The corridor goes airless.
Six guns.
Luca doesn't move. Doesn't speak. Doesn't give Enzo a single thing to read.
But his hand at my back presses once — deliberate, steady, certain.
I've got you.
Three words in a touch.
Even here. Even now. Even with six guns and his own blood soaking through the bandage, and his uncle waiting for an answer that's going to cost someone everything.
I've got you.
22
LUCA
Six guns.
I count them the way I count everything — fast, automatic, the inventory of a man who has spent his entire adult life reading rooms for the variables that kill you. Six guns, six men, Enzo standing behind them with his hands clasped and his warmth performing itself, and the patience of someone who believes he's already won.
He hasn't won.
He just doesn't know it yet.
"Put the weapons down," Enzo says to his men. Not to me — he's performing for the audience. "We're family. This is a conversation."
"It is," I say. "Let's have it."
I reach into my jacket.
Three of the six guns track the movement. I move slowly — unthreatening, nothing in my hand yet — and pull out my phone.Unlock it. Pull up the file Niko sent me while I was bleeding on the gallery floor and Serafina was somewhere above me in a building I hadn't reached yet.
The final file.
I hold the phone up. Press play.
Enzo's voice fills the corridor.
Not his current voice — this is Enzo decades ago, younger and less careful, speaking on a recorded line he didn't know was being kept.
"Greenlight the Castellano hit. Make it look Virelli. I want the first strike on record before the end of the month."
A second voice — the politician, younger, less polished. "And the payment structure?"
"Through the security contracts. Same as before. Clean."
"And if the Morettis trace it back?"
A pause. Enzo's voice, comfortable, certain: "They won't. I'll make sure of it."
I stop the playback.
The corridor is very quiet.
I watch the six men understand what they just heard. It moves through them like weather — the soldier nearest the door first, his gun dropping an inch, then two. Then the man beside him. Then, one by one, the rest.
