His calm terrified me more than their threats.
That night, I curled into a corner of the safehouse bunker. Sal’s men posted outside like sentinels. The hard drive was locked in a steel case, guarded by a man who had once burned a cartel alive for touching his sister.
Reagan put a bounty on my head the next morning. Five million.
Posters. Hacked databases. Underworld whispers.
The name “Danica De Santis” became cursed.
The traitor wife. The stolen drive. The ticking bomb. Operatives of Titanis were raided across the country. Reagan was dismantling my father’s legacy with surgical precision.
But he didn’t know I wasn’t just surviving.
I was evolving.
Salvatore got me into a blacksite bunker in the Rockies. No names. No signals. No trackers.
Just ex-spies, elite mercs, a war table, and enough firepower to rewrite the narrative.
We started building my fake death.
Creating a ghost story.
Letting the world believe I was gone.
But I wasn’t gone. I was hunting.
And when I came back?
It wouldn’t be as Reagan’s wife.
It would be as his end.
Faking your death is an art. Not just smoke and mirrors. It’s blood. Fire. Teeth. The explosion rocked the safehouse at dawn. The flames devoured the walls, the air itself twisted from the heat.
Salvatore had everything ready. The dental remains, perfectly matching mine.
My blood, drawn weeks ago, splattered like a sacrifice.
Even the ring—my mother’s—left at the scene like a symbol. I watched from a nearby cliff, far from the chaos. The flames reflected in my eyes, but there were no tears.
I didn’t mourn the woman they thought I was.
She died the day Reagan decided I was disposable.
We paid one of his trusted men to “confirm” the body. Loyal enough to be believed. Corrupt enough to be bought. He called it in.
Voice trembling, like a man haunted.
“She’s dead. There’s nothing left but ash.”
The bounty lifted.
The manhunt ceased.
Danica De Santis was a memory now. A ghost.
***
The jet was sleek. Silent. Fast.
Salvatore sat across from me, dressed like a god of war wrapped in custom Italian silk.
No longer the broken-hearted boy I once left behind.
Now, a shadow king feared by all—Mr. X.
But right now?
He was just the man flying me far from hell.
“Facility in Mexico is locked down. Private doctors. Guards. No one gets in or out unless I say so.”
He didn’t need to say it. I trusted him.