25. Nick
NICK
The night air hits me like a slap when I step outside, but it’s a welcome one.
After hours in that place with the dim lighting and the leather and the lack of windows, the open street feels like surfacing from deep water.
Milan at midnight is cool and damp. The cobblestones are slick with the kind of mist that isn’t quite rain.
I take a breath that reaches the bottom of my lungs for the first time since I walked through that black door.
Ivy is already outside, waiting for me. She stripped the wig off in the dressing room and scrubbed most of the heavy makeup away, though traces of it are still visible around her eyes.
Her black hair is loose on her shoulders.
The corset is hidden under her long coat, buttoned to the throat. The mask is gone.
She looks like herself, which is of course the point.
“The feed uploaded while you were in the room,” I tell her, checking my phone one last time.
The footage—every stomach-turning second of it—is sitting on a secure, encrypted server which Liam’s people set up before we left the States.
There are redundant backups in three separate locations.
A dead man’s switch is tied to both our names.
If either of us fails to check in within a forty-eight-hour window, the footage goes live.
Sent to every major news outlet in Italy, every family associate on the list Gabriel provided, and every law enforcement agency with jurisdiction over organized crime in southern Europe.
Vincenzo Russo, patriarch of the Russo family, on his hands and knees wearing a dog collar. Panting. Crawling. Having his nose shoved into his own piss.
It would end him. Not just his reputation, but his life.
Men like Vincenzo don’t survive that kind of exposure.
The family would disown him. His allies would evaporate.
Men who followed him out of fear dressed up as respect would find their fear suddenly pointed in a very different direction, and the wolves who’ve been circling for years would move in before the footage finished its first news cycle.
He knows all of this. He’s spent his entire life making sure no one ever had this kind of leverage over him.
Tonight, that changed.
“He should be out any minute.” Ivy’s voice is steady, but there’s a tightness underneath it.
She’s holding herself together the way she always does, through sheer force of will.
Whatever she feels about what happened in that room, she’s locked it away and put it somewhere I can’t reach. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
I position myself slightly ahead of her and to the left.
Not blocking her—she’d kill me for that—but close enough that if things go wrong, I’m between her and whatever comes through that door.
Liam’s team is parked two streets over. I texted them our status five minutes ago.
They’re ready to move. All that’s left to do is wait in a wide alley between the club and the building beside it.
Finally, the black door opens, and Vincenzo Russo steps out into the night.
He looks exactly like the kind of man who runs an empire.
Impeccable suit, silver hair combed back, shoulders set with the rigid posture of someone who has never in his life allowed himself to slouch.
He’s smiling, too. A private, satisfied smile, the kind a man wears when he’s just had exactly the evening he wanted.
His guards flank him, two of them, both large and both armed.
They scan the street with the automatic efficiency of professionals.
Vincenzo takes three steps before he sees her.
The smile doesn’t fade. It drops off his face like something that was never attached properly to begin with.
What’s left underneath is a color I can only describe as chalky.
Not pale. Deathly white. The blood leaves his face so fast I can almost see it happen, draining downward, leaving nothing behind but the hollowed-out expression of a man who just realized the worst thing he can imagine is standing ten feet away from him, looking him dead in the eye.
“Ciao, Vincenzo,” Ivy says.
His mouth falls open, but nothing comes out.
The guards react before he does. They step forward, hands moving to their jackets, and I feel the change in the air the way you feel a storm coming.
The pressure change, the static, the hair on your arms standing up.
I move one step closer to Ivy, my hand already resting on the weapon holstered beneath my jacket.
“I wouldn’t,” I warn. My voice carries in the quiet street. Level, calm. The voice I use when I need someone to understand the next five seconds will determine whether they live or die. “Whatever you’re thinking about doing right now, I need you to stop thinking about it.”
Vincenzo’s eyes haven’t left Ivy. He hasn’t blinked. He looks like a man watching his own house burn down from across the street.
“Everything that happened in that room tonight is on video,” I tell him.
“Every second. Every detail. It’s been uploaded to a secure server that neither you nor anyone in your organization will ever find.
The footage is tied to a dead man’s switch linked to both of our names.
If anything happens to either of us—and I mean anything at all, at any point, for the rest of our lives—the footage goes live.
Every news outlet in Italy, every associate in your family’s network.
Every law enforcement agency with an interest in your operation. All of it, everywhere, all at once.”
The street is very quiet. One of the guards looks to Vincenzo, waiting for instructions. The other is looking at me, obviously calculating the distance between us, the angle, the odds. I’ve already run through all of it. If he moves, I’ll be faster. I have to be.
“Your best option,” I continue, “is to walk away. Let us live in peace. Let Ivy live in peace. No more surveillance or kill orders, no more men sent to track her down. It’s over.
She’s done. In exchange, the world never has to see Vincenzo Russo on all fours with a tail shoved up his ass, getting his nose rubbed in his own piss. ”
The words land like I hit him. I watch it.
His jaw clenches, his nostrils flare, his hands curl into fists at his sides.
For a long, terrible moment, I see something in his eyes that goes beyond anger.
It’s the look of a man confronting the end of everything he’s built, every wall he’s erected, every carefully maintained fiction about who he is.
It’s the look of a man who understands with absolute clarity that he has lost.
“You—” His voice comes out rough, broken. He clears his throat and tries again, and when he speaks, his accent is thicker than I expected, the English strained. “You were in my room.”
