The partition is closed.Ren can't see me. The windows are blacked out and the city outside is muffled. I am alone in the dark with her voice in my head sayingdon't touch mein that wrecked, throaty tone that meant the exact opposite.
I handle it.
Fast and rough, hand braced against the door, jaw locked, her face behind my eyes whether I want it there or not. The sound she made when she shoved away from me — that sharp little exhale, half fury, half want she wouldn't admit to with a gun toher head. What she'd sound like underneath me. Whether she'd fight it, give in, or both.
Both is what I want.
Both is what would wreck me.
It takes less time than it should.
It helps less than I needed.
I fix my jacket. Breathe. Shove her back into the locked part of my head.
Once. That's all that was.
It doesn't happen again.
My phone buzzes.
Niko.
Hit squad identified. Not Virelli. Not Moretti. Outside professionals, clean, no family ties. Someone else sent them.
I read it twice.
Then I sit in the dark and think about Serafina sleeping — or not sleeping — in my safehouse with a dead man's drive and enemies she doesn't know she has yet.
Someone else.
Shit.
I knock twice on the partition.
Ren's eyes find mine in the rearview.
"Turn around. Get me back to the house. Now."
He doesn't ask why. He never does. The car swings hard and accelerates, and I sit back and stare at the ceiling and think about a woman who walked into that brownstone without looking back, like she had everything under control.
She doesn't know the list just got longer.
She doesn't know who's on it.
5
SERAFINA
The brownstone is beautiful.
I hate it immediately.
It sits on a quiet stretch of 92nd Street. Original ironwork. Clean limestone. Window boxes with live plants someone actually waters. The SUV pulls into a private gated alley before I can clock the street name, and two men in earpieces materialize from the shadows like they were grown there.
Luca isn't one of them.
A man named Kosta takes my gym bag before I can argue about it, carries it inside, and sets it on a bench in the foyer like a bellman at a hotel I didn't book. He's polite. Professional. Doesn't speak unless spoken to.
