He lets out a low chuckle. A rare crack in his stoic armor.
He slowly withdraws his cock from my body. The loss of his heat leaves an immediate ache in my core. He steps back, adjusting his clothing with the same ruthless efficiency he applies to a reload. He grabs a clean towel from his duffel bag and gently cleans my thighs, his rough hands shockingly tender.
He pulls the hem of his shirt down over my hips, restoring a small shred of my modesty.
I stay seated on the edge of the metal desk, my body humming with residual pleasure. I watch him as he turns his attention back to the wall of security monitors.
He taps a key on the keyboard next to my hip. One of the camera feeds expands on the center screen. It is a drone feed, high above the city, showing the roof of a large commercial building.
"Your clinic is safe," Nico says quietly. His eyes scan the glowing screen. "The strike force pulled back ten minutes ago. They realized I was no longer in the kill zone. Vincenzo dispatched a sweeper. Your medical bag, your winter coat, your boots, your clothes — all of it will be back in this building by sundown. We do not leave loose ends in a kill zone."
"Good." I let out a slow, shaky breath. "Then I can go to work tomorrow."
He turns his head. The pale light illuminates the sudden, cold tension settling over his sharp features. The man who just hadme on the desk is gone. The Costa family killer is looking directly at me.
"No." His voice is flat. Absolute.
"Nico, I'm not shutting down my practice because?—"
"The men at the clinic were hunting me," he interrupts, his tone dropping an octave. "Because of the intel leak. Because my brother is moving against their armory network on the South Side tonight."
"Then why did they go to my clinic?" I cross my arms, my sassy defense mechanism instantly rebooting. "Did they just guess you were hiding in my treatment room?"
He steps closer to the desk. He places his large hands flat on the metal surface, trapping me in his space once again.
"They didn’t track my phone to the clinic, Priya." The deadly seriousness in his eyes sends a fresh chill over my heated skin. "I was staking out your block last night for a reason. I was on a reconnaissance mission, tracking a Bellanti weapon and money laundering pipeline."
He points a finger at the expanded monitor screen.
"That operation is being run out of the commercial property connected to your clinic's west wall. The building connected to your clinic. The one you work beside every day."
The room narrows.
"They were not there for me this morning, Priya." Nico's voice is a low, terrifying truth. "They were there because the Bellanti family owns the building next door. And tomorrow, we’re going to clear it out for good."
6
NICO
The green cursorblinks on the third surveillance monitor. It flashes against a sea of encrypted black code. Coordinates. Leaseholder names. Shell corporations. The data scrolls down the screen, casting a sickly, neon glow.
I stare at the text. Enamel grinds against enamel.
She is asleep on the worn leather sofa under the wool blanket. The adrenaline crash hit her hard after the escape, the argument, and the brutal truth about the building beside her clinic. The day has bled past while she slept.
I worked through the grey afternoon and the purple dusk without leaving these monitors, building the case against the building pressed against her clinic wall one piece of code at a time. She is wrapped in the black fabric of my shirt. It hangs off her soft curves, smeared with the dried blood from my shoulder. She smells like me. I touched her on a metal desk in a room built for war.
But the screen in front of me tells a different story. It tells me the war is already at her front door.
The strike force wasn’t the real discovery. The real discovery is what they were protecting. The building connected to the west wall of Priya’s clinic—the abandoned brick structure with the boarded-up windows and the rusted fire escape—is a Bellanti property. It operates under a shell LLC, a blind trust managed by Rourke.
She walks past a Bellanti auto-shop armory every morning. She unlocks her doors, turns on her lights, and heals people ten feet away from the men who murdered my family.
A low, violent hum starts at the base of my skull. It vibrates down my spine, sinking into my blood. Decades of cold discipline evaporate. I am not a soldier right now. I am a predator looking at a map of a hunting ground.
She is not an accident. Or she is, and that is infinitely worse. The universe put the only warm, vibrant thing I have ever wanted right next to a ticking bomb. The Bellantis firebomb properties. They turn entire neighborhoods into collateral damage. They already burned the building beside her clinic once. They nearly burned her livelihood to the ground. And now they are operating right next door to her.
I will rip their throats out with my bare hands.
