Chapter 2 Isabella Cole

ALESSIA VALENTI

Nineteen years.

People like to say time heals everything, but they’re liars. Time doesn’t heal a damn thing—it just sharpens the edges until the pain feels like purpose.

I was four years old the night I watched a monster put a bullet in each of my parents’ heads right in the middle of our living room. The memory never dulled. If anything, it grew clearer with every passing year: the sharp bite of cigarette smoke in the air, the sticky warmth of blood soaking into the cracked wooden floorboards, the jagged scar running down the shooter’s cheek like a second smile. And the boy—fourteen at most, with frightened green eyes—who stood frozen beside him and said nothing at all.

Some memories fade. Mine only hardened.

Every birthday after that became another quiet funeral. Another reminder that the people who should have been singing to me were rotting in the ground.

The state shoved me into Saint Mary’s Children’s Home a week later. Counselors called it trauma. Doctors diagnosed survivor’s guilt. They were all wrong. What kept me awake at night wasn’t guilt. It was the slow-burning certainty that I was meant to do something about it.

While the other kids dreamed of becoming doctors or rock stars or astronauts, I dreamed of revenge.

The orphanage gave me food, shelter, and an education—more than some kids ever got—but it never gave me a family. Not until Noah showed up.

He was eleven, all scraped knees and reckless confidence, with a grin that promised trouble was never far behind. The first time he saw me sitting alone in the corner of the rec room, he tilted his head and said, “You look like you bite people.”

“I do.”

He laughed like I’d told the best joke in the world. “We’re gonna be friends.”

“I don’t want friends.”

“Good thing I wasn’t asking.”

Somehow, he stayed. He forced his way into my life the way sunlight wedges through closed blinds—loud, persistent, impossible to ignore. By the time we were teenagers, Noah had taught me everything the adults wouldn’t: how to scale a fence without leaving fingerprints, how to slip past cheap security systems, how to coax open a locked door with nothing but patience and a hairpin.

“One day you’re gonna put me out of business,” he’d tease.

“You don’t even have a business.”

“Exactly.”

I smiled more around him than I ever did with anyone else. Not because life suddenly got easier, but because he made the weight of it feel bearable.

Life after the orphanage was just the two of us. No parents, no guardians, no system watching over our shoulders. Two broken kids with strange ambitions. He wanted the structure of the military. I wanted power. And the military felt like the perfect forge to turn myself into something lethal.

“Less,” Noah had said the day we picked up the enlistment forms, leaning against the rickety table in our cramped apartment, “you should be a lawyer or some high-powered CEO.”

I’d flicked the paperwork at his face. “Shut up. We’re doing this together.”

And we did.

The years that followed were brutal—sweat-soaked, disciplined, unforgiving. I never looked like the kind of woman people expected to survive military training. Noah loved reminding me of that, right up until the moment someone underestimated me and paid for it. Beneath all the teasing, he always had my back.

Now, at twenty-three, I stood in the apartment I shared with Emma—Noah’s ex who had somehow become one of my closest friends. She’d grown up in the same orphanage, though her father was still alive somewhere. I folded another sweater into my duffel bag, each item feeling heavier than the last. This wasn’t just a move. It was the beginning of everything I’d planned for nineteen years.

A soft knock sounded on the door. Emma leaned against the frame, watching me.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said quietly as I zipped the bag shut.

“I’ve told her that a hundred times,” Noah added, stepping out of the hallway in a white tank top, his dark hair still messy from sleep.

I raised an eyebrow. Of course he’d spent the night. Again. For the last time, I reminded myself.

I rolled my eyes. “Come on, guys. It’s not like I’m moving to another planet.”

“New York might as well be,” Emma said. “That city has its own gravity.”

The truth sat between us, heavy and unspoken. I needed a new identity. A new life. A new self.

Isabella Cole.

A quiet, unassuming receptionist who noticed nothing, remembered nothing, and blended into the background like wallpaper.

Months of careful, quiet digging had finally led me to him: Damian De Luca. Only son of Vittorio De Luca. The family that had destroyed my family. The green-eyed boy from that night had grown into the heir of an empire I intended to burn down.

My plan was simple in theory, brutal in execution: get close to Damian. Become whatever he needed me to be. Gain access. Then quietly dismantle everything—father and son both—while I hunted down the other two men whose faces were still burned into my memory.

Noah crossed his arms, his usual playful energy gone. “I’m not talking about the move. New York’s only a couple hours away. I’m asking if you’re really sure about this.”

He stepped closer, voice dropping. “The De Lucas aren’t just rich, Less. They’re ruthless.”

I tightened my grip on the strap of my bag. “I should be the one reminding you. I was there. I saw what they did to my parents.”

My voice stayed mostly steady, but after nineteen years the pain still slipped through the cracks.

“I’m not going to war,” I said. “I just want a fresh start. A new persona. That’s all.”

Noah snorted. “A receptionist who looks like she couldn’t tell a pistol from a stapler. You’ve sold that line a hundred times.”

He moved even closer, lowering his voice. “I’m begging you—with the last slice of cold pizza in the fridge—observe first. Don’t rush into anything dangerous.”

A small smile tugged at my lips. “Yeah… maybe.”

We all knew “maybe” meant nothing when it came from me.

“I think Emma should come with you for the first few weeks,” Noah continued. “It makes your story more believable. Less suspicious.”

Noah’s expression softened into something scared and genuine. “You’re the only family I’ve got, Less.”

“And you’re the only family I have,” I whispered back.

Emma clapped her hands together. “Alright, enough of the emotional stuff before I start crying. Let’s hit the road.”

I waited while they gathered their things, my mind already racing ahead to the new life waiting in Manhattan. We piled into Noah’s car, the three of us squeezed together, my new identity tucked neatly into my bag like a loaded weapon.

As the Manhattan skyline rose in the distance, something cold and electric settled in my chest.

Get ready for me, De Lucas.

I’m coming.