I work through it.
The guard's back stays turned.
The lock gives a millimeter.
Then he turns around.
He sees my hands. Sees exactly what I'm doing. His face does the thing faces do when something has gone wrong on their watch — flash of alarm, rapid calculation of consequence — and he's across the room in three strides, one hand reaching for my arm?—
I scream.
Not from fear.
From strategy.
Full-throated, everything I have, sharp enough to punch through concrete and steel and however many floors separate me from Niko's feeds and Luca's heat signatures and the man who is bleeding somewhere in this building and absolutely, categorically, coming through that door.
I need him to know which one.
The guard's hand slams over my mouth.
Too late.
The door opens.
My father walks in.
We look at each other across the dim concrete room — my wrists still bound, his hands still clean, forty years of everything wrong between us filling the space like smoke. He waves the guard back with two fingers. Sits across from me like we're at dinner.
"Figlia mia," he says. My daughter.
"Don't." My voice comes out even. I'm proud of my voice right now. "Not tonight."
He does it anyway. The warmth. The patience. The careful architecture of a man who has spent his entire life making cages look like homes. He didn't order the fixer's move — he wants me to know that. Wants me to understand he's here to help, to manage this, to protect me the way he's always protected me.
I let him finish.
"No."
He blinks.
"No." I lean forward as far as the zip ties allow. "I'm not coming home. I'm not giving you the drive. I'm not letting you contain this the way you've contained everything for forty years — paying for hits, feeding a manufactured war, turning your own daughter into a bargaining chip because you couldn't imagine a world where she got to just be a person." Clean and cold and not a tremor in it. "And if anything happens to me — to Luca, to anyone I care about — that evidence goes wide. Every journalist, every federal prosecutor, every name on that drive's list. Simultaneously. I set it up before the gala. It's already done."
Silence.
"You don't own me." Quiet. Absolute. "You never did. You just made me believe I owed you something." I hold his gaze. "I'm done paying."
He opens his mouth.
The door opens.
Luca moves through it the way he moves through everything — with the total efficiency of a man who has already decided what happens next and is simply executing the decision. The guard at the window goes down first. The one off to the side doesn't fully turn before Luca is past him. Neither of them makes a sound worth mentioning.
Two seconds.
I missed it. I was watching the threat form in my father's face, and the room rearranged itself around me without my knowledge, and now Luca is at my side, blade already through the zip tie at my wrists, and I genuinely cannot account for when any of it happened.
He's still bleeding. Dark through the white of his shirt, soaked through the bandage at his side. Every trained instinct I have wants to go straight there.
