Chapter 3
NICO
Dante pours me a glass of whiskey before I have even managed to shut the oak door behind me.
“Sit.”
I sit on the leather chair across from him.
The gold signet ring is catching the morning light on his right hand where it always does. Papa’s ring. Two generations of Santoro Dons on the same finger, worn down smooth by decades of decisions. He hasn’t touched the gold yet this morning.
He is going to.
The whiskey is entirely too early and we both know it.
He slides the glass across the dark mahogany desk, the base whispering against the wood.
“Drink that,” he says, “and tell me what you think.”
The folder resting under his palm belongs to Marco’s intelligence network. Pale blue. Three sheets of surveillance printout at most. I already know what’s inside before he flips it open.
I drink the liquor slow, letting the burn settle.
He turns the folder around.
Two grainy surveillance photographs slide into view.
A man standing at the New Orleans commercial port, checking his watch near a shipping container.
The same man at a different angle, taken from a hidden lens two days later.
Russian shoulders, built for freezing docks.
A coarse beard grown in to blur his jawline against a standard security camera.
“He’s asking after a girl,” Dante says. “Russian nationality. Early twenties. Slight, compact build. Light hair.”
The description is not specific enough to warrant an execution on sight.
It is enough to ruin my pulse.
I take a second swallow, keeping my hand steady.
“They don’t have a name,” I say. “They have a face. A Russian girl who walked out of the Benedetti basement and straight into the wrong fucking news cycle.”
“And by next week?” Dante asks.
“They’ll have a name.”
Dante watches me across the desk, his gaze unblinking.
So I say it for him. “You want me to accelerate the timeline.”
“Yes.”
“How.”
“Transport,” Dante says, tapping his knuckles against the desk. “Gia’s prescribing group therapy for the survivors at Casa Lucia. Tuesday. Eleven. You drive them. You do not step foot inside the clinic building. Ninety minutes total. You wait in the vehicle and you bring them straight back.”
I lean back into the leather of my chair and my hand goes to the back of my neck, where the skin is smooth, and my fingers find the place and stay.
“How’s the acclimation going,” he says, and it isn’t a question.
“She’s in the house,” I tell him. “She hasn’t stabbed anyone. She’s eating half the food Maria brings up to her quarters.”
“Half.”
“Half.”
“That’s not acclimated, Niccolò. That’s surviving.”
“She’s been here weeks, Dante. In our world, surviving is the win.”
“Not anymore. This changes the entire grid.” He taps the folder again, the sound sharp in the quiet study.
“We need her comfortable leaving the compound. Comfortable being in an SUV with you for the round-trip. Comfortable enough that if we have to move her to a safehouse tomorrow, she doesn’t claw through your skin to get away.”
Fuck.
“Dante—”
“Don’t Dante me. Is this assignment going to be a problem for you.”
“No.”
“Because if you can’t handle this girl, tell me right now. I’ll put another brother on the logistics.”
“There is no one else,” I say, looking him dead in the eye. “Renzo’s got Izzy and Sofia locked down. Marco’s too young to read a room this volatile. You know it, and I know it.”
“Then stop fucking arguing with me and tell me what you need to make it happen.”
The whiskey glass is empty. I set it down on the wood with a quiet click. “Time,” I say. “You’re asking me to put a woman who flinches at footsteps into a closed car in a few days.”
“I’m not asking.”
“I know.”
He pours himself a drink, drinking half of it down in one swallow. He looks at the port photographs one more time, his jaw working, before he slams the blue folder shut.
“She let you carry her out of that basement,” he says, his voice dropping. “She sits on the other side of the oak door when you read to her at midnight. Cassia says she came downstairs yesterday to sit in the library.”
“You just need to give her a reason to keep choosing.”
I don’t answer him.
He turns the signet ring on his finger. Once. Slow.
“Tuesday,” he says. “Eleven. You bring them home.”
“And if she refuses to get in the SUV.”
“She’ll get in the SUV.”
“You sound sure.”
