2

Alessio Water. It was everywhere, filling my mouth, my nose, my throat. I gagged violently, my body twitching as I heaved myself onto my hands and knees. Rough, wet sand dug into my palms. I coughed until my ribs ached, spewing up mouthfuls of bitter, salty seawater onto the shore. "Enzo..." I tried to call out, but my voice came out as a raw, broken rasp. For a terrifying moment, the memory of the boat flooded back. The deafening gunshots. The cold look in Gianna Moretti’s eyes. The burning, tearing pain in my chest as the bullets slammed into me. I remembered falling backward into the pitch-black ocean, sinking into an endless freezing void while my life bled out of me. I gasped and brought a trembling hand up to my chest. My white shirt was shredded, caked with wet sand and dark red blood. The bullet hole was right there, right over my ribs. But when I pressed against it, expecting the agony that should have killed me, there was only a dull, throbbing ache. The bleeding had stopped. The wound felt... closed. Not healed, but sealed off, like someone had glued the torn flesh together beneath the skin. How? I thought, my heart hammering against my ribs. How am I alive? I shoved the terror aside and forced myself to look around. I was on a narrow, deserted strip of dark sand framed by towering black cliffs. The ocean crashed against the shore just a few feet away, white foam churning in the moonlight. "Enzo!" I yelled louder this time, scrambling to my feet. My legs were shaky, like jelly, but I pushed forward. "Enzo!" Then I saw him. He was lying flat on his back about fifteen feet away, right at the water’s edge. Waves were washing over his boots, tugging at his ruined suit. He was completely still. "No, no, no! Enzo!" Panicking, I ran over and dropped to my knees beside him. I grabbed his shoulders and rolled him onto his side. He didn't move. His skin was deathly pale, blue around the lips, and his clothes were soaked through with ocean water and blood. I put two fingers against his neck, my hands shaking so badly I could barely feel my own pulse, let alone his. "Come on, Enzo. Don't do this to me. Wake up!" I slammed my hands onto his chest, pumping hard, trying to remember the CPR training I had always scoffed at back home. "Wake up, damn it!" I pressed my ear to his mouth. Nothing. Desperation clawed at my throat. Tears blurred my vision, mixing with the saltwater on my face. "You told me to keep my eyes on you! You can't die now, you bastard! Wake up!" I hit his chest again, harder this time. Enzo suddenly jerked violently. He gasped, a long, ragged sound, and threw up a lungful of seawater. He rolled over onto his elbows, coughing desperately, his body shaking with massive shivers. I let out a breathless sob, collapsing back onto the sand. "Thank God... God, Enzo..." Enzo stayed on his knees for a long minute, his head hanging low, water dripping from his dark hair into the sand. Slowly, painfully, he lifted his head. His dark brown eyes were unfocused, but as he looked at me, recognition slowly flickered back. "Alessio?" he croaked, his voice deep and raspy. "Yeah. Yeah, it's me," I said, reaching out to grab his arm. "I'm right here." Enzo looked down at his own torso. His jacket was shredded from multiple bullet entry points. He reached under his shirt, touching the torn, scarred skin where the lead had torn through him just an hour ago. Just like mine, his wounds were closed. No active bleeding. No fatal damage. "What..." Enzo whispered, looking around at the dark, empty beach, then back at his blood-stained hands. "What happened? The Morettis... they shot us. They threw us into the ocean." "I know," I said, my mind racing. "I remember falling into the water. I remember sinking. But... look at us. We should be dead, Enzo. We were five miles out in the middle of the Atlantic. How did we get to a beach?" "I don't know," Enzo said, trying to stand up. He stumbled, and I quickly grabbed his arm to steady him. He leaned heavily on me, his brows furrowed in confusion and deep pain. "I remember sinking. It was cold. So cold. And then..." He stopped, a strange look crossing his face. "I thought I saw someone." "Someone?" I asked. "Like a boat?" "No," Enzo muttered, shaking his head to clear it. "Not a boat." "You two talk a lot for men who almost drowned." The voice came from behind us. I whipped around instantly, moving by pure instinct. My hand went straight to my belt for my gun, but my holster was empty—lost somewhere in the depths of the ocean. I stepped in front of Enzo, putting myself between him and the voice. Sitting on a large, flat rock just ten feet away, watching us with quiet curiosity, was a young woman. She looked completely out of place on a dark, desolate beach in the middle of the night. She looked to be in her early twenties, with long, striking dark hair that cascaded past her shoulders, wet and clinging to her skin. Her clothes were strange—a loose, ragged piece of pale cloth draped around her frame that looked less like modern clothing and more like a ruined piece of fabric washed up from an old shipwreck. She had no shoes. She had no purse, no phone, no jacket, no identification. But what stopped me in my tracks were her eyes. Even in the pale, dim moonlight, they