The phone buzzed, displaying a blocked number. Nora answered, her hand trembling violently.
“Hello, Mrs. Rossi,” Silas Thorne’s smooth, mocking voice purred through the speaker. “I see why he likes you. Very… substantial.”
“Let him go,” Nora demanded, her voice shaking but defiant.
“This isn’t about money, sweetheart. It’s about leverage. Tonight, you will enter your husband’s private study. Behind the painting, there is a safe. Inside is the encrypted ledger containing every route, account, and name the Rossi family holds. You will bring it to the steel plant at midnight. Alone. If you tell him, your brother dies. If you bring security, he dies. Do we understand each other?”
The line went dead. Nora sank onto the closed toilet lid, the phone clutched in her sweating palm. For an hour, she was torn between two impossible betrayals. Toby had ruined her life, drowned her in debt, and run away when the danger arrived. But he was still her brother. The boy who had stolen extra cafeteria rolls so she could eat when their mother worked double shifts.
Yet, as she thought of Dante—of the way he had fired a stylist for insulting her, of the way he had shielded her body from a sniper’s bullet, of the raw vulnerability he had shown her in the safe house—she realized something profound. Silas Thorne believed she would hide the threat out of shame. He believed her love for Dante was conditional, a fragile thing that would break under the weight of her messy, impoverished past.
Silas Thorne didn’t know Nora Vance. She had been poor, she had been mocked, but she refused to be a coward.
At eleven o’clock, Nora walked down the plush hallway to Dante’s study. The room smelled of his cologne and old paper. She swung the heavy painting aside, revealing the digital safe. Her finger hovered over the keypad. She knew the code. Dante had given it to her days ago, a silent gesture of trust. She could open it, take the ledger, and trade her husband’s empire for her brother’s life.
She closed her eyes, picturing Dante’s face. Not angry. Just profoundly, quietly heartbroken.
Nora pulled her hand back. She swung the painting shut, locked the study door, and walked straight to the underground war room.