No drive on the body. I already knew that. Watched Tessaro put it in her pocket with his own dying hands.
The trauma bayis quieter when I get there. The worst of it is over.
She's still there.
Standing in the center of the bay like she hasn't moved since the footage cut off. Hands at her sides. Post-resuscitation protocol. I can see her going through it. Methodical. Unhurried. Her team moves around her. Nobody touches her. Nobody gets too close.
She commands space without trying. Every person in this room is orbiting her, and none of them knows it.
My men see me arrive. They go still the way trained men go still when someone above them walks in. She notices that before she notices me. I watch her register their reaction, file it, process it.
Then she turns.
And looks directly at me.
Green eyes. Sharp jaw. Hair pulled back, a few pieces loose around her face. No makeup. No polish. Just clean skin and bone structure that doesn't need any goddamn help.
Scrubs. Someone else's blood on the sleeve.
And she's still the most dangerous thing in this room, including me.
She looks like a war I'd lose on purpose.
I shut that down. Hard.
Her gaze moves to my pocket. Then back to my face. She's already calculating. I can see it. The rapid assessment. The threat evaluation. She's doing to me what I'm doing to her.
Except what I'm doing to her involves a hell of a lot more than threat assessment.
I'm thinking about the way her scrub top pulls at her collarbone. About the way she holds herself like she's daring the room totest her. About those hands — the ones that just cracked a man's sternum without flinching — wrapped around me, pulling me closer, digging into my back while I find out what sound she makes when she stops being composed.
Fuck.
I shut it down. Harder.
She's a Virelli. She's off-limits. She's holding something that belongs to me.
That's all she is.
My jaw tightens because some part of me — the part that hasn't been told no in a very long time — doesn't believe that for a single fucking second.
I callMatteo before I make it back to the car.
He picks up on the second ring. Of course he does. Matteo doesn't miss calls any more than he misses targets.
"I heard." No preamble. That's my brother. CEO of Moretti Global Security, ten years as a Navy SEAL before that, and every word out of his mouth is deliberate. Nothing wasted. "Tessaro."
"He gave the drive to the Virelli girl."
Silence. The kind that means he's already three steps ahead, running scenarios. "You're sure?"
"Watched it happen on the security feed."
Another pause. "Enzo's going to want her contained."
"Enzo's going to call me in about thirty seconds."
"Then you already know what he's going to say." Matteo's voice is even. Unreadable. "And you already know you're not going to listen." A pause. "Do this right and there's room to talk about expanding your role. You understand what I'm saying?"
