Chapter 2 - The Anatomy of a ThreatThe ten minutes of forced isolation stretched out like a wire pulled to its absolute breaking point.
Adrian didn't open his files again. He simply rested his elbows on the mahogany table, steepled his long fingers, and watched her. It was an unsettling, suffocating kind of attention—the kind a predator gives an animal before it decides whether to hunt or play.
"You're shaking," he noted quietly, his dark eyes dropping to her hands, where her pen was poised over the blank white paper.
"I am not shaking," Lucia lied, her grip tightening on the pen until her knuckles turned white.
"Your left hand is trembling," Adrian corrected smoothly. "Why? Because you're in a room with me without a glass partition? Or because you think I’m going to make your life difficult?"
"I don't think about you at all when I'm not working, Mr. Costa," she fired back, lifting her chin.
"A lie," he said, smiling faintly. "A very proper, very rehearsed federal lie. But a lie nonetheless. You dreamed about me last night, didn't you? Or at least, you dreamed about what you should have said back in the hallway when I caught you running away."
Lucia’s face flushed hot, infuriated by how easily he read her. She had thought about him. She had spent half the night staring at her ceiling, replaying the way her name sounded on his tongue—smooth, deliberate, and entirely too intimate.
Before she could invent a sufficiently scathing retort, the heavy steel door swung open, and Adrian’s lead defense attorney, a sharp-eyed bulldog named Marcus Vance, bustled into the room followed by two junior associates carrying bulging briefcases.
"Mr. Costa, apologies for the delay, traffic on the FDR was—" Vance stopped short as he noticed the tension radiating between his client and the young interpreter. A flicker of anxiety crossed the lawyer's eyes. "Ah. Miss Romano. Good morning. I trust everything is... satisfactory?"
"It is entirely professional, Mr. Vance," Lucia said, her voice dropping back into its clinical, emotionless register. "Shall we begin the deposition review?"
For the next two hours, the room transformed into a battleground of semantics, syntax, and legal strategy. Vance and his associates were preparing Adrian for the upcoming cross-examination by the federal prosecutor, a relentless career litigator named David Sterling who had built his entire reputation on putting men like Costa behind bars.
As the attorneys debated wiretap transcripts and shell company loopholes, Lucia’s fingers flew across her notepad, translating complex financial jargon into precise Italian legal equivalents, then back into English for the record. She was brilliant at it. Her mind operated like a high-speed processor, stripping away emotion and leaving only pure, unadulterated meaning.
Yet, underneath the professional rhythm of the room, a secondary, silent conversation was happening entirely between her and Adrian.
Whenever Vance used a complex legal term—beneficial ownership, constructive trust, material omission—Adrian would look directly at Lucia, waiting for her translation. But instead of just nodding to show she understood, he would occasionally tilt his head, murmuring a phrase in low, guttural Sicilian under his breath.
“Nun c’è peggio sordi di chiddi ca nun si ponnu cuntari,” Adrian muttered during a brief pause while Vance was searching through a document.
There is no money worse than the kind you cannot count.
Lucia’s pen stopped dead against the page. She looked up, her eyes locking onto his. Without thinking, without the protection of her microphone or her booth, she muttered her reply in the same dialect, her voice barely a breath.
“Ma chiddi ca si cuntanu cu u sangu finìsciunu sempri pi brusciari.”
(But the kind counted in blood always ends up burning.)
Adrian’s breath caught. For a single, startling second, the mask of cold, untouchable authority slipped entirely away, replaced by raw, burning shock. Then, slowly, a grin spread across his face—a genuine, dangerous smile that made her heart skip a beat.
"What was that?" Vance asked, looking up from his papers, blinking in confusion. "Miss Romano? Did you say something?"
"Nothing, counselor," Lucia said instantly, her professional armor snapping back into place as she lowered her head and resumed her notes. "Just noting a translation discrepancy in paragraph four."
May you like
Vance grunted and went back to his reading. But across the table, Adrian Costa leaned in close, his voice a low, gravelly whisper meant for her ears alone.
"Careful, princess," he murmured, his eyes dark and burning with a terrifying intensity. "You keep playing with fire like that, and you're going to burn down the whole damn courtroom."
