Luca
The badge goes into an evidence bag.
Serafina watches me seal it. Arms crossed. Chin up. Furious and frightened and showing neither. I've already learned the difference between her composure and her calm. This is composure. The calm version of Serafina doesn't cross her arms.
"It's a message," she says. "Not a threat. Not yet."
"It's both."
"It's meant to destabilize me." She looks at the bag. "Make me panic. Make a mistake." Her jaw sets. "I'm not going to do either."
I look at her — this woman who not long ago came apart in my hands and is now standing in my study analyzing threat escalation patterns like she's reviewing a chart — and it hits me low in the gut. Not the time. Not even close.
"No," I say. "You're not,”
I call Niko.
Niko arrives at the brownstone at 9 a.m., looking like he slept under his desk. He probably did. He's slight, permanently caffeinated, and the best tech operative I've ever worked with.
He stops dead in the doorway when he sees Serafina.
"You're the surgeon."
"You're the tech guy." She hands him a coffee. She made it exactly right — black, two sugars — which means she either asked someone or noticed. Either way it lands. Niko blinks at the cup like she's handed him a small miracle.
"I like her," he tells me.
"Focus."
He focuses.
We set up in the study — Niko's equipment spread across the desk, three monitors running, Serafina in the chair to my left because she's the only one the dead man trusted, and I'm not letting her out of my sight.
She knows it. She hasn't argued. After the badge, the math shifted between us, and we both know that, too.
The drive opens in layers.
Niko works through the second encryption key — the one traced to the Virelli shell company, the one that required Serafina's presence to access — and the files unspool across the screens like a wound opening.
Ledgers. Account transfers. Shell companies, four layers deep.
Audio files timestamped over years — hits framed as "contract resolutions" in corporate bloodless language, which makes it worse.
Serafina goes still beside me.
"Those aren't family hits." Quiet. "The framing. The language. That's not how my father's people talk."
"It's not how ours talk either."
She looks at me. "Someone was mimicking both sides."
"Creating hits that looked like betrayals. Feeding the feud." I watch the files load. "Keeping two families at war so the real player stayed invisible."
Niko keeps pulling threads — names from the audio metadata, cross-referencing with the ledger accounts. Politicians. Police commissioners. A network of people who publicly stand for law and order and quietly bankroll its opposite.
Then Serafina leans forward.
"Stop." Her voice sharpens. "Go back."
She points at a name in the ledger. Recurring transfer. Quarterly. Substantial.
"Richard Hale." Flat. Recognition and revulsion in equal measure. "Former city councilman. He's on Bellevue's donor board and funds three of our charity programs. Gave a speech last spring about community investment and public health." Her mouth tightens. "He shook my hand."
"And he's been bankrolling hits for years," Niko says, not looking up.
He pulls up a second thread. "He's not working alone.
Every buried investigation, every witness who disappeared before they could talk, has a name attached.
" He points to the screen. "Dennis Falco.
Former NYPD Deputy Commissioner. Thirty years on the force, retired with commendations.
Clean record." A beat. "Nobody gets that far with a clean record.
They get that far with a record that's been cleaned. "
Serafina stares at the screen.
I watch her process it — finding rot in the one place she believed was clean. She built her life around Bellevue, around the belief that her work existed outside all of this. Finding Hale's name here isn't just information. It's a violation.
I want to say something. I don't have the words.
I settle for what I'm certain of.
"We'll take him down."
She looks at me. "Promise?"
"Yes."
She holds my gaze for a moment, then nods once and looks back at the screen. It's not absolution. It's not comfort. It's a target, and right now that's what she needs.
The recordings run for hours.
We listen in near silence, broken only by Niko's commentary and Serafina's questions — which turn out to be better than mine.
She catches inconsistencies I miss. She maps patterns in the audio timelines without being asked.
At one point, Niko slides his laptop toward her without a word, and she starts pulling metadata like she's done it before.
"Did you ever consider anything other than medicine?"
She doesn't look up. "My father wanted me in the business. I wanted the opposite of everything he stood for." A pause. "Bellevue was as far as I could get."
"And yet."
"And yet." Her mouth curves. Doesn't reach her eyes.
