22. Ivy
IVY
It’s been four days since the club. They’ve been the closest thing to normal I’ve had in longer than I can remember.
We’ve been back to Lucia’s twice. Nick pretended not to notice the way she touched my arm when she brought the wine, which I appreciated—but the faint color in his ears told me he’s still adjusting.
We’ve walked until I ran out of streets to show him, then found new ones.
He bought me gelato from a cart and watched me eat it like it was the most important thing he’s watched lately.
Like he was cataloging every second, every reaction, and storing it.
Normally, I would find it unnerving. It would probably piss me off. It doesn’t bother me now.
I took him to a bookshop where I used to spend entire afternoons.
The owner, an old man named Sandro who smells like pipe tobacco and doesn’t ask questions, nodded at me like I’d been in last week instead of several months ago.
Nick browsed the shelves while I sat by the window and watched him.
For a few minutes, the distance between who I was and who I’m becoming narrowed down until it felt a lot more manageable.
It’s been nice. I’m not used to nice. Nice usually makes me suspicious, because in my experience, nice is usually the thing that happens right before everything goes wrong.
There’s an open-air market near the canal that sets up every morning and sells everything from fresh produce to leather bags to cheap scarves for the tourists.
I have a paper bag under one arm filled with fresh pasta, bread, wine, and a huge wedge of pecorino.
I promised him I’d make cacio e pepe tonight, and I intend to keep that promise.
We walk together, side by side, content to be together. I’m actually content.
Which is, of course, when I see him.
He’s on the other side of the street, maybe thirty meters ahead of us.
Mid-forties with a stocky build, his hair going gray at the temples.
He’s wearing a blue linen jacket that’s too warm for the weather, which tells me he’s carrying something underneath it.
He’s walking with purpose but not urgency, phone in one hand while the other swings at his side.
Marco Ferretti. One of Vincenzo’s mid-level associates. Not inner circle, but close enough to know faces. Close enough to know mine.
In the space of a heartbeat, everything changes. The market noise goes flat. The colors drain away. The warm, easy feeling I’ve been carrying these past several days folds up and disappears. Something older and colder replaces it.
I don’t grab Nick’s arm. I don’t do anything that might draw attention. I only angle us toward a fruit stand on our side of the street, putting a canvas awning between us and Marco’s sightline.
“Two o’clock,” I murmur. “Blue jacket. Don’t look.”
“Who?”
“His name is Marco Ferretti. Works for Vincenzo. Logistics, mostly. He manages supply routes between Milan and Naples.” I pick up a peach from the stand and pretend to examine it, tilting my head just enough to track Marco’s reflection in the glass storefront beside us.
“If he sees me, he reports it, and Vincenzo knows I’m here. If he knows I’m here—”
“Everything is finished before it starts.” His voice has gone flat. The shift is instant, the way mine was. “Did he see you?”
“I don’t know.” And I don’t. He was looking at his phone when I spotted him, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t glance up thirty seconds earlier and clock me from the corner of his eye.
It doesn’t mean he isn’t on the phone right now telling someone what he saw.
I can’t know, and not knowing means I can’t take the chance.
The calculation is ugly and immediate, and it runs itself without my permission. If Marco saw me, he calls Vincenzo, who sends people. The operation is blown, and we’re running again.
If Marco didn’t see me, he goes about his day, never knowing how close he came.
But I can’t bet everything on that. Not when the stakes are this high. Not with Nick standing next to me.
I set the peach down. “We need to follow him.”
Nick studies my face. He doesn’t argue with whatever he sees there. He only starts to move when I do.
Marco is still headed north, now with the phone to his ear.
I keep us on the opposite side of the street, half a block behind, matching his pace.
The market crowd thins as we move further from the canal.
The streets narrow into the older part of the neighborhood where the buildings press closer together and the foot traffic drops. Less cover, but also fewer eyes.
He turns left onto a side street. I hold up a hand, and Nick and I wait at the corner for three seconds before rounding it. Marco is still walking. His phone call is over, and he’s pocketed the device. Now he’s moving with less purpose, like a man killing time between appointments.
