Page 133 of The Cost of Silence

Emotion surges up, hot and sharp. “What if he dies?”

For a second, the mask slips. I see it all, rage, fear, grief pushed down so hard it must hurt, the old instincts my presence has been tempering since the night he pulled a man off me.

“Then whoever ordered this,” he says, voice low and lethal, “will learn the difference between us trying to be clean and us remembering exactly how unclean we know how to be.”

A chill walks down my spine, but it’s not fear of him. It’s fear of what the world is turning him back into. “Promise me something,” I say, throat tight.

He studies me warily. “Depends what it is.”

“Promise me that when you go after them, and I know you will, you’ll do it smart. Not just hard. Use your brain, not just your gun. Don’t throw away everything your dad built because they’re trying to drag you back into the dark.”

“You sound like Adi,” he says.

“Good,” I reply. “Usually means someone’s making sense.”

He huffs out a breath that might almost be a laugh if it weren’t so exhausted. “We’re not going to be passive anymore,” he says quietly. “That’s over. But we’re not going to be stupid, either. We’ll find the leak, we’ll cut it out, and we’ll deal with Orlov and whoever’s feeding him. All of them. I can be my father’s son without becoming his worst days.”

“And me?” I ask. “Where do I fit in this battle plan?”

He reaches up, cupping my face, thumbs warm on my damp skin. “You stay alive,” he says simply. “You help us see angles we’d miss. You keep being the woman who turned my penthouse into a place my family wants to be. And you do not, under any circumstances, decide that the way to keep us safe is to walk out of here and go hide alone somewhere.”

The thought had flickered through my mind, this idea that maybe if I left, if I took myself off the board, the attacks would stop. That they’d turn their attention back to boardrooms and docks and places I can’t see.

“She’ll be safer away from you,” my mother will say when she hears about today. I know it. She’s not wrong.

But as I look at Nico now, eyes haunted, jaw tight, shoulders bearing weight old and new, I understand something I didn’t before.

Leaving doesn’t make any of this less dangerous. It just makes me easier to grab. “I’m not going anywhere,” I say. “You’re stuck with me, Mancini.”

His exhale is slow, the edge easing off his shoulders just slightly. “Good.”

He pulls me in then, towel and all, folding me against him. I tuck my face into his chest and let myself sink into the solid heat of him, the steady hammer of his heart under my ear.

For a moment, I let my eyes close. I see Rossi’s face again, pale and determined; the flash of the gun; the way the blood bloomed under my hands. I see the rat on the table, the strips of my article, the long shadow of an uncle I’ve never met and enemies who know too much.

We have a traitor somewhere, maybe in their organization, maybe in the building, maybe in the newsroom I used to call home. It could be someone who hears things in the kitchen, a nanny scooping up Letty’s toys, a driver on the payroll who thinks loyalty is optional. It could be a tech who installed the cameras and decided to double dip. It could be someone at the Ledger still taking calls from the same ghost who fed me my first poison-dipped tip.

We don’t know. That’s the part that scares me most.

I open my eyes, fingers curling in the fabric of his shirt. “Okay,” I say quietly, mostly to myself. “They wanted a warning. They got one too.”

He pulls back just enough to look at me. “What do you mean?”

“They told us they can hit us on the street,” I say. “Fine. Message received. But they also told us we’re getting close enough to matter. Close enough that we can smell them. That means they’ve slipped up somewhere. And if there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s follow tiny mistakes to the people who made them.”

His mouth curves, but there’s nothing soft in it. “That’s my girl.”

Something twists in my chest at the possessiveness in a way that has nothing to do with ownership and everything to do with being chosen, again and again, even when it’s dangerous.

I press my forehead to his. “Then let’s make sure they regret ever spelling my name,” I murmur.

His eyes darken, glinting with a promise that is equal parts love and violence. “Oh, we will,” he says.

Outside, somewhere in a fluorescent-lit operating room, a man who stood between me and a bullet is fighting for his life.

Inside this bathroom, wrapped in a towel and an embrace I never planned on, I realize we’ve crossed a line we can’t uncross. This isn’t just about an article anymore, or old debts, or even the Mancini name.

This is personal.