Behind me, Niko quietly closes his laptop. The sound of him standing, stretching, excusing himself carries the tact of a man who's learned when a room needs fewer people in it.
The door clicks shut.
Just Luca. The window. Forty years of lies.
"What do we do with it?" My breath fogs the glass.
"We use it." He crosses to stand beside me. Close but not touching. A choice I notice. "We give the federal piece to prosecutors through a channel Enzo can't reach. The internal Moretti piece we handle directly. Enzo's influence depends on controlling information. The moment the soldiers see this evidence, he loses the argument."
"And my father?"
"Giovanni is boxed in by exposure. Public leverage. He touches Bellevue, the files go wide — every name, every payment, every manufactured hit. Including his own." His voice is even. Certain. "He's spent forty years controlling the story. We take the story away from him."
I look at my reflection in the dark glass. Serafina Virelli, trauma surgeon, Giovanni's daughter, currently standing in a Moretti safehouse at 2 a.m. with a man her father would call the enemy.
"He'll never forgive me."
"No." He doesn't dress it up.
"Good."
His hand comes up — slow, deliberate, giving me every chance to step away — and settles at the small of my back. Warm. Steady. Just there.
I don't step away.
We stand at the window together, and I breathe through the last of it. The city does what cities do. It keeps moving, indifferent and alive. I match my breathing to it until the seismic thing settles into something I can carry.
His hand hasn't moved.
I'm aware of every point of contact. The heat of him through my shirt. The way his breathing has slowed to match mine without either of us deciding to. The particular quality of his stillness — not absence, never absence with Luca — just presence held carefully, like something he's afraid to break.
Neither of us moves from the window for a while.
Below, the city does its thing — a cab, a dog walker, a couple walking close together in the cold — and I watch it, letting the silence settle into something neither comfortable nor hostile. A third thing. Something new.
"Can I ask you something?"
"You're going to regardless."
Fair. "Girlfriends."
He turns his head slightly. "What about them?"
"How many?" I keep my eyes on the street. "Ballpark."
A pause. "Why?"
"Because you look like that and you run in circles where women make very poor decisions around men with your net worth. I'm doing math."
He's quiet for a moment. Then: "Many."
"Define many."
"Many." The word is flat. Not boastful. "Women have never been a problem for me to find."
"I'll bet." I ignore the thing that tightens in my throat. "So what — rotating roster? Someone permanent?"
"No one permanent." He looks back at the window. "It doesn't usually get that far."