“I need you to get ahead of him,” I tell Nick. “Come at him from the other direction. Get his attention. Draw him somewhere narrow.”
Nick looks at me. A question passes between us that neither of us has to ask out loud, because we both already know the answer.
“There’s an alley past the green door,” I continue, my voice steady. “I noticed it on the way to the market. No cameras, no windows facing in. Dead end.”
He holds my gaze for one more second. Then he nods, crosses the street, and moves.
I watch him go. He cuts through a passageway between two buildings, looping around to get ahead of Marco without being seen. I hang back, tracking Marco from behind while Nick positions himself.
It takes less than two minutes. Nick emerges ahead of Marco, walking toward him.
He has his phone out, looking at the screen, and as they approach each other on the narrow sidewalk, Nick stumbles slightly.
He bumps Marco’s shoulder. Apologizes in Italian with a rough accent, but it’s passable enough for a brief exchange.
Marco stops. Nick gestures with his hands, asking something about directions to keep him talking.
While I close the distance from behind.
Nick angles his body, still talking, then takes a half step that guides the guy’s attention toward the mouth of the alley. I can’t hear what he’s saying, but Marco glances in the direction he indicates and takes a step toward the alley to look.
Nick steps with him. Another half step. Then another. Marco is in the alley now, still turned partly toward Nick, still thinking about directions or whatever it was that got him out here today.
I come in behind him.
He doesn’t hear me. Not until I’m close enough that it doesn’t matter whether he hears me or not.
When he turns, his eyes go wide and his mouth opens, and I see the recognition hit.
It’s not surprise or confusion, but the terrible clarity of a man who knows exactly who he’s looking at and what it means.
“Ivy—”
My name is the last thing he ever says. My hand is already moving.
The blade I’ve been carrying in my jacket since we left the safe house does its work quickly and efficiently.
The way I was taught. One motion. Clean.
He drops, and I catch him, lowering him against the wall so there’s no sound of a body hitting the ground.
Nick is at the mouth of the alley, blocking the view from the street. He doesn’t watch. He doesn’t need to.
I crouch beside Marco and go through his pockets.
Phone first—I power it down and pocket it.
We’ll get rid of it later. Then his wallet.
I open it and pull the cash. Three hundred euros, give or take.
Enough to make it look like a motive. I wipe the wallet and drop it beside him, open and empty, the way a thief would leave it.
And that’s when I see the photos. Two of them, tucked behind a clear plastic sleeve the way people used to carry pictures before phones made it unnecessary.
The first is a woman, dark-haired, smiling, standing in a garden with her hand shielding her eyes from the sun.
The second is a family portrait. Marco, the woman, and two children—a boy and a girl, both under ten.
The boy has Marco’s chin. The girl has his eyes.
I stare at the photos, and something cold lodges itself in my gut.
I’ve done this before. Stood over bodies and gone through pockets and walked away without looking back, because that was the job.
The job didn’t require me to think about what I was leaving behind.
It required me to be precise and efficient and to not ask questions.
Vincenzo trained that into me the way you train any reflex—through repetition, through reward.
Through the steady, patient erosion of the part of a person that hesitates.
I used to be proud that I never hesitated.
Now I’m looking at a picture of two children whose father isn’t coming home tonight, and the pride is nowhere to be found.
My hands are steady when I stand up, because they always are. That’s what training does. It keeps your hands steady even when the rest of you is falling apart.
Nick is beside me, checking the street, confirming we’re clear.
He’s doing all the practical things that need to be done while I stand here holding a dead man’s cash and thinking about all the other wallets I never opened.
All the other pockets I went through without looking at the photos.
The families I never thought about, because thinking about them wasn’t part of the job description.
How many of them had children? How many of them were someone’s father, someone’s husband, someone’s son?
I never asked, because Vincenzo never told me, and I never wanted to know.
The targets were names on a page. Coordinates.
Schedules. Vulnerabilities to exploit. They were never people.
They couldn’t be people, because if they were, then what I was doing had a weight to it I couldn’t carry.