Luca
I already know it's bad. Good news doesn't call this late.
"Talk." I set down my glass. Eighteen-year-old Macallan, barely touched. Three hours in my home office, working through security contracts while the city rots quietly beneath its skyline.
"Tessaro's down." Ren. One of my field operators. Voice flat, controlled. "Bellevue trauma bay. Two in the chest, one in the belly. He's circling the drain."
Dante Tessaro. Forty-one years old. Fourteen years in Moretti operations. One of maybe six men I trusted with anything that mattered.
Circling the drain.
"The drive?"
Silence. The wrong kind.
"He was conscious just long enough. Our guys in the room say he grabbed the surgeon, passed her something before they could intervene." A pause. "The surgeon is Serafina Virelli."
The name detonates.
Giovanni Virelli's daughter. The one who fled to California for college, buried herself in medicine on the opposite coast, and has spent every year since building a life that has nothing to do with her father's world.
I know who she is. I make it my business to know everyone connected to anyone who could be a problem.
I just didn't know she was back in New York City.
"Pull the security footage. Send it now."
I'm already reaching for my jacket.
The footage loads by the time my driver hits the FDR.
Eight minutes to Bellevue. I watch every second on my phone, the city blurring past the window while the trauma bay plays out on a three-inch screen.
She's not what I expected.
Most people fall apart under pressure. They get loud. They freeze. Serafina Virelli owns the chaos. Barking orders. Cracking a man's chest with her bare hands. Total control. Zero hesitation.
She runs a resuscitation the way I run a kill team.
That should not be attractive.
It is.
She spots the Moretti ring on one of the escorts. There's a pause — barely a breath — and then she keeps working.
Backbone.
Inconvenient as hell.
Then I see it. Tessaro's hand, shaking, deliberate, pressing something into her scrub pocket. Small. Metal. The drive.
She doesn't look down. Doesn't flinch. Just keeps working while a dying man shoves a grenade into her pocket.
I rewind it. Watch it again.
She has it. No question.
I pocket my phone as we pull up to the hospital entrance. Only question left is whether Tessaro's still breathing.
He's not.
One of my men meets me in the corridor. Two words. "He's gone."
No drive on the body. I already knew that. Watched Tessaro put it in her pocket with his own dying hands.
The trauma bay is quieter when I get there. The worst of it is over.
She's still there.
Standing in the center of the bay like she hasn't moved since the footage cut off. Hands at her sides. Post-resuscitation protocol. I can see her going through it. Methodical. Unhurried. Her team moves around her. Nobody touches her. Nobody gets too close.
She commands space without trying. Every person in this room is orbiting her, and none of them knows it.
My men see me arrive. They go still the way trained men go still when someone above them walks in. She notices that before she notices me. I watch her register their reaction, file it, process it.
Then she turns.
And looks directly at me.
Green eyes. Sharp jaw. Hair pulled back, a few pieces loose around her face. No makeup. No polish. Just clean skin and bone structure that doesn't need any goddamn help.
Scrubs. Someone else's blood on the sleeve.
And she's still the most dangerous thing in this room, including me.
She looks like a war I'd lose on purpose.
I shut that down. Hard.
Her gaze moves to my pocket. Then back to my face. She's already calculating. I can see it. The rapid assessment. The threat evaluation. She's doing to me what I'm doing to her.
Except what I'm doing to her involves a hell of a lot more than threat assessment.
I'm thinking about the way her scrub top pulls at her collarbone.
About the way she holds herself like she's daring the room to test her.
About those hands — the ones that just cracked a man's sternum without flinching — wrapped around me, pulling me closer, digging into my back while I find out what sound she makes when she stops being composed.
Fuck.
I shut it down. Harder.
She's a Virelli. She's off-limits. She's holding something that belongs to me.
That's all she is.
My jaw tightens because some part of me — the part that hasn't been told no in a very long time — doesn't believe that for a single fucking second.
I call Matteo before I make it back to the car.
He picks up on the second ring. Of course he does. Matteo doesn't miss calls any more than he misses targets.
"I heard." No preamble. That's my brother. CEO of Moretti Global Security, ten years as a Navy SEAL before that, and every word out of his mouth is deliberate. Nothing wasted. "Tessaro."
"He gave the drive to the Virelli girl."
Silence. The kind that means he's already three steps ahead, running scenarios. "You're sure?"
"Watched it happen on the security feed."
Another pause. "Enzo's going to want her contained."
"Enzo's going to call me in about thirty seconds."
"Then you already know what he's going to say." Matteo's voice is even. Unreadable. "And you already know you're not going to listen." A pause. "Do this right and there's room to talk about expanding your role. You understand what I'm saying?"
I know what he's saying.
He hangs up just as my phone buzzes again.
Enzo.
Of course.
"I heard about Tessaro." Gravel and old grudges.
Enzo Moretti. Seventy-eight years old. My father's brother.
Old-world mafia down to his marrow. Built the family's power on blood and paranoia and has never once let go of either.
The man would start a war with a parking meter if it looked at him the wrong way.
He's been running operations since before I was born, and he treats loyalty like a leash. "The girl has the drive."
"She does."
"Then you know what needs to happen."
I get into the back seat. My driver pulls out without being told. Outside, the city moves past the windows — bright and indifferent, full of people who have no idea what runs underneath it.
"She needs to be contained," Enzo says. "Before Giovanni gets to her first. She's a Virelli. We don't know what she does with that drive."
"I'll handle it."
"Luca." His voice drops. The tone he uses when he wants to remind me who built this empire. "I need her contained. Not charmed. Not negotiated with. Contained. Do you understand me?"
I understand him perfectly.
I'm just not planning to listen.
"It'll be done," I say, and hang up.
I lean back against the seat.
That lifted chin. That steady mouth. The way she stood over a dead man without flinching. I think about the drive and what Tessaro died to deliver and the fact that Giovanni Virelli is going to move fast the second he finds out his daughter is holding it.
She's a problem. No question.
But she's my problem now.
I don't share. I don't hand off. And I don't let Enzo or Giovanni or anyone else decide what gets done with what belongs to me.
Serafina Virelli walked into the middle of something that's going to get her killed. She doesn't know it yet.
I'm going to make sure she lives long enough to find out.
What I do with her after that? Can't think about it. Can't afford to. Because if I start, I'll think about those hands again. That jaw. The way she looked at me like she was already deciding how to take me apart.
Christ.
I want to let her.
Not thinking about it.
My phone buzzes. Unknown number. Burner.
I open the message.
Virelli men are en route to Bellevue. Ten minutes.
I'm already moving.