Chapter 6

Alessia POV:

Bella moved me.

The new room was a stark white box. No window.

Just a bed, a chair, and a single, buzzing fluorescent strip overhead.

She tossed a threadbare towel and a bottle of water onto the mattress.

"Try not to make a mess," she said, and left.

From the room next door, I heard a woman's sobs. They weren't quiet, polite tears. They were gut-wrenching, soul-tearing sounds-the sound of a soul fracturing under a weight it could no longer bear.

She kept wailing a name, and then a phrase that made the blood in my veins turn to ice.

"Crimson Thorn... my boy... my sweet boy..."

Bella reappeared in the doorway, a file in her hand. She nodded toward the wall.

"A victim of your father's business," she said, her voice a sterile, emotionless drone.

"Her son is dead. Overdosed on the poison the Scorpion sold to high school kids."

I squeezed my eyes shut, but the woman's cries echoed in my head.

My hand flew to my neck, my fingers instinctively closing around the tarnished silver compass that hung there. The only thing of my mother's I had left.

"It will always guide you, Alessia," she'd told me years ago, her voice a soft whisper as she fastened the chain. "Even in the dark."

The dark. I was in it now. Drowning in it.

I remembered my father at her funeral. He'd insisted on a closed casket.

"It's better to remember her as she was," he'd said, his voice thick with a grief I now realized was a performance.

What had he been hiding?

My fingers fiddled with the compass's clasp, a nervous habit. My nail caught on a tiny, almost invisible seam near the hinge. It wasn't part of the design. It was a line. A break.

I pressed.

A tiny click, no louder than a sigh. A hidden compartment sprang open.

Inside, nestled in a bed of faded velvet, was a micro flash drive.

Sleep, when it finally came, wasn't an escape. It was a different kind of hell.

I was in the desert, the sun a merciless hammer overhead. My mother was calling my name, her voice carried on the wind.

"Alessia... The Scorpion... El Jefe... they know..."

I woke with a start, my heart pounding against my ribs. Her words from the dream echoed in my mind. El Jefe. The boss.

I had to talk to Dante.

I grabbed my phone, my fingers shaking as I went to his number. Still blocked. Erased.

A cold resolve settled over me. I wasn't just a loose end. I was a witness.

And I had something they didn't know about.

I dialed the main De Luca business line, the number from their corporate website. A crisp, professional voice answered.

"De Luca Holdings, how may I direct your call?"

"I have new information," I said, my voice sounding strange and distant even to my own ears. "Regarding Daniel Gallo. And Martha Gallo."