Luca
Ilisten to the voicemail twice.
Giovanni's voice is exactly what I expected — cultured, warm, the tone of a man who's spent decades making threats sound like invitations. The content is no surprise.
The target is.
Bellevue.
He picked the one thing she built on her own. The one place that has nothing to do with any of this — patients, nurses, residents who come in at 6 a.m., go home at midnight, and have never heard the name Virelli in their lives.
I set the phone down.
"Fuck," I say. Very quietly. To no one.
Then I call Caruso.
"Bellevue. Full perimeter. I want four men on the ER entrance, two on the parking structure, and one embedded with hospital security. Tonight." A pause. "And keep it off the main log."
"Understood." He doesn't ask why. He never asks why. It's one of his most valuable qualities.
I hang up and pour two fingers of scotch I don't drink. I stand at the window, watching 92nd Street do nothing as I wait for Serafina to come downstairs.
She doesn't come downstairs.
I go to her.
She's in the kitchen when I find her — standing at the counter with a glass of water she isn't drinking, still dressed, still wired the way she gets when she's running threat assessments behind her eyes, pretending she isn't. My laptop is open on the island.
That's new.
"It's done," I say. "Bellevue is covered. Four at the ER entrance, two on the structure, and one embedded inside."
She doesn't turn around.
"I know," she says. "I saw."
Something in her voice stops me.
She turns. The expression on her face isn't the fury of a woman who disagrees with a decision. It's the expression of a woman who has just learned that the ground beneath her is not what she thought.
"You had footage," she says. "From the ambulance bay. The night Tessaro died."
I go very still.
"I found it when you stepped out." She looks at the laptop, then back at me.
"You watched me. Before you ever walked into that trauma bay.
Before you approached me in the stairwell.
You already knew exactly what happened — you saw him pass me the drive, you saw my face, and you had footage of me doing my job on the worst night of my life. "
Her voice is completely controlled. That's how I know it's bad.
"And you never told me."
"Serafina—"
"How long have you been watching me?" Not a shout. Quieter than that. The kind of question that carries weight. "Before that night? After? Did you pull my shifts, my schedule, my—"
"The footage came from the hospital's own system," I interrupt. "Standard security sweep after Tessaro went down. I pulled it once, that night, to confirm the drive transfer. That's all."
"That's all." She repeats it like she's testing the structural integrity.
"You watched me resuscitate a dying man.
You watched him press something into my pocket.
You watched my face when I realized what it was.
" Her jaw is set. "And then you showed up in my stairwell and let me think you were reacting to information in real time. You already knew everything."
"I knew about the drive. I didn't know you."
"You had a head start I didn't consent to." Her eyes find mine and hold there. "That's not a small thing, Luca. That's not a protocol decision or a security call. That's you deciding you had the right to watch me before I had any say in whether you were in my life at all."
The words land clean and true. I don't have a defense against them because she's right.
"Yes," I say.
She blinks, like she expected me to argue.
"I made a judgment call in a situation with no clean options," I say.
"I needed to know if the drive had been transferred and to whom.
The footage confirmed it. I used it, and I moved.
" I hold her gaze. "I should have told you.
From the first night. You deserved to know I'd seen it and I chose not to tell you, and that was wrong. "
The kitchen is very quiet.
She looks at me for a long time. Reading me the way she reads everything — methodical, thorough, looking for what I'm not showing.
"The bargain," she says finally.
"Full transparency. From this moment. Anything you want to know."
"The footage. Is it still accessible?"
"I'll have Niko pull it and send it to you tonight. Every frame. Delete it after if you want. That's your call."
Another long silence.
Then she crosses to me.
I don't move. I let her come — let her stop close enough that I can see the calculation still running in her eyes, the war between fury and something else that she hasn't decided what to do with yet.
"I'm still angry," she says.
"You should be."
"Don't agree with me so easily. It's suspicious."
"I'm not trying to win the argument." I hold her gaze. "I'm telling you you're right."
Her throat moves. Something in her expression shifts — not softening, not yielding. Recalibrating. The specific look of a woman adjusting her understanding of a man she thought she'd already mapped.
She reaches up.
Her fingers find the collar of my shirt — deliberate, slow — and she pulls me down to kiss me. It's not gentle, not forgiveness, and not the end of it. It's the kiss of a woman who is still furious and has chosen to be so here, with me, rather than across the kitchen.
I'll take it.
I take all of it.
Her hands clench in my shirt, and I step back, moving us against the counter and lifting her onto it.
She wraps her legs around me like she's been waiting for this release all night.
Maybe she has. The anger still lives in her hands — gripping too tight, demanding — and I match it, meeting her exactly where she is.
"I'm not your enemy," I say against her mouth.
"I know." Her hands find my hair. "I know that. It doesn't make any of this easier."
"No." I pull back far enough to look at her. Her eyes are dark, furious, and wanting. I feel all three in my blood. "Nothing about you is easy."
