"Now, Niko."
He works faster.
Giovanni is still in the gallery when I pass back through.
I almost don't stop.
He looks at me — at the bandage, at the blood darkening through the gauze, at whatever is on my face right now that makes his two men stir on the floor and immediately go still — and he opens his mouth.
"I didn't order any of this."
"I know."
He stares at me. He doesn't understand yet that I am walking past him, not toward him. That the only reason he is still breathing is because his face when the shot rang out was the face of a man who didn't know it was coming. His daughter saw it. I saw it. That's the only thing saving him right now.
"If you had," I say, "this conversation would be different."
I keep walking.
I leave him standing in the dark with his unconscious men and whatever is left of his certainty.
He doesn't follow.
The trail goes cold twice.
The first time, I break three fingers on a parking garage attendant on Little West 12th who suddenly remembers waving through a van at midnight without logging it. I'm not proud of it. I do it anyway. Serafina would tell me there was another way. She'd be right. I'll let her be right about it later, when she's safe. When I can afford the luxury of being a better man.
The second time, Niko pulls a partial plate from a bodega camera — four layers of shell companies, one property management firm, three buildings.
One warehouse. Gansevoort Street.
"She left something," Niko says when I'm two blocks out.
I stop.
"Transfer footage — a little while ago. They moved vehicles. She went down during the transfer. They thought she was unconscious." A pause. "She wasn't."
He sends me the still.
Pavement. A smear that looks like nothing.
Except it's not nothing. Three drops in a pattern so precise it could only be intentional — equidistant, measured. The spacing of a woman who has spent her career working in millimeters and never does anything without a reason.
A surgeon's mark.
She knew I was coming. She knew I'd have Niko pulling every frame within a mile radius. And she used seconds on the ground, and whatever blood she could reach to leave me a trail only I would recognize.
She trusted me.
I stand on Gansevoort Street with a bullet wound and blood on my Tom Ford and feel it rip through me — not pain, not relief. Bigger than either. Her name all through it. The kind of feeling that doesn't fit inside a body, that spills out the edges and rewrites everything it touches.
She trusted me.
After the camera and the editing and the thirty seconds I looked away at the wrong moment and got her taken — she trusted me.
I don't deserve it.
I'm going to earn it anyway.
