Luca says nothing beside me. But I feel him — still and coiled and ready, watching everything. Not intervening. Letting me run.
And beneath that stillness, something else. Something controlled so tightly it's almost invisible.
He's sitting three feet from the man whose voice we heard on that recording. The man who authorized the first strike. The man who built a war on his own family's blood and called it loyalty.
And Luca is showing him nothing.
The control that takes — the absolute, surgical discipline of it — hits me somewhere unexpected. I've seen him break three men without raising his voice. I've seen him go still with the specific stillness of something dangerous. But this is different. This is Luca Moretti holding a grenade and looking like he's holding a glass of water, and the effort is invisible to everyone in this room except me.
I look back at Enzo.
There it is.
Enzo suggests the conference room.
It isn't a suggestion.
We sit — Enzo at the head of the table because of course he does, Luca to my left, two men I don't know flanking Enzo like decorative threats. Glass and steel, and the kind of quiet that costs money to maintain.
Enzo folds his hands on the table. "The situation has become complicated."
"It was complicated before I was in it."
"True." He acknowledges this with a small nod, which surprises me. "But your presence adds a dimension. You have something people want. You carry a name that has been at the center of this city's bloodiest conflict for forty years — a name both families have spent decades either weaponizing or mourning." He looks at me steadily. "That makes you useful. And useful things require careful management."
"Management." I repeat it like I'm tasting something off. "Is that what we're calling it."
"Serafina." My name in his mouth is nothing like my name in Luca's mouth. Flat. Instrumental. The way you'd say the name of a file. "Luca's protection is a resource. Resources have limits. The most efficient resolution to your situation is a negotiated return to your father under conditions that serve both families."
Silence.
I smile.
Not the smile I give difficult patients or impatient administrators. The one that lives underneath that. Sharper. Older. The one my father's world taught me before I decided to leave it.
"I'm nobody's chip." Flat. Final. "Not yours, not my father's, not anyone's. The drive stays with me. I stay where I choose. And if either family decides otherwise—" I let it sit for a breath. "I have copies of everything on that drive in three separate locations, and a journalist at the Times who owes me a favor. So." I fold my own hands on the table, mirroring him. "Let's try this again. What can I actually do for you, Mr. Moretti?"
The room is very quiet.
Enzo looks at me for a long moment. Then he looks at Luca.
Luca looks back. Says nothing. But the muscle in his jaw ticks once — tight and controlled — and I feel the weight of what that silence costs him.
The man he's protecting me from is sitting at the head of this table, and Luca is backing my play anyway.
Loyalty on one side.
Me on the other.
He chooses me without a word, and it settles into my stomach like a fist I wasn't expecting.
Enzo's mouth curves. Just slightly. "You're Giovanni's daughter after all."
"I'm nobody's daughter. I'm a trauma surgeon. There's a difference."
What follows isforty minutes of the most sophisticated sparring I've ever participated in — and I once argued a hospitalboard out of cutting the trauma unit budget with a PowerPoint and sheer nerve.
Enzo tests every angle. He probes my relationship with the drive — how much I understand, how much I've shared. He asks about my father with the careful neutrality of a man who already knows the answer and wants to see if I'll lie. He floats the idea of a "voluntary cooperation framework" twice, rewording it each time, like I might not notice it's the same cage with a different latch.