“I am sure, Nico. Because you’re going to make sure.”
“Dante—”
His voice drops an octave.
I close my mouth. My jaw wants to keep going, but I swallow the anger.
The whiskey at the bottom of his glass moves when he sets it flat on the mahogany.
Cazzo. Fuck.
“All right.”
“Good.” He stands up, and I match his movement.
He walks around the massive desk, his hand gripping my shoulder until his fingers dig into my suit jacket.
“Don’t fuck this up, Nico.”
I look at him. My oldest brother, carrying Papa’s empire since Papa stopped being able to.
“I won’t.”
“I know.”
He lets go of my shoulder. I turn and walk out.
Gia is standing in the hallway directly outside the study, her arms crossed tight over her chest. Still in her green hospital scrubs. She has a ceramic cup of coffee in her hand that clearly stopped being warm hours ago.
“He tell you?”
“He told me.”
“Good,” she says. “Then you know the protocol. You do not step foot inside the clinic building.”
“Understood, Gia.”
“Sofia’s in the same group. Same SUV.”
I look down at her face. My twin. The one who knows me better than I know myself. “You’re putting Sofia in the vehicle as insurance.”
“I’m putting Sofia in the car because she needs the therapy session, Nico, and Mila needs to see another survivor who’s further along the timeline. If it also means Mila won’t bolt the second you turn the ignition, that’s a bonus.”
“Gia—”
“Don’t Gia me. You look like total shit, by the way.”
“Thanks.”
She shifts her coffee cup to her other hand. “When’s the last time you actually slept.”
“I’m fine.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I don’t answer her.
She steps closer, her voice dropping. “I don’t know what’s been wrong with your head since you came back from Moscow.
But whatever it is, Nico, if any part of that trauma walks into that SUV with her on Tuesday morning, I will know.
So will she. And I will pull this assignment before you can turn the key. ”
I hold her eyes. “It won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“It won’t, Gia.”
She watches my face for a long beat. The twin thing.
Her eyes track from my mouth to the hollow under my eye and back again without blinking, the same look she’s been giving me since we were kids in the Garden District, the look that knew I had a concussion before my knees gave that day Marco shoved me off the dock and I told her I was fine.
“Okay,” she says, her voice softening just a fraction. “Okay.”
She reaches up, her fingers touching my cheek. Quick. A ghost of a gesture. Then she drops her hand back to her side.
“Tuesday,” she says. Then she turns and walks away down the long hall.
I stand alone in the corridor. The study door is still wide open behind my back, and I can hear Dante already on the line, handling the next crisis.
The back room is two doors down. Marco is sitting at the comms station with three high-resolution monitors up, his shirt sleeves pushed all the way to his elbows. The black ink on his knuckles moves as his fingers hit the keys.
He does not stand when I walk in. He hasn’t done that since the promotion. I am glad of it.
Izzy is sitting at her laptop in the dark corner of the room, her shoulders hunched. Her sleeves are pushed up, and the geometric tattoo on her left wrist flashes every time she types.
“Two tail cars on the run,” Marco says without looking back, updating the tracking grids on the central monitor.
“The surveillance van rotates with a civilian sedan to keep the lines dirty. Tuesday’s route goes through the Garden District and the Magazine corridor.
Casa Lucia security has been brought up to war baseline.
We’re running automated counters on the perimeter doors. ”
“You’ll want to see this,” Izzy says, her eyes glued to her own screen. “Nico. Come here.”
I cross the room, my boots loud against the tile.
Her display is split down the center. Port surveillance video logs on the left. Communications metadata waveforms on the right. The same Russian voice cuts through three different intercepts. He is moving across our city.
Izzy taps the trackpad with her thumb. The voice comes through her speaker, rough and low. The questions are too clean, too rehearsed. The bastard didn’t come up with them. He’s running someone else’s script.
“Devushka. Russkaya. Let dvadtsat’. Svetlye volosy. Khudaya.”
A girl. Russian. About twenty. Light hair. Thin.
Izzy taps the pad again, switching to a different intercept. Same voice. Two days later.