I look at her for a moment longer than I should.
Then I look back at the screen.
It's nearly evening when Niko hits the last file.
Different from the others — not a financial record, not a conversation. A single audio memo. Short. The kind a man makes for himself when he needs to remember something. When he needs the record to show he tried.
Niko plays it.
The voice is older. Deliberate. The cadence of a man who has spent a lifetime choosing words carefully and knows the weight of every one.
Serafina goes rigid beside me.
I know why.
I recognized the voice three seconds before she did.
Niko lets it run to the end. Pauses the audio.
The room is completely silent.
He looks at me. His face does the thing it almost never does — uncertain and careful, the expression of a man delivering news he wishes he didn't have to.
"This file," he says slowly, "says Enzo authorized the first strike."
I don't move. Don't react.
Years of training have locked my face away, and right now I need every inch of that control because what's moving through me isn't clean or strategic. It's cold fury. The kind that doesn't burn. The kind that freezes everything it touches until you can't feel your own hands.
Enzo. My uncle. The man who handed me my first weapon and told me that loyalty was the only currency that mattered.
"Send me the file." My voice is even. "Lock down the copies. Nobody talks about this until I say so."
Niko nods. Knows better than to push.
I don't move for a moment.
Just a moment. Long enough to feel the floor not be there.
The man who handed me my first weapon. Who sat across from me at Sunday dinners for as long as I can remember.
Who buried my father and told me, in the car after, that family was the only thing that couldn't be taken from you if you held it tight enough.
Held it tight enough.
Right.
Then I put it in the locked room with everything else that can't help me in this moment, and I move.
I look at Serafina. Her face is careful — reading mine the way she reads a patient, looking for what's underneath the surface. She finds it. Doesn't name it.
"Go get some rest," I tell her. "Both of you."
My shower runs cold for thirty seconds before I give up and turn it hot.
I stand under the water, both hands flat against the tile, trying to think about Enzo, the file, the manufactured war, Hale's name on that ledger, and the bloodstained badge in the evidence bag downstairs.
I think about all of it for approximately forty seconds.
Then I think about Serafina.
The sound she made when she came. That sharp, helpless cry — nothing like the controlled woman she shows the world. Nothing practiced or performed. Just pure, unguarded reaction, she couldn't have stopped if she tried.
I've been with women who were louder. I've never been with a woman whose sound hit me like a physical thing, low in the gut, the kind that leaves a mark. Not one of them crawled under my skin like this. Not one of them made me feel like I was the one coming undone.
I think about her hands in my hair. The way she said "don’t stop" like it cost her something. The way she looked at me when she stood back up — wrecked and furious about being wrecked, already rebuilding the walls even as her chest heaved.
My hand moves down my stomach before I decide to let it.
I think about the mark on her throat. My mark.
Which I have no right to feel possessive about and feel possessive about anyway — feral and irrational and completely mine.
I think about the soft place beneath her ear.
The way she arched into me as her body had already made the decision without consulting her brain.
I think about her on that wall, both of us past the point of reason, her voice wrecked and real—
I wrap a hand around myself and stop pretending this is going anywhere else.
She'd hate that I'm doing this. That thought alone almost finishes me — Serafina, sharp-tongued and furious, finding out that Luca Moretti is in his shower thinking about the way she tastes.
The way she pulled my hair. The way she said I will literally haunt you to the end of your family line if you stop now — like wanting me was a choice she was making with full information and no apologies.
Christ.
I think about having her properly. No interruptions.
No Caruso. No world on fire outside the door.
I think about taking my time — and I would take my time, I would make a religion of it — learning every inch of her until she forgot every reason this was a bad idea.
Until she said my name, the way she said it, against the wall. Rough and breathless and real.
I come hard with her name locked behind my teeth.
The water runs over me. I stay where I am for a long moment, forearm braced against the tile, breathing returning to something functional.
Then I straighten. Shut off the water.
Enzo authorized the first strike.
The world is still burning. I still have work to do.
And Serafina Virelli is taking an afternoon nap down the hall — her first real sleep since the ER, earned and overdue — and that is either the most dangerous thing in my life right now or the only thing keeping me sane.
Possibly both.