Chapter 2 - The Man Beneath the Floor
Wren showed Luca the message without speaking.
His face changed instantly.
Whatever weakness the blood loss had carved into him disappeared beneath something colder. He held out his hand for her phone. Wren hesitated, then passed it over.
Luca read the message twice.
“Do you recognize the number?” she mouthed.
“No.”
He typed nothing back.
Instead, he looked around her ruined shop—the broken glass, smashed lilies, muddy footprints, streaks of red along the counter.
“We leave.”
“You can barely sit up.”
“They know you lied.”
“They don’t know where you hid.”
“They know enough.”
Wren folded her arms. “This is my home.”
“Above the shop?”
She nodded.
“That means they know where you sleep.”
The sentence landed harder than the threat on her screen.
Wren had lived above Ashford Flowers for six years, ever since her grandfather died and left her the building with a mortgage, a stubborn furnace, and a handwritten note reminding her that flowers survived more winters than people expected. She had fought to keep the place through rent spikes, construction dust, and customers who assumed a deaf florist could not understand wedding music themes.
Leaving felt like surrender.
Luca must have seen the answer forming on her face.
“This isn’t bravery,” he mouthed. “Staying here tonight is gambling with information you don’t have.”
“You’re giving orders in my shop?”
“Yes.”
She stared at him.
He managed to stand by gripping the worktable. “You saved my life. I’d prefer not to watch you lose yours because you’re stubborn.”
Wren signed one sharp word he did not understand.
His eyebrows lifted.
“It means no.”
“I guessed.”
Despite herself, Wren almost laughed.
Then the front lights flickered.
Both of them turned.
Wren felt a faint vibration through the floor from the alley stairs.
Someone was coming.
Luca reached beneath his coat and drew a compact pistol. His movements were slow but practiced.
Wren’s heart pounded.
The back door opened.
A broad man with a beard and rain-dark suit stepped inside.
Luca raised the weapon.
The stranger lifted both hands.
“Marco,” Luca mouthed.
The tension in Luca’s shoulders eased.
Marco Bellini, it turned out, was Luca’s chief of security and oldest friend. He had been searching three neighborhoods after Luca’s convoy was ambushed near the waterfront. Three drivers were dead. Two security men were missing. Luca had escaped on foot after his vehicle was forced into a delivery truck.
Marco looked at Wren’s arm.
Then at Luca’s crude stitches.
Then back at Wren.
His lips formed a sentence too quickly.
Wren frowned.
Luca caught the misunderstanding and said, “Slow down. She reads lips.”
Marco repeated himself carefully.
“You did this?”
Wren nodded.
Marco examined the floral wire visible beneath the bandage on Luca’s side and seemed caught between horror and admiration.
“You need a doctor.”
“I know,” Luca said. “One we own.”
Wren disliked the word.
Luca noticed.
“One we trust,” he corrected.
Marco’s gaze moved to the smashed shop. “We need to move now.”
Wren went upstairs long enough to pack two shirts, jeans, toiletries, her laptop, spare hearing-aid batteries she rarely used, and the framed photograph of her grandfather standing beneath the original Ashford Flowers sign. She also took the old building plans from the drawer.
When she came down, Luca was arguing silently with Marco.
She caught only pieces.
Safehouse.
Traitor.
Inside.
Route.
Luca saw her and stopped.
“What?”
Wren pointed between them. “Someone inside your group knew where you would be.”
Marco’s expression sharpened.
Luca’s mouth tightened. “Yes.”
“Ten men don’t corner a man like you by accident.”
“No.”
“Who knew your route?”
Luca looked at Marco.
Marco answered slowly enough for Wren to follow.
“Seven people.”
“That’s too many.”
Luca gave her a strange look. “You think like security.”
“I think like a woman who runs a cash business alone on a city street.”
Marco almost smiled.
They left through a basement passage that opened into the rear of the neighboring bakery. Wren had not used it since childhood. The owner, Mrs. Bell, was away visiting her daughter, which meant no one saw them emerge.
A black SUV waited in a garage two blocks away.
Luca refused the hospital. Instead, Marco took them to a townhouse in Beacon Hill owned through a company that Wren suspected had no obvious connection to the Moretti name.
A doctor arrived twenty minutes later.
Dr. Elena Park was small, direct, and unimpressed by Luca’s reputation. She cut away Wren’s improvised stitches while shaking her head.
“These are floral supplies?”
Wren nodded.
“You kept him alive.”
Wren exhaled.
Luca watched her from the bed.
Dr. Park cleaned the wound properly, removed a bullet fragment, started antibiotics, and announced that Luca had been lucky in several medically offensive ways.
“You need forty-eight hours of actual rest.”
“I need twelve.”
“You need forty-eight if you want your organs to remain inside you.”
Luca looked toward Wren as if seeking support.
She signed, “Listen to doctor.”
He did not understand the signs, but the expression translated well enough.
Marco left to coordinate security. Dr. Park slept in the next room.
For the first time since the attack, Wren and Luca were alone.
He sat propped against pillows, pale but alert.
“You cut yourself for me,” he said.
Wren looked down at the bandage on her arm.
“I needed a trail.”
“Most people use ketchup.”
“Most people don’t keep ketchup behind a florist counter.”
His smile came slowly.
It changed his face.
Without the blood and fury, Luca looked younger than she expected. Maybe thirty-four. Maybe thirty-five. There was exhaustion beneath his eyes and a small scar along his jaw she had not noticed before.
“Why did you help me?” he asked.
Wren considered lying.
Instead, she sat in the chair opposite him.
“When I was fourteen, my grandfather collapsed in the subway. People stepped around him because they assumed he was drunk. One woman stopped. She called for help. He lived another eleven years.”
Luca’s expression softened.
“I promised myself I would never become someone who steps around people.”
He looked at her for a long time.
“That promise nearly got you killed.”
“Still a good promise.”
His gaze shifted to the rain at the window.
“My father had promises too.”
“Did he keep them?”
“No.”
Something in the way Luca answered closed the conversation.
Wren stood.
Luca caught her wrist gently—not restraining, only asking her to wait.
“Wren.”
She looked down at him.
“I need you to understand something. The men who came after me are not random soldiers. Someone knew exactly when I would be alone enough to hit. Someone gave them my route.”
“So?”
“So until I know who, anyone near me is in danger.”
Wren pulled her hand free.
“Then stop being near me.”
The corner of his mouth moved.
“Smart.”
“I have moments.”
Her phone buzzed again.
This time the message contained a photograph.
Wren standing outside her shop three days earlier, locking the front door.
Under it, one sentence.
WE KNOW WHO YOU ARE.
Luca read it over her shoulder.
Whatever fragile warmth had existed between them vanished.
He reached for his own phone.
“Marco,” he said when the call connected. “Change everything. She’s not a witness anymore.”
Wren’s stomach sank.
May you like
Luca looked directly at her.
“She’s a target.”