"Good." She pulls me back down.
I get her out of her shirt. She gets me out of mine.
The tattoos she said she wanted to learn — I feel her hands tracing them in the dark, following the lines across my chest and arms with a deliberateness that makes my jaw lock. She's learning me. Filing it away.
Then her mouth finds my chest, and she bites down — sharp, deliberate, the kind of bite with intent — and I hiss through my teeth.
She pulls back and looks at the mark. A thin bead of blood wells at the surface.
She holds my gaze, lowers her mouth to it, and licks it clean, slow and unhurried, like she has all the time in the world to ruin me.
"First scar from me," she says against my skin. Her eyes come up to mine — dark, furious, burning. "Now we're even."
I have been shot. I’ve been stabbed once on the left side, four inches from anything critical. I’ve taken hits that would hospitalize most men and walked away without a word.
Not one person in my entire life has bitten me and then named it.
I stare at her.
She stares back. Completely unrepentant. Waiting to see what I do with this.
I flip us before she can react, pressing her back against the counter, and feel her sharp inhale against my throat.
"We are very far from even," I say.
She throws me a dangerous smile. "Then I suggest you keep up, Moretti."
I work my way down her body with ruthless focus — not because I'm in a hurry, but because I need her to feel this. Need her to understand that what I did came from a place I can’t yet name, and that this is the only way I know how to say it.
My mouth finds her breast. She arches. I feel her pulse hammering under my lips.
Then I keep going.
When I get where I'm going, I take my time — spreading her open, looking at her like she's something I want to memorize, then lowering my mouth to her. She's wet, and I groan against her, unable to help myself. She tastes like something I'd burn this city down for.
Her whole body shudders.
I drag my tongue through her slowly — learning every fold, every sensitive place — before I find her clit and stay there, circling, savoring, giving her exactly enough to push her to the edge and not quite enough to tip her over.
She makes a broken sound above me, and her thighs clench against my shoulders.
I press them back open because I'm not done. She doesn't get to rush this.
"Luca—"
"I've got you." I drag my mouth lower, tasting all of her, then back up. "I've got you."
I take her apart slowly — until she's shaking, gripping the edge of the counter, and making sounds that have nothing to do with composure. When I look up, she’s wrecked and glorious, looking at me like she’s furious about how much she wants me, and I feel that look in my spine.
"Come here," she breathes.
I move back up her body. She reaches for my belt with efficient hands, and I let her, my forehead dropping to hers as she works, both of us breathing hard in the quiet kitchen.
When I push inside her, the sound she makes goes straight through me.
I tell myself the relief I feel is purely practical.
I tell myself that for approximately three seconds before I stop lying to myself entirely, because the truth is, nothing about this woman has ever made me capable of rational decisions, and skin against skin with Serafina Virelli is not where my self-control makes its last stand.
I move, and she moves with me — urgent, close, her legs wrapped around me, and her mouth at my jaw, and my hands gripping her hips hard enough to bruise.
The anger is still there beneath the heat — we haven't resolved anything, not really.
Giovanni Virelli is still out there, Bellevue is covered tonight, but tomorrow is another question entirely.
We haven't fixed any of it.
But right now, she's holding on to me like I'm the only solid thing in the room, and I'm holding her because she's the only thing worth holding. For this moment, it’s enough.
"Look at me," I say.
She does.
"Sei bellissima," I breathe. The words spill out before I can stop them, ragged, real, and entirely unplanned. Her eyes soften for just a second — one unguarded second when the surgeon, the Virelli heir, and the woman who never bends drop away, and it's just her. Just Serafina. Just this.
Then she pulls my mouth to hers, and I stop thinking altogether.
She comes with my name on her lips, quiet and absolute, her fingers digging into my shoulders. Moments later, I follow her over the edge, my face buried in her throat, my hand spread flat against her spine.
We stay tangled together. Her breathing slows against my neck. My heart rate follows.
"I'm still angry at you," she reiterates softly.
"I know."
"The footage thing was wrong."
"I know."
A pause. "The men in the building are staying, though."
"Yes." I press my mouth to her temple. "They are."
She exhales. Not quite a laugh. Close enough.
I'm reaching for my shirt when the phone on the island lights up.
Niko.
I answer. "Talk to me."
His voice comes through fast and tight — the voice he gets when he's found something that changes the picture. "I finished tracing the payment chain. All of it, end to end." A pause. "Luca – it leads to City Hall."
The kitchen goes very still.
Serafina reads my face. Her eyes sharpen immediately — the surgeon clocking a change in vitals.
"City Hall," I repeat.
"Richard Hale," Niko says. "He's been running this from within the city government for decades — and he's had Falco at the NYPD bury every thread that came close. Between the two of them, they owned this city's underworld without ever getting their hands dirty." A pause. "We've got them both."
I look at Serafina.
She looks back at me.
"Send me everything," I say. "Tonight."