"Don't." I turn. "Don't use that voice. Don't manage me. Tell me what you know about my father and the men who just came through your front door."
Luca stands in the center of the room — jacket gone, shirt untucked on one side, dried blood on his forearm that isn't his.
He looks like what he is.
A weapon someone forgot to put away.
My pulse does its stupid thing. I ignore it.
"What I know gets people buried."
"I'm a trauma surgeon. I've seen buried."
"Not like this."
I cross to him. Two feet away. Close enough to make it a choice.
"Try me."
He studies me the way he studies everything — threat assessment, exit routes, calculated risk. Then his jaw shifts.
"Your father has been feeding information to both sides of this conflict for years. Not the hits. Not directly. But the timing — which jobs got greenlit, which targets got warnings — isn't random. Someone with access to both families has been steering."
"You think it's my father."
"I think the evidence points somewhere I can't prove yet."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only honest one I have."
Cold moves through me. Rage. Grief. The specific nausea of suspecting your own blood and knowing you can never unsuspect it.
I hold his gaze and don't let any of it show, because I learned that from my father.
Which is its own kind of hell.
"The man in my trauma bay," I say. "What was he carrying that got him killed?"
"Proof." Luca's voice doesn't change. Ever. "That the war between our families was engineered. That someone outside both houses has been profiting from it for decades."
The room goes so quiet I can hear the guards downstairs. A floorboard. A car on the street.
"I want to call my father."
"That's not a good idea."
"Wasn't asking."
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he crosses to the desk, picks up a black burner, and sets it on the edge without a word.
I take it.
My father answerson the second ring.
"Serafina." My name in his mouth — warm, deliberate, the voice of my entire childhood. Boardrooms and bedtime stories in the same breath. "Figlia mia— my daughter. I've been worried."
I keep my back to Luca. It doesn't help. I feel him like a change in barometric pressure, steady and unavoidable behind me.
