Kill Order Kiss Novel Chapter 08

Kill Order Kiss Novel Chapter 08

Winter in London was brutal, but I barely noticed. My research was gaining traction-Professor Ashworth submitted my paper on cryptocurrency laundering patterns to a top-tier journal, and within weeks, it was accepted for publication.

“First-year fellow, first-author publication,” Ashworth said, the closest thing to a compliment he’d ever given. “Don’t let it go to your head.”

Yuki and Oliver threw me a small celebration at a pub near campus. Oliver brought champagne; Yuki brought a cake shaped like a spreadsheet. I laughed until my sides hurt, surrounded by people who knew me only as a scholar, not as a mobster’s ex-girlfriend.

It was the happiest I’d been in over a year.

That night, walking home through the frost-bitten streets, I found a man leaning against the wall outside my

building.

My body reacted before my mind-heart rate spiking, muscles tensing, hand reaching for the pepper spray in my coat pocket. Then the figure stepped into the streetlight, and I saw his face.

Not Dante.

Marco Vitelli.

He looked different from the last time I’d seen him-thinner, harder, with a new scar cutting through his left eyebrow. He raised both hands, palms out, the universal gesture of I come in peace.

“Before you spray me,” he said, “I’m not here on Moretti business.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because Rome asked me to check on you, and because I owe you an apology.”

I didn’t lower the pepper spray. “You were assigned to kill me, Marco. An apology doesn’t quite cover it.”

He flinched. Actually flinched-this man who I’d seen break a man’s fingers over a poker debt without

blinking.

“I was never going to do it,” he said. “I told Dante the day he gave me the order that I wouldn’t. That’s why he wrote the contingency-hiring an outside contractor. But that was a bluff too. The whole thing was theater for

Castellano.”

“So everyone keeps telling me. Funny how the only person who wasn’t in on the performance was the one whose life was at stake.”

He had no answer for that

“What do you actually want, Marco?”

He reached into his coat-slowly, deliberately-and pulled out a manila envelope. “This is everything I have on the Castellano merger. Financial records, communication logs, the real terms of the deal Dante doesn’t know ! copied these.”

“Why are you giving this to me?”

His jaw tightened. “Because the merger is rotten. Castellano is using Dante. The marriage to Bianca is a leash, not a partnership. And the things they’re planning-” He stopped himself. “You’re a forensic accountant/ You’ll see it in the numbers.”

I took the envelope but didn’t open it. “This doesn’t make us even.”

“I know.” He stepped back. “Take care of yourself, Valentina. You deserved better than all of us.”

He disappeared into the London fog like he’d never been there at all.

I went inside, locked every door, and spread the documents across my kitchen table.

By 3 AM, I understood exactly what Marco had given me.

Not just evidence. A weapon.