19. Nick
NICK
Here we are again. This time, though, we’re on her home turf.
The safe house is tucked above a leather goods shop on a narrow street that smells like canal water and fresh bread.
From the outside, it’s nothing. A nondescript door between two storefronts, a buzzer panel with faded names that probably don’t belong to anyone real.
The kind of place your eyes slide right past.
Ivy doesn’t buzz. She produces a key and lets us in.
The stairwell is clean but bare, lit only by a single window on the landing.
She takes the stairs without hesitation, two flights up, to a second door with three separate locks.
One key, a second key, then a code punched into a pad so fast I only catch the last two digits.
“Welcome to my office,” she says as she pushes the door open.
I don’t know what I expected. Something sparse, maybe. Functional. A cot, a table, a weapon rack. The kinds of places I’ve set up for short-term operations over the years. Bare bones, nothing personal. In and out.
This isn’t that.
The apartment is small but organized with a precision bordering on surgical.
The main room serves as both living space and workspace, and it’s the workspace that stops me in the doorway.
One wall is lined with shelving units, and on those shelves is everything a person would need to become someone else entirely.
Wigs on foam heads. Contact lens cases in a row, each marked with a color.
Makeup kits, and not the kind you’d find at a drugstore.
Theatrical grade, professional. Below it, there’s a rack of clothing spanning everything from business formal to evening wear to what looks like a nurse’s uniform still in dry-cleaning plastic.
Below the shelves sits a locked cabinet, which she opens with another key. Inside, arranged in neat rows like library cards, are passports. At least a dozen of them. Different countries, different names. She fans through them with casual efficiency, like she’s done it countless times before.
“Italian, French, Czech, Austrian,” she lists without looking up. “The German one is expired, but it served its purpose.” She pulls one out and checks the photo, then sets it aside. “Greek. That one was a good time.”
There’s nothing I can do but lean against the wall and watch her work.
This is Ivy in her element. Not the woman who let me hold her in the bathtub at Liam’s penthouse or the one who ordered pancakes without thinking about it at the diner.
This is the version of her that existed for more than a decade without me.
The version built from the ground up to disappear and reappear as needed.
Watching her is like watching a musician pick up an instrument they haven’t touched in a while.
There’s no rust, no hesitation. She moves through the space like it’s an extension of her body.
It should unsettle me. Some of it does. But if I’m being honest with myself—and I’m trying to be—there’s something else underneath the discomfort.
Something closer to admiration. She’s good at this, better than good.
She operates at a level I’ve only seen in a handful of people, and most of them had entire governments behind them.
She had Vincenzo Russo. The rest, she built herself.
“Stop staring,” she murmurs without turning around.
“I’m not staring. I’m admiring.”
“You’re staring.” She opens a drawer and pulls out two small cases, both about the size of a contact lens container.
When she pops them open, I see they hold earpieces.
Compact, flesh-toned, nearly invisible. “These are good for about three hundred meters,” she tells me, holding one up.
“Longer than that if there’s no heavy interference.
We’ll be able to hear each other the entire time we’re inside. ”
“You have military-grade comms lying around in a drawer?”
“I have a lot of things lying around in drawers.” She sets the earpieces aside and turns to face me, leaning against the edge of the desk with her arms folded. “Let’s talk about how we’re getting you inside.”
We’ve been circling the membership issue since the jet landed.
An establishment like the one Gabriel described doesn’t exactly hand out guest passes.
“Liam’s people came through,” I confirm, checking his message again.
“One of his contacts in Milan located a member who’s been having financial difficulties.
Gambling debts, the expensive kind. In exchange for a very generous and very quiet settlement of those debts, we now have his membership credentials, his entry protocols, and his PIN for the door.
The team will leave them for me to pick up on my way in.
He’s been encouraged to take an extended holiday somewhere far from Italy for the next month. ”
She arches an eyebrow. “Encouraged.”
“Strongly encouraged. Liam’s people can be very persuasive when the situation calls for it.”