burned with an intense, luminous shade of blue—like the shallow tropical ocean illuminated by the sun. "Who the hell are you?" I demanded, keeping my posture aggressive despite my trembling legs. "Are you with the Morettis?" The woman tilted her head, her bright eyes tracking my movement. She didn't look afraid of my yelling. In fact, she looked confused by it. "Morettis?" she repeated. The word sounded foreign on her tongue, pronounced slowly, like she was trying to figure out how her lips were supposed to shape it. Enzo pushed my shoulder gently, stepping out from behind me. He was still weak, but his commander instinct was kicking in. He looked at her calmly, analyzing every detail of her appearance. "I am Enzo Romano," my brother said, his voice quiet but steady. "This is my brother, Alessio. Who are you?" The woman stared at Enzo for a long moment, her blue eyes scanning his face, his shoulder, and the torn cloth over his chest. A subtle shift passed over her features—almost like relief. "Nerissa," she said softly. "Nerissa," Enzo repeated. "Is that your name?" She nodded once. "Yes." "What are you doing here, Nerissa?" I asked, stepping forward, my suspicion rising with every second. "This is a private coastal strip. Did you pull us out of the water?" "Yes," Nerissa said simply. I let out a harsh, disbelieving laugh. "Right. You expect us to believe that? Look at him! Enzo is six-foot-two and weighs two hundred pounds in wet clothes. I'm not much smaller. You're telling me a girl who looks like she weighs a hundred pounds soaking wet dragged two grown, bleeding men out of a midnight tide and dragged us onto a beach?" Nerissa looked down at her small, pale hands, then back at me. She didn't offer an explanation. She just sat there, silent, watching the waves roll in. "Where is your phone?" I pressed, stepping closer to her rock. "Your car? Did someone drop you off here?" Nerissa blinked at me. "Phone? Car?" She said the words as if I were speaking a foreign language. She picked up a handful of wet sand, letting it sift slowly through her fingers, completely unbothered by my hostile tone. "Don't play dumb with us," I snapped, frustration bubbling over. I had just been shot, betrayed by my own family's inner circle, and thrown into the sea to die. I wasn't in the mood for riddles. "Nobody walks around a freezing beach at two in the morning in a bedsheet with no shoes and doesn't know what a phone is! Who sent you? Are you a distraction?" Enzo raised a hand, stopping me. "Alessio, back off." "Enzo, she's lying! It’s impossible!" "I know it's impossible," Enzo said quietly, his eyes never leaving Nerissa. "But look at her, Alessio. She’s soaking wet, she has no weapons, and she isn't acting like a Moretti assassin. If she wanted us dead, she could have just let us drown." Enzo took two slow steps toward the rock. Nerissa didn't pull away. She watched him move with a strange, intense focus, her gaze repeatedly dropping to his chest, where his bullet wounds had stopped bleeding. "Thank you," Enzo said softly. "For pulling us out." Nerissa looked into his eyes, and for a fleeting second, a faint, tiny smile touched her lips. "You were sinking," she murmured. "The dark water was taking you." I rubbed the back of my neck, my mind spinning. None of this made sense. Nothing about tonight made sense. We should be dead. Our bodies should be at the bottom of the ocean floor feeding the fish. Yet here we were, breathing, standing on dry land, talking to a strange girl who didn't even know what a car was. As I watched her, I noticed something else. Nerissa wasn't really looking at us anymore. Every few seconds, her head would twitch toward the ocean. She kept glancing at the dark, crashing waves with an expression that looked suspiciously like anxiety. She was fidgeting, her toes curling into the wet sand, her ears straining toward the sound of the water. She wasn't waiting for us to thank her. She was waiting for someone else. "Enzo," I whispered, leaning closer to my brother. "We need to get off this beach. Right now. If Gianna's men double-check the water or if Marco betrayed our location to another crew, we're sitting ducks out here in the open." "He's right," Enzo said, turning to look up at the towering black cliffs surrounding the cove. "We need to find a road, get to a safehouse, and figure out who in the family ordered the hit." Enzo turned back to Nerissa. "Can you walk? We can't stay here. We have to move." Nerissa didn't answer. She suddenly stood up on top of the rock, her posture rigid, her head snapping toward the dark ocean horizon. The calm, curious expression on her face vanished, replaced by stark, sudden dread. The wind shifted, blowing a cold sea spray across the beach. In the distance, past the breaking waves, a faint red light flickered on the water. Then another. The low, muffled thrum of a high-powered boat engine began to echo off the stone walls of the cliff. My blood turned to ice. "They're back," I breathed, terror gripping my chest. "They came back to look for our bodies." Nerissa slowly turned her head to look at Enzo and me, her bright blue eyes wide with warning. "The men who tried to kill you," she said, her voice dropping to a sharp whisper. "They are coming."