He said her name. He put her in his filthy mouth.
I do not negotiate. I do not calculate the value of the data on that drive.
I raise my weapon and pull the trigger.
Rourke fires at the exact same moment. Sparks explode off the steel doorframe next to my head. Concrete shrapnel bites into my cheek. I do not flinch. My first round catches the seam where his vest opens above the shoulder strap. It shatters his collarbone and spins him violently to the side. His assault rifle clatters to the floor.
He screams, a wet, ragged sound, and drops to his knees. His left hand scrambles for the pistol holstered at his thigh.
I cross the room in three long strides.
My boot connects with his jaw, a brutal, sickening crack of bone snapping. Rourke collapses onto his back, gasping for air, blood pouring from his mouth. I stand over him, the barrel of my Glock pointed directly between his eyes.
"You don't say her name," I whisper. The venom in my voice surprises even me. "You don't think about her. You don't breathe the same air as her."
Rourke stares up at me, terror finally breaking through his arrogant facade. He recognizes the monster standing over him. He realizes the man in the tailored suit is still standing there—only now every contract has collapsed to one line, and his name is the variable being subtracted.
"The data," Rourke chokes out, spitting blood onto the concrete. "The transfer is at ninety percent. You kill me, you lose the encryption key. The ledgers are gone, Costa. Your operation is dead."
He thinks I care about the operation. He thinks I care about millions of dollars or strategic advantages.
I look at the laptop. The green progress bar crawls forward. 92%. The files on Rourke’s laptop contain everything: the hidden Bellanti cargo routes, the rerouted shipping schedules Jeff buried inside the Costa system, and the shell-company filings my own fronts used to make the laundering look legitimate. Jeff’s secondary drive can still prove pieces of thescheme, but this upload has the full chain. Natalia’s firm processed those shell companies without knowing who stood behind them, and her name is buried in the metadata as counsel of record. If Rourke sends this file to the South Side, the Bellantis will not just know I brought her into the operation. They will have enough to twist the records, leak them to the Feds, and make her look complicit before she ever gets the chance to prove she was used.
If I secure the laptop, I hand my family the cleanest weapon we have against the Bellantis. But Natalia remains inside the file, tied to the shell companies, the transit reroutes, and me.
There is no choice. There never was.
I shift my aim. I fire three rounds directly into the laptop. The screen shatters in a spectacular explosion of glass and sparks. The hard drive beneath it disintegrates. The motherboard fractures into useless plastic shrapnel.
The green light dies. The transfer fails. The ledgers are destroyed.
I just burned six months of strategy. I just destroyed millions of dollars of leverage. I just crippled my own family's tactical advantage.
And I feel unshakeable peace.
Natalia is safe. The link is severed. She is clean.
Rourke stares at the smoking ruin of the laptop in utter disbelief. "You're insane," he wheezes. "You just blew your own op."
"The op is dead," I say.
I put a bullet through his head.
The loud crack rings out, bouncing off the concrete walls. Rourke's body goes slack. The room falls into an oppressive silence, broken only by the hiss of sparking wires from the destroyed laptop.
I lower my weapon. My hands are steady. The chaotic storm that has raged inside me since the moment Natalia walked into Il Corvo has finally settled. The Fixer is still in this room. The contract just changed. Every line of it ends in Natalia's name now, and I will redraft the whole city to enforce it.
The steel door at the far end of the maintenance bay kicks open with a deafening crash.
Matteo and Dante storm into the room. Their tactical rifles are raised, laser sights cutting through the smoke and dust. They sweep the corners in perfect, lethal synchronization. When they see me standing over Rourke's body, they lower their weapons.
Dante moves first. His frame blocks the doorway as he scans the perimeter. His eyes dart to the shattered laptop on the folding table, then to the smoking barrel of my gun.
Matteo steps into the light. His jaw is locked in a tight line. He looks at the dead Bellanti enforcer, then zeroes in on the destroyed hard drive. He understands the mechanics of data transfers. He knows what I just did.
"Tell me you got a backup off that drive before you shot it," Matteo says. His voice is dangerously calm. It is the voice he uses before he orders a city block leveled.
I meet my brother's stare. I do not blink. I do not offer excuses.