“Mozhet, sestra cheloveka, kotoryy proshel cherez port v proshlom godu. Dolzhok doma.”
Maybe the sister of a man who came through the port last year. A debt back home.
The phrasing is lethal. Dolzhok doma. A little debt back home.
It’s the phrase a Russian longshoreman from Odessa hears in his nightmares before a blade finds his ribs. The bastard isn’t just asking questions anymore. He is recruiting every criminal on the docks to start watching the streets on his behalf.
“There’s a third clip,” Izzy says, her fingers freezing over the keys. “I’m not playing it.”
“Why.”
“It is the part where he details what’s going to happen to her when they take her back.”
“Play it.”
“Nico.”
“Izzy. Play the tape.”
She hits the key.
“Sperva my otrabotayem nash dolg na ney. Potom ona poydyot domoy. Ne vazhno v kakom sostoyanii.”
First we work off our debt on her. Then she goes home. It doesn’t matter in what condition.
My jaw grinds around the Russian verbs until my teeth ache. The hand wearing Papa’s watch closes into a fist at my side, my nails digging into my palm, but I stay standing.
She cuts the audio short.
I want to put my fist through the wall.
“He’s not asking with discipline anymore,” Izzy says, looking up at me through the shadows. “He’s asking like a man whose deadline is moving. Which means somebody above him in the Bratva hierarchy is leaning on his neck.”
“How long do we have.”
“A week before he buys a name from a dirty cop. Two weeks before he has a face that matches a body.” She looks straight into my eyes, her face still. “You should tell her. It’s going to land on her whether or not you keep her behind that door. It’ll land softer if you give her the knife yourself.”
“Not yet.”
“That wasn’t advice.”
“I know.”
“Nico—”
“I said not yet, Izzy.”
She holds my eyes for another beat, then goes back to her keyboard, her fingers back on the keys.
Cassia walks into the back room then, a leather Casa Lucia financials folder tucked under one arm and a fountain pen in her other hand.
Her left hand rests instinctively at the small of her back.
The baby bump is still small enough to live under the folds of the linen dress, but the fabric has stopped pretending.
She glances at my face, her expression sober. “You’re driving Tuesday.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Good. There’s a green sweater resting on the chair in her room. She wears it every time she tries to leave the threshold. Leave it right where her hands can find it before you knock on the frame.”
“Cassia—”
“I’m telling you a thing she won’t tell you, Nico.” She sets the folder down on the back-room table with a soft thud.
“And bring food in the SUV. Bread, fruit, whatever Nonna will hand you from the pantry. Don’t offer it to her. Just set it on the console between the front seats and forget it’s there.”
“Why.”
“She’ll know what to do with it,” Cassia says simply. Then she turns on her heel and walks out.
The back room moves on around me, the comms humming.
I stand in the middle of the room.
She’s being looked for.
I walk back toward my own wing slow, my boots making no sound against the corridor.
I pass Nonna Rosa at the bottom of the back stairs, a wicker basket of laundry balanced against her hip. She doesn’t say a word to me. She just looks at my face. I keep walking.
She has known the truth since I flew home from Moscow with blood under my nails. She has never said it out loud.
I stop at the sharp corner right before Mila’s hallway. The Akhmatova volume is still in my suit jacket pocket, right where I closed it last night.
I do not walk to her oak door this morning.
I turn. I go straight to my own room.
I sit on the edge of the mattress. The watch is still on my wrist. I don’t take it off.
The silver cufflinks come off, into the porcelain dish on the dresser. Mama’s. I don’t look at them.
I open the Akhmatova. The poem is about a woman whose lover comes to her threshold at night and refuses to knock.
I slam it shut.
Tuesday morning Maria walks them down to the SUV and I drive them out and bring them home.
I will be in a car with her, no door, no oak.
Cristo.
Just her and me in the leather seats, someone hunting her through the ports, and her pulse running fast against my wrist at the dinner table is the wrong thing to be carrying right now and I cannot put it down.