It isn’t directed at me. It’s directed at Ivy.
She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t need to. She stands there with her arms at her sides and lets him look at her. She lets him see the face he trained and molded and controlled all those years. The weapon he built.
I watch the recognition settle into him. Not only that she was in the room, that she saw everything. It’s that the girl he raised, the assassin he created, stood over him while he crawled on his hands and knees and begged to be degraded, and he never for a single second knew it was her.
His hand moves to his jacket.
I step in front of Ivy. My weapon is in my hand before I’ve finished the thought. Behind me, I feel her move, feel her hand close around my arm—not pulling me back, just there. Steady. Ready.
Vincenzo pulls a gun.
Time stretches. Every detail sharpens. The streetlight reflecting off the barrel. The mist on the cobblestones. The sound of Ivy’s breath behind me. The guard to Vincenzo’s left reaching for his own weapon.
I’m ready to take the bullet. I’ve made peace with it in the space between one heartbeat and the next, the way I’ve been trained to. If it means she walks away from this alive, I’ll take whatever he gives me.
Then Vincenzo turns the gun to his left and fires twice.
The first guard drops. The second guard has half a second to register what’s happening before the third shot takes him down. Both men hit the cobblestones with the heavy, final sound of bodies that won’t be getting up.
The street echoes, then silence.
Vincenzo stands over them with the gun still in his hand, the barrel smoking in the damp air.
His face is blank, expressionless. Empty.
The mask is back—not the one Ivy wore, but the one he’s worn his entire life.
The iron hand. The man who eliminates problems with the efficiency of someone crossing items off a list.
He just killed two of his own men. Not because they threatened him, but because they heard what I said. Because they knew what he does on Thursday nights, and Vincenzo Russo does not leave witnesses.
He looks at me, then Ivy, before turning back to me again.
He doesn’t say a word. He only tucks the gun back into his jacket, buttons it with steady hands, then walks to the black sedan waiting at the curb.
The driver doesn’t get out. Vincenzo opens his own door, gets in, and closes it behind him.
The engine is already running. The car pulls away from the curb, moves down the street, then turns a corner.
My heart is hammering so hard I feel it in my fingertips.
I holster my weapon before turning to Ivy. She’s standing exactly where she was, half in shadow. Her face is blank. Not calm, but completely blank. Whatever she’s processing, it’s happening somewhere I can’t see. “Are you hurt?” I ask.
“No.”
“Are you—”
“I’m fine.”
She’s not fine. I know she’s not. But she’s alive, and I’m alive, and Vincenzo just drove away from us instead of putting bullets in our heads. Right now, that’s going to have to be enough.
I pull out my phone and text Liam’s team. Stand down. Target departed. Two casualties, not ours. Seconds later, they let me know they’re on their way.
These two men woke up this morning thinking they’d go home tonight. They did their jobs, stood where they were told to stand, and died because the man they worked for couldn’t afford to let them live with what they had heard.
I’ve seen worse. I’ve done worse. But something about the casual efficiency of it—the way Vincenzo didn’t flinch or even look at their faces—sits in my stomach like ice.
This is the man who created her. This is what she comes from.
I turn back to Ivy, who’s looking down the street where the car disappeared. There’s something in her face I can’t read. It’s not shock or relief. It goes deeper, something that doesn’t have a name. I’ve spent weeks learning every expression she has, and this one is new.
“Let’s go home,” I offer.
The silence that follows is only a few seconds long but feels like an hour.
“I am home,” she replies. Her voice is flat.
Stripped of everything. There’s no warmth, no edge.
No trace of the woman I came here with tonight.
It’s the voice of someone who finished the only mission that mattered, and now that it’s done, she doesn’t know what comes next.
Or worse, she’s already decided.
“The mission is over now,” she adds, before turning and walking away.
Not toward the safe house. Not toward me.
Just away, down the slick cobblestone street.
Her boots click against the stones, and the long coat sways around her legs.
She moves the way she moved the first time I ever saw her: alone, deliberate, a woman who doesn’t need anyone and has spent years proving it.
“Ivy.” She doesn’t stop. “Ivy!” She doesn’t turn around.
I stand there in the mist with two dead men on the ground and the taste of something bitter in the back of my throat as I watch her walk away.
Every instinct tells me to follow her. To run after her, grab her arm, and make her look at me.
To make her hear me say that this isn’t over, that we’re not over, that the mission being done doesn’t mean we’re done.
But I know her. I’ve spent weeks learning her, and I know chasing her now will only make her run faster. She isn’t walking away because she doesn’t care. She’s walking away because she does, and caring is the thing that scares her more than Vincenzo ever could.
She reaches the end of the street. For a single second, she pauses. Her shoulders rise with a breath, then fall. She doesn’t look back before turning the corner, and then she’s gone.
I stay put long enough for Liam’s team to arrive and the bodies to be handled. Long enough for the mist to turn into actual rain, which soaks through my jacket. I pull out my phone and call Liam. He answers on the first ring. “How’d it go?”
I set off down the empty street toward the corner where she disappeared. The rain pools in the gaps between the cobblestones. She’s gone. There’s no trace of her.
“We got the footage,” I tell him. “Vincenzo backed down. It’s over.”
“And my sister?”
There’s only one way I can answer the question. “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”