In the morning, I don't sleep in like I had planned to do because I wake up at around seven in the morning thinking about Dante and also thinking about what the worst thing that could happen if I tell him who I am.

The worst—he kills me. And that's really not so bad.

But if I tell him and he can accept that, then I think that we could be really amazing. He would know that I really do love him, even though I know all of the things that he's done. Because I know that he doesn't think that I'd love him if I knew who he really is.

I lay in the bed, naked beside Dante for a while just thinking about how I think he would take it if I did find the courage to tell him. I'm not sure if I would go through with it, I'd probably wimp out at the last minute anyway. I'd tell him in person because anything else is weak and if I'm really going to do this, I can't be weak. I'm going to throw this entire mission into flames if I do this. My father will kill me if Dante doesn't do it first.

I don't know how long I'm lying awake in the silence of the morning before there's a loud pounding on Dante's bedroom door. Immediately, I close my eyes again and pretend to be asleep because if it is his father, I don't want to deal with him. Especially considering that I'm naked.

I'm lying on my stomach with my bare back uncovered but the sheet covers me up from the dip of my back and below. I hear the door open and I feel the bed moving as Dante starts to wake up to the loud sound of the knocking.

"What're you doing?" Dante tiredly mumbles to the person who has now barged into the room.

"We have a problem," It is Giovanni. I feel entirely too exposed now but I just keep my face in the pillows and my breaths long and deep to make it look like I'm still asleep. "Get up."

"What is it?" He asks. I can feel him moving around the bed, probably finding his pants or underwear to put on before he actually gets up.

"We'll talk at the office," His father says and then there's a long pause. "Is that the new IT girl?"

"I told you that I was seeing her," Dante reminds his father as he stands up from the bed. He still sounds really tired but he can apparently sense an urgency in his father's voice because he seems to be moving fairly quickly.

"I didn't make the connection," Giovanni admits.

"Yeah. Well we'll be at the office in half an hour," He says. I hear a door open so he either just went into his closet or his bathroom. I know that he's only a few steps away but I still feel gross being naked and alone in a room with Giovanni.

"You're not bringing her," His father says quickly. "This is private business. Unless you told your girlfriend about the side business?"

"No," Dante sighs, his voice very low but Giovanni isn't talking quietly at all, apparently not caring at all if I were to wake up and hear what they're saying.

"Well then, unless you want to use her has bait, I'd leave her here," He tells Dante and after that, it sounds like he leaves the room. I remain still just to be sure.

There's some quiet rustling around in the room for a few minutes until I feel the bed dip again and then there's a warm hand on my back.

"Elisa," Dante mutters my name quietly and then starts to lightly shake me.

I pretend to be slowly waking up as I slowly roll over to look at him. I pull the sheet up as I roll to cover my chest just in case Giovanni comes back. "Good morning," I greet him. He's already wearing a dress shirt and his tie is hanging untied around his neck. "I thought that we were sleeping in today."

"Change of plans," He looks apologetic. "I'm sorry, my dad needs me at the office early today."

"Really?"

"Yeah," He sighs, sounding very disappointed. "I'll make it up to you tonight?"

"Okay," He leans down and gives me a quick kiss to my lips. "Have a good day."

"I love you," He tells me as he stands back up and focuses on tying his tie. He won't look me in the eye to tell me that he loves me but I don't think that it's because he's lying, I think that it's because he doesn't know how.

I watch him carefully as he gets completely ready to go follow his father on whatever mission that's so important that it's pulling Dante away from our morning cuddling. He brushes his teeth, sprays just a tiny squirt of cologne, grabs a sports jacket from his closet, takes his briefcase, and he's heading toward the door.

"I love you too, bunny," I say just before he's gone.

In his house by myself, I know that I have the perfect opportunity to snoop but I pass it up. This house has to be incredibly secure so trying anything would probably be a huge mistake anyway. If I really am going to tell Dante who I am, I want it to actually come from me and not from the man who shoots me when he catches me going through Giovanni's home office or something.

I get dressed in the office clothes that I had brought with me yesterday which is just a comfortable gray dress and slim black heels. I go through my morning routine as quickly as possible so that I can get to the office. I want to know what this urgent mission was that Dante and Giovanni have taken on this morning.

I had driven here so I am able to just get in my car after passing all of the security guards and I drive away from the huge house and toward the casino to start my day of work which will mostly just include snooping.

As I'm driving though, my phone starts to ring so I answer it as I pull up to a red light. "Hello?"

"Hey," It's Dante. "So it looks like this is going to take all day, I don't think we'll be able to hang out tonight."

"Oh, that's alright. You can double make it up to me tomorrow," I say jokingly. "What's going on?"

"Nothing that you should worry about," He dismisses my question.

"Alright, if you say so," I easily let it go. "Um, tomorrow, there's something that I need to tell you."

"Can you tell me right now?"

"It's more of an in-person type of thing," I tell him. "It's just important that I at least see you tomorrow or I'll wimp out and not tell you at all."

"Okay. Dinner tomorrow. Definitely," He confirms. The red light doesn't last long and then I'm driving up to the casino. "I have to go, we're really swamped, I just wanted to let you know about tonight."

"Sure. I'll see you tomorrow."

We end the phone call and I grab my tote bag and head into the building. I'm a little bit late so Denise is already at her desk, greeting me with a caffeinated smile.

"So I've got another Tinder date tonight," She tells me without any prompting at all. "Just a tourist in town for the week so it'll be a nice fling. Nothing compared to what you have going on with Dante but I just felt like bragging a little bit."

"What do you think that I have with Dante?" I raise my eyebrows at her.

"Well a relationship for starters," She tells me with a little laugh. "That's more that I've had in a while."