“And if someone at the door recognizes that the man walking in isn’t the man whose name is on the membership?”
“Then I’ll be relying on the fact that this particular member hasn’t visited in over six months, and the staff turns over frequently. Gabriel confirmed that. The door security checks credentials, not faces.” I pause and shrug. “It’s not airtight, but it’s the best we’ve got on short notice.”
She considers this. I can practically see her running scenarios in her head the way I’ve watched her do a dozen times now.
Testing the weak points. Probing for the gap that could get one of us killed.
After a few seconds, she nods. “It’ll work.
Just don’t volunteer information. Hand over the credentials, keep your head down, let them lead you in.
Men who frequent places like this don’t make small talk with the staff. ”
Rather than remind her this isn’t my first job, I settle for nodding. “Noted.”
“I’ll go through the staff entrance thirty minutes before you.
That gives me time to get situated and make sure the room is accessible before Vincenzo arrives.
” She pushes off the desk and moves to the clothing rack, fingers walking through the hangers.
“Gabriel said Vincenzo uses the same room every Thursday. That means there’s a setup routine.
Someone prepares the room for him. If I position myself as part of that routine, I have access before he ever walks through the front door. ”
“And the camera?”
She reaches into another drawer and holds up something no bigger than a shirt button. “Pinhole. Streams to a secure feed I can access remotely. He’ll never notice it if I place it somewhere on my outfit.”
She thinks of everything. Every angle and contingency. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that if Vincenzo had aimed her in any other direction, she’d be running entire operations by now. Instead, she spent years being someone else’s weapon to use as he chose.
The thought makes me want to put a fist through the wall.
“The team Liam sent is set up at a rental property eight minutes from the club,” I tell her. “Four men, two vehicles. They’ll monitor the exterior and the street. If anything goes sideways, they can be at the staff entrance in under two minutes.”
“Nothing is going to go sideways.”
“Humor me.”
The look she offers is the one that means she’s deciding whether to be annoyed or amused. She settles somewhere in between. “Fine. Eight minutes. Two vehicles. I feel very protected.”
“You should. Liam insisted on it, and when Liam insists on something—”
“It happens. I’m getting that.” She pulls a garment bag from the far end of the rack and unzips it partway, checking the contents without giving me a glimpse of what’s inside.
Whatever she sees satisfies her. She zips it back up and drapes it over the desk chair.
“I need to get ready. This is going to take a while.”
“How long is ‘a while’?”
“Long enough for you to make yourself useful and go over the building layout one more time.” She nods toward a folder on the desk—Gabriel’s intel, printed and annotated in her handwriting.
Notes in the margins, arrows, circled points of entry.
She’s already been through it more than once on the jet.
Anything to distract herself from flying, I guess.
“There’s a second exit on the east side that Gabriel didn’t mention.
I found it on the city’s building permits.
Fire escape, exterior stairwell. It’s worth knowing about. ”
Of course she found something Gabriel missed. I pick up the folder and settle into the chair by the window while she disappears into the small bedroom with the garment bag and closes the door.
I go through the layout. Memorize the corridors.
Trace the route from the main entrance to Vincenzo’s preferred room, then from the staff entrance to the same room, then from both to every exit.
I mark the second stairwell she found. Calculate the distance from there to the street where Liam’s team will be parked.
I do it twice, and then again, because repetition is the difference between panic and muscle memory when things go wrong.
Things aren’t going to go wrong, but I prepare like they will because that’s what keeps people alive.
The bedroom door opens.
I look up from the folder, and for about three full seconds, I forget what I was doing.
She’s transformed. The shoulder-length black hair has been replaced by a dark auburn wig that falls past her shoulders in loose waves.
Her makeup is different—heavier, more dramatic, the kind that changes the geometry of a face.
Her eyes are larger, her cheekbones sharper.
She’s wearing a black corset that cinches her waist and pushes everything else into territory I’m trying very hard not to stare at, paired with a skirt that’s more of a suggestion than an actual garment.
Sheer stockings, heels that add three inches to her height.