Dante stood in a dimly lit room filled with cigar smoke beneath the city. It was a world away from the glitzy galas and sterile boardrooms he usually frequented. This was the darker side of his empire, the foundation of shadows on which his legitimate life was built. He had just finished negotiating a truce between two rival cartel factions. His mere presence forced the grizzled leaders into a reluctant handshake. It was business, unsavory but necessary. The "emergency at the port" provided the perfect excuse to slip away from the gala.
His phone buzzed. It was Leo, a single buzz signaling a non-urgent status update. Dante ignored it, dismissing the cartel leaders with a final nod. As they left, their fear palpable in the air, he finally looked at his phone.
One missed call from Leo, followed by three more in quick succession.
A cold dread gripped him, an emotion he hadn't felt since he was ten years old, hiding in a closet. He hit dial. Leo answered on the first ring.
"Sir." Leo's voice strained, tight, and almost unrecognizable. "They're gone."
Dante's world shrank to the sound of his own blood pounding in his ears. "Explain," he commanded, maintaining a deadly calm.
"Julian's tracker went offline seven minutes ago. They found the car abandoned in an underpass three blocks from the gala. The windows were smashed. No signs of them. No driver. We've lost them, sir."
The silence that followed was absolute. The hardened guards in the room instinctively stepped back. The temperature dropped. The charming CEO and the calculating underground lord had vanished, leaving behind something primal. A predator whose purpose had just been taken from him.
"Valerius," Dante breathed, the name a curse. The gala was a distraction, a masterfully executed trap. He had walked right into it, leading his two most precious people to danger.
His rage was not explosive; it was a silent vortex. He didn't shout or break things. He focused, pure and lethal.
"Leo," he said, his voice low and more menacing than a shout. "Lock down the city. Every port, every private airfield, every train station. Nothing moves without my authorization. Get every second of traffic cam footage from a ten-block radius around the gala. I want every vehicle identified."
He moved towards the exit, his guards scrambling to keep up.
"Pull every file we have on Julian. His financial records, his family, his associates. I want to know who he had coffee with this morning. Also, get a city-wide check on all active burner phones. We're looking for new signals that activated in the last hour."
He entered the back of his armored SUV, which served as a mobile command center. Screens lit up, displaying city maps crisscrossed with data.
"Sir," Leo's voice came through the speaker. "There's no indication of a ransom demand."
"He doesn't want my money," Dante growled, gripping the console. "He wants to break me. He wants me to feel what my father felt."
Guilt weighed on his chest, crushing him. He had placed Isabella in this cage to protect her, but in doing so, had marked her as a target. Her fierce spirit, sharp mind, and captivating presence—he had brought this darkness upon her. He had saved her from Valerius's corporate attacks only to deliver her into his hands. Each passing second that she was missing compounded the debt he owed her, a weight that threatened to shatter his soul.
For an hour, he faced dead ends and false leads. The digital traces of a carefully planned abduction. Dante's grip on control slipped, his cold rage threatening to boil over.
Then, a breakthrough.
"Sir, I've got something," a tech analyst's voice crackled. "It's faint. A single, encrypted packet, sent on a loop. From one of our secure-line phones. It's not a standard transmission. It's a low-frequency emergency ping. Someone had to manually activate a deep-level diagnostic function to send it."
Isabella. It had to be her. Her tech-savvy mind found a back door in the very system he had used to imprison her. She was fighting back. She was giving him a lead.
"Where is it?" Dante demanded.
"It's coming from the old shipping yards, Pier Four. The signal is weak, sir. They must be underground, in one of the old smuggling holds."
Dante's expression hardened. He looked at Leo in the passenger seat. "Get the tactical gear," he said, his voice dropping to a near-whisper, filled with deadly intent. "I'm going in myself. We're burning that pier to the ground."