I already know it's bad. Good news doesn't call this late.
"Talk." I set down my glass. Eighteen-year-old Macallan, barely touched. Three hours in my home office, working through security contracts while the city rots quietly beneath its skyline.
"Tessaro's down." Ren. One of my field operators. Voice flat, controlled. "Bellevue trauma bay. Two in the chest, one in the belly. He's circling the drain."
Dante Tessaro. Forty-one years old. Fourteen years in Moretti operations. One of maybe six men I trusted with anything that mattered.
Circling the drain.
"The drive?"
Silence. The wrong kind.
"He was conscious just long enough. Our guys in the room say he grabbed the surgeon, passed her something before they could intervene." A pause. "The surgeon is Serafina Virelli."
The name detonates.
Giovanni Virelli's daughter. The one who fled to California for college, buried herself in medicine on the opposite coast, and has spent every year since building a life that has nothing to do with her father's world. I know who she is. I make it my business to know everyone connected to anyone who could be a problem.
I just didn't know she was back in New York City.
"Pull the security footage. Send it now."
I'm already reaching for my jacket.
The footage loadsby the time my driver hits the FDR.
Eight minutes to Bellevue. I watch every second on my phone, the city blurring past the window while the trauma bay plays out on a three-inch screen.
She's not what I expected.
Most people fall apart under pressure. They get loud. They freeze. Serafina Virelli owns the chaos. Barking orders. Cracking a man's chest with her bare hands. Total control. Zero hesitation.
She runs a resuscitation the way I run a kill team.
That should not be attractive.
It is.
She spots the Moretti ring on one of the escorts. There's a pause — barely a breath — and then she keeps working.
Backbone.
Inconvenient as hell.
Then I see it. Tessaro's hand, shaking, deliberate, pressing something into her scrub pocket. Small. Metal. The drive.
She doesn't look down. Doesn't flinch. Just keeps working while a dying man shoves a grenade into her pocket.
I rewind it. Watch it again.
She has it. No question.
I pocket my phone as we pull up to the hospital entrance. Only question left is whether Tessaro's still breathing.
He's not.
One of my men meets me in the corridor. Two words."He's gone."
