Then he steps back.
Puts the wall back up, smooth and immediate, as if it were never down.
"Lock your door," he says.
He takes the photograph. "I'll post someone in the hall."
He leaves.
I stand in the middle of the room, staring at the closed door.
Furious that he walked away. Furious that part of me aches because he did.
I lock the door.
It doesn't help.
6
LUCA
Within the hour, the brownstone is running like a war room.
Caruso has the exterior feeds pulled up on four monitors. The photograph was slid through the mail slot in a twenty-second window between guard rotations, executed with a precision that wasn't amateurish.
Whoever sent it knows how we move.
Which means someone talked. Or someone watched long enough to learn.
Neither option sits clean.
"Pull the rotation logs," I tell Caruso. "Cross-reference everyone with access to this address in the last seventy-two hours. You know what to look for."
He nods and gets to work.
I stand at the window with untouched coffee and watch 92nd Street do nothing. Quiet block. Old money and discretion.Nobody walks a dog this late up here. Just the occasional cab and the specific silence of a city pretending it doesn't have teeth.
The man I posted in Serafina's hall reports no movement.
I go up to check on her anyway.
Not because I need to. Because she just found a threat slid under her door in a house full of my men, and I need to know she's not sitting in that room coming apart at the seams.
I tell myself that's the reason.
I knock once.No answer. I try the handle — unlocked, the way I told her it would be — and open it two inches.
She's asleep.
Or close enough to it. On top of the covers, still dressed, one arm across her stomach like she fell mid-thought. The lamp on the nightstand is still on. Her face in sleep looks nothing like her face awake — the jaw unclenched, the line between her brows smoothed out, something almost unguarded in the set of her mouth.
I stand in the doorway longer than I should.
She looks younger like this. Softer. Like the woman underneath the surgeon, the one she keeps locked behind twelve-hour shifts and that razor wit she uses like a scalpel.
My chest does something I don't have a name for.
I've stood in rooms with dangerous people my entire adult life and felt nothing but the cold arithmetic of threat and response.This is not that. This is something that doesn't have a tactical category and doesn't fit in any part of my operational framework — and the fact that it doesn't fit is its own kind of alarm.
