a violent halt in front of the establishment known as the Garden of Eden, Fynn stepped out without hesitation. The building glowed beneath decadent lights, all polished glass, velvet curtains, and hidden corruption. To the wealthy elite of the island, it was a private sanctuary for indulgence, a place where politicians, businessmen, smugglers, and predators shed their respectable faces and fed their darker appetites. Women in revealing dresses drifted like perfume through the halls, their painted smiles trained to entice, their hungry eyes immediately fastening on the foreign man who entered like a storm wrapped in black.

Several of them straightened with visible interest, their gazes sliding shamelessly over his tall frame, but Fynn did not spare any of them a second glance. Disgust rose quietly beneath his skin, not because the place was unfamiliar, but because every inch of it reminded him how much filth money could disguise. Yet despite his contempt, there was one reason he still crossed this threshold whenever summoned.

Its owner was the only family he had left.

He moved through the dim corridors with practiced familiarity until he reached the private chamber at the far end. Without knocking, he pushed the door open.

The room was thick with cigarette smoke and amber shadows. Expensive liquor lined the glass table, jazz hummed faintly from unseen speakers and seated with her back partially turned toward him was a woman whose posture radiated the kind of confidence only age and survival could create.

"What do you need, Estella?" Fynn asked immediately, dispensing with every form of warmth.

Estella slowly turned in her chair, a cigarette balanced elegantly between two fingers. Her dark eyes glittered with amusement, and a broad smile stretched across lips painted the same deep red as the wine resting beside her.

"I missed you too, mi sobrino favorito," she replied with infuriating ease.

Estella was Puerto Rican to the bone, fiery where his mother had once been soft, ruthless where grief had hardened her over the years. She was his late mother's twin sister, the woman who had gathered him from the ruins of his childhood after his mother's death and raised him beneath the shield of her family's fortune. Everything Fynn now possessed, the land, the businesses, the offshore empires, had roots that traced back to the bloodline of the woman standing in front of him.

He had no patience for nostalgia tonight.

"What do you want?" he repeated, his voice colder.

Estella crushed the cigarette into the ashtray and rose. The smile vanished from her face as she approached him, and in that instant the playful aunt disappeared, replaced by the hardened woman who had survived too many monsters.

"Your father is in Puerto Rico."

The words landed like a blade driven between ribs.

Fynn's shoulders stiffened, and a violent tension climbed through his spine. For ten years he had lived with deliberate distance, ten years since he severed every connection to the man whose name alone could sour the blood in his veins.

His jaw hardened. "I am not interested."

Estella laughed once, but there was no humor in it. "Do not insult me with that lie. You may have built empires, Fynn, but I still know the shadows that live inside you."

He stared at her, unmoving, waiting.

Estella's eyes narrowed, and when she spoke again, each word struck with heavier force than the last.

"His arrival is not what should terrify you." She stepped closer. "The girl should."

The mention came like a gunshot inside his chest.

"Isabelle Fortia," Estella said quietly.

Fynn's expression changed at once.

It was subtle, but deadly.

His eyes sharpened, his breathing turned shallower, and something primitive awakened beneath the composed exterior he had worn all evening.

Estella noticed it immediately.

"I do not need details," she said. "I saw enough in your face. If James Donovan discovers she exists, he will use her. Men like him never attack where steel is strongest. They attack where flesh is softest." Her own eyes darkened with old grief. "Do not let him destroy that girl the way he destroyed my sister."

For a moment, neither of them spoke.

Fynn felt his aunt's words striking places inside him he had spent years sealing shut. His mother's face flashed briefly in memory, gentle and fading, followed by the colder memory of a father who knew only control, punishment, and blood.

Without another word, he turned and left.

Estella watched him go, sadness pulling faintly at her features.

"Remember Estrella," she whispered into the empty smoke. "Do not let her die twice."

Outside, the night air hit Fynn like ice, but it did nothing to cool the violence surging through him. He reached the Bugatti and drove his fist into the hood once, then again, and again, until pain split across his knuckles and blood streaked the polished metal. The rage he had buried for years ripped free in uneven breaths. He dragged a hand through his hair, cursed into the darkness, then yanked a cigarette from his case and lit it with shaking fingers.

He inhaled hard.

Smoke burned down his throat, but it did little to smother the image now lodged in his mind.

Isabelle sleeping.

Isabelle smiling.

Isabelle in his arms.

And James Donovan finding her.

The thought alone made something savage rise inside him.

Fynn crushed the cigarette beneath his heel and immediately called Caine.

"Yes, Boss," Caine answered without delay.

"Double every guard around the rest house," Fynn ordered. His voice was calm, but the calmness itself was more frightening than anger. "No one enters. No one leaves without my permission. If an unfamiliar face appears within a hundred meters, put them down first and ask questions later."

Caine did not hesitate. "Understood."

The line disconnected.

Fynn opened the surveillance feed on his phone, and Isabelle's sleeping face appeared on the screen. She looked peaceful, unaware that a new threat had just stepped onto the island, unaware that the darkest chapter of his life was moving toward her.

His bleeding fingers tightened around the device.

He had spent ten years avoiding the ghost of his father.

But for Isabelle, avoidance was no longer an option.

If James Donovan wanted war, then war was exactly what he would get.

Fynn climbed back into the Bugatti and tore into the road, the engine roaring beneath him like a beast unleashed.

At almost the same hour, another vehicle convoy pulled away from the airport.

At the center walked a broad-shouldered foreign man in his mid-forties whose very posture commanded silence. Age had not softened him. If anything, it had sharpened the brutality carved into his features. Men in black followed at his sides, while a woman carrying a tablet hurried to keep pace.

"Find him," he ordered, his voice carrying the iron certainty of a man who had never accepted failure.

The woman worked quickly, fingers tapping across the screen before unease clouded her face. "No digital trace, sir. He has buried himself too well."

The man's jaw flexed.

"Contact Estella. She knows where my son is."

Minutes later, even that line went dead.

No answer.

No lead.

Nothing.

A slow, humorless smile touched the man's lips, but the men around him shifted uneasily because they knew that smile meant someone would bleed.

For ten years James Donovan had searched with fragments and rumors.

Now he was finally on the same island as the son who escaped him.

And this time, he had no intention of leaving empty-handed.