Vanessa claimed Sophie injured herself on a garage door, until Luca noticed the blood, the wheelchair, and one terrified look that told him his mother was missing. / Chapter 25 / 50

Chapter 25 - The Black Water Crossing

The rain turned to an icy sleet by three in the morning.

The river was a serpentine strip of black glass, cutting through the industrialized marshland south of the city. We moved in silence aboard a low-profile, flat-bottomed tactical skiff, its muffled electric motor barely creating a ripple against the murky water.

Luca knelt at the bow, dressed in matte-black Kevlar, an assault rifle resting across his knees. Behind us were five of his most loyal personal operators—men who had answered the red-flag emergency beacon without question, men whose families had been cared for by the Morettis for generations.

I sat beside Luca, peering through night-vision optics at the sprawling silhouette of the Black Water Ironworks.

The complex was a rusted industrial carcass of abandoned blast furnaces, towering cranes, and collapsed corrugated-steel sheds. But heat signatures lit up our thermal displays like fireflies: heavy automated sentries on the catwalks, armed patrols pacing the barge docks, and a single, heavily illuminated medical trailer parked deep inside the central smelting shed.

"There," I whispered, pointing to the trailer. "That's where the power conduits are routed. Look at the diesel generators humming on the side."

"They're running high-output medical scanning equipment," Luca confirmed, his voice barely a hum over our encrypted low-frequency throat mics. "That's where Clara is."

"And Mateo?"

Luca shifted his gaze to the upper crane platform overlooking the entire yard. "He won't be on the ground. Mateo never fights in the dirt when he can play sniper. He’s up on the crane gantry, covering the approach vectors."

"If we hit the docks, he pins us in the open," I said, analyzing the kill zones. "The crane gives him a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree kill box."

"Which is why you aren't coming with me through the water," Luca said, turning his head toward me.

I glared at him in the greenish hue of the night-vision goggles. "Luca, don't start with this sacrificial martyr nonsense—"

"I’m not being a martyr, Sophie. I’m being the bait," he cut in smoothly. "Mateo wants my head. If he sees me hit the southern loading dock with the strike team, every gun on that yard turns toward me. That gives you three minutes to scale the drainage intake pipe behind the smelting shed, slip into that trailer, and extract Clara."

"And who watches your back when Mateo opens up with a fifty-caliber rifle from eighty feet in the air?" I countered.

Luca smiled—a cold, terrifying flash of white teeth in the dark. "You do. The moment you clear the trailer, you drop him."

Before I could argue, the skiff drifted under the mossy pilings of the old railroad trestle. The water smelled of rusted iron and stagnant diesel.

"Two minutes out," the helmsman signaled.

Luca checked his weapon, then reached out, his hand wrapping around the back of my head, pulling me into a fierce, breathless kiss. It was hard, tasting of rain and war, an unspoken promise stamped in blood and fire.