I didn't exactly choose to be stolen at four years old.
But the French underworld isn't big on consent.
One minute I was Donatella Acardi, Mafia royalty. The next? Just another stolen kid bleeding in someone else's basement.
That's where I met Ami...
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Donatella POV:
I cracked open the bedroom door and peeked down the hallway like a criminal in my own house.
Quiet. Too quiet.
Everyone was either sleeping, planning murders, or pretending they weren’t all tangled up in some family-level mafia dysfunction. Typical Wednesday.
I stepped back in, shut the door behind me, and pulled out my phone. No calls. No texts. Just the ghost of my sanity and a couple of waterlogged apps still glitching from the USB tsunami incident.
I opened my messages and typed fast:
Me:
> “Get your hacker ass up here. We’ve got a burner to steal.”
Three dots appeared. Then stopped. Then came back.
Amir:
> “Are you on drugs again or is this just regular chaos?”
Me:
> “Both. Get up here.”
Amir:
> “I swear to God, if this is another exploding USB—”
Me:
> “Less whining. More breaking and entering.”
I tossed the phone on my bed and started pacing, running through everything we had to do tonight.
Because of course we had to do it tonight.
The window was tight. Leonardo had been moving different files around, bringing in weird guests at weird hours. Security was tighter. Cameras had been adjusted. And for some godforsaken reason, Leonardo suddenly got paranoid about digital surveillance—which meant he started wiping and rotating burner laptops every 72 hours.
We had maybe six hours until the next one showed up and the one we needed disappeared forever.
And I knew—I knew—I should’ve grabbed it last time we broke into his office. My gut was screaming like a fire alarm. But no, we were too focused on the damn USB. The cursed, exploding, traumatizing USB that nearly fried our hair off.
So now? Round two.
Except this time, we weren’t taking any risks.
This time, we had to shut everything down. Cameras. Microphones. Laser grid. Retinal scanner. That terrifying motion-sensor painting that tracks you with Leonardo’s eyeballs no matter where you walk in the room.
The works.
And that would take hours.
Which meant I needed the one person in this entire blood-soaked castle who understood how to disarm a biometric firewall while watching anime reruns.