"What happened to the guy that you were with on our double date?" I ask her as I try to figure out the best way to go about finding out what's going on with Dante today. I need to get alone with my laptop to see what's going on because as I closed up the security system, I gave just myself access so that I can still get into their system without them even knowing.

"He didn't appreciate you ditching his brother," She explains. "So it didn't go anywhere after that night."

"Oh. I'm sorry about that," I answer absentmindedly, getting some work done as fast as possible so that it looks like I've been working all day instead of eavesdropping on the Berardis.

"It's nothing, he smelled like beat juice anyway," She shrugs at me.

"Shit," I mutter out quickly, standing up from my desk. "I totally spaced. I have a meeting in five minutes. I'll catch you later."

I don't give her another breath to respond to me, to prolong this conversation about boys that I don't care about having, and I hurry away with my tote bag that holds my laptop. I find an empty room in this back corner that I lock myself in and use my laptop to log into their system. I get my Bluetooth set up on their system too so that I can hear what's going on among their radio system.

I see a file that has been opened a lot today and so I open that. There is silence on the radio right now.

When I open the file though, I kind of wish that I hadn't. I actually just wish that instead of driving to work today, I just drove over a cliff instead. What I'm looking at on my screen is a GPS tracking page, a black and green grid map view from above the lake house. There's a bright green dot down the street from the house, right where I had parked on our mission to the lake house.

They put a tracker on my car.

Luckily, it's not the car that I'm using as Elisa. When I got my Elisa identity, I had to buy a crappy used car from a crummy dealership just to look authentic but my real car is the one that I used to drive Coleman and I to the lake house two days ago and now, they know about it. They know that I was at the lake house.

When I'm working, I make sure to always check my car for trackers or bugs or anything like that but since I haven't been home very often at all, I just didn't think about it before driving it to the lake. I'm sure regretting that now, they must have bugged it while I've been here.

The tracker is titled with "Vera Markov" so they know that it was my car. Does that mean that Giovanni took Dante so that they could go looking for me? Demanding me to answer for why I was out there or how I even found out about it.

As I'm staring at the map in awe, somebody comes over the radio and it makes me jump a little bit. "How did they even find out about the lake house?" It's Giovanni.

"She must have followed us out there," It's Dante in my ear now. "Or maybe we're being tracked too. That fucking bitch, what do you think she took? There's nothing there that would interest her or anybody from Pantera."

I want to hear him say my name. I know that it's a ridiculous thought right now but I can't help but thinking it. Just say it. Say my name. 'That fucking bitch' doesn't count but I do appreciate the kind words.

"I'm sure she found something," Giovanni mumbles irritably. "Where are we on finding her?"

"The same place that we've been for the past twenty years, sir," Somebody else answers on the radio. "Vera Markov is invisible."

I don't know what to do about this. I can't ask my father for help because he doesn't know what I went out to the lake house and I obviously can't go to Dante. Coleman has done enough to help me with all of this undercover shit so I don't want him to get involved either. I'm on my own, I have to think about this some more.

Maybe I can just wait it out. They won't be able to find me, they never could before, even if I am right under their noses. They are rats after all, and they're not very smart. I love Dante but that doesn't take away how much I despise everything that he stands for and anybody that he's ever known.

"If she did follow us," Dante continues. "That means that she knows about Elisa. Is she in danger?"

I am, just not in the way that you fear.

"We can give her a body detail," Somebody else offers over the radio whose voice I don't recognize.

"No," Dante is quick to answer. "No, it's fine. I'll protect her. What's the plan, Dad?"

"I'm not sure yet," Giovanni admits.

I decide to throw them a bone, maybe distract them for a while so that I can think of a real plan. I write them an email, like the average business professional that I am.

Hello, boys. It's about time you notice me, I've been getting lonely. Nice place you've got up there, I had a blast.
-VM

It's vague and ridiculous but it'll set them on the wrong trail because I'm going to bounce it off of a tower on the other side of town so that it looks like I'm sending it from a completely opposite direction. It'll take them two hours to get to this area and two to get back. That's four hours, if they fall for it, for me to really think of something.

I send it to Giovanni and then I shut my laptop and head back to work. I try my best to hide the Bluetooth with my hair so that I can keep listening while I work discreetly at my desk so that I know what's going on. There's not much I can do now anyway, just to wait and hope that I didn't royally fuck things up this weekend.

"Get Burns up here," Giovanni says over the radio but then that's it. I don't know who Burns is and so I don't know what that means or what he's up to but he's apparently in the same room as Dante and whoever else is hunting me down because they've stopped using the radio.

I skip my lunch because I'm so nervous about what's going on and I hate not knowing and I hate not being able to do anything about it. I can't really focus on my work, it feels like the seconds are ticking by like hours or days.

When the radio finally picks back up, it's been a solid four hours since I sent the email.

"This was a bust, we're back to the drawing board," Dante announces. My plan worked but I don't have a new plan so all I did was waste their time, I got absolutely nothing else accomplished by sending out that email.

"No we're not," Giovanni decides. "We're going to make a visit to the Renegade, I've got an idea."

That's just great.

The only thing that I can do now is to text Sergei to at least warn them that Giovanni is coming, probably to start some trouble in order to find me. And so I discretely send Sergei a text to warn him and then I get back to my work. I try to immerse myself into the technology to try and get my mind off of the disaster that is coming down on me but it doesn't work. I can still feel the disaster crashing on my shoulders and all around me.

I have no idea how this is going to end.

It's about an hour after that when the radio comes back on again. It's Giovanni. "Alright, new plan. We don't have Vera but we've got somebody who knows her fairly well. Everybody to the basement now."

No.

Before he turns his radio off, I hear Coleman's voice in the background, telling Giovanni to fuck off.