"It's meant to destabilize me." She looks at the bag. "Make me panic. Make a mistake." Her jaw sets. "I'm not going to do either."
I look at her — this woman who not long ago came apart in my hands and is now standing in my study analyzing threat escalation patterns like she's reviewing a chart — and it hits me low in the gut. Not the time. Not even close.
"No," I say. "You're not,”
I call Niko.
Niko arrivesat the brownstone at 9 a.m., looking like he slept under his desk. He probably did. He's slight, permanently caffeinated, and the best tech operative I've ever worked with.
He stops dead in the doorway when he sees Serafina.
"You're the surgeon."
"You're the tech guy." She hands him a coffee. She made it exactly right — black, two sugars — which means she either asked someone or noticed. Either way it lands. Niko blinks at the cup like she's handed him a small miracle.
"I like her," he tells me.
"Focus."
He focuses.
We setup in the study — Niko's equipment spread across the desk, three monitors running, Serafina in the chair to my left because she's the only one the dead man trusted, and I'm not letting her out of my sight.
She knows it. She hasn't argued. After the badge, the math shifted between us, and we both know that, too.
The drive opens in layers.
Niko works through the second encryption key — the one traced to the Virelli shell company, the one that required Serafina's presence to access — and the files unspool across the screens like a wound opening. Ledgers. Account transfers. Shell companies, four layers deep. Audio files timestamped over years — hits framed as "contract resolutions" in corporate bloodless language, which makes it worse.
Serafina goes still beside me.
"Those aren't family hits." Quiet. "The framing. The language. That's not how my father's people talk."
"It's not how ours talk either."
She looks at me. "Someone was mimicking both sides."
"Creating hits that looked like betrayals. Feeding the feud." I watch the files load. "Keeping two families at war so the real player stayed invisible."
Niko keeps pulling threads — names from the audio metadata, cross-referencing with the ledger accounts. Politicians. Police commissioners. A network of people who publicly stand for law and order and quietly bankroll its opposite.
Then Serafina leans forward.
"Stop." Her voice sharpens. "Go back."
She points at a name in the ledger. Recurring transfer. Quarterly. Substantial.
"Richard Hale." Flat. Recognition and revulsion in equal measure. "Former city councilman. He's on Bellevue's donor board and funds three of our charity programs. Gave a speechlast spring about community investment and public health." Her mouth tightens. "He shook my hand."
"And he's been bankrolling hits for years," Niko says, not looking up. He pulls up a second thread. "He's not working alone. Every buried investigation, every witness who disappeared before they could talk, has a name attached." He points to the screen. "Dennis Falco. Former NYPD Deputy Commissioner. Thirty years on the force, retired with commendations. Clean record." A beat. "Nobody gets that far with a clean record. They get that far with a record that's been cleaned."
Serafina stares at the screen.
I watch her process it — finding rot in the one place she believed was clean. She built her life around Bellevue, around the belief that her work existed outside all of this. Finding Hale's name here isn't just information. It's a violation.
I want to say something. I don't have the words.
I settle for what I'm certain of.
