"Nadia."
One word. My name. In the voice of a man who has had me against a wall and is now standing in a room with eight bodies on the floor, bleeding through a dressing I put on him, saying my name like it is the whole sentence.
I am running out of things to say that are not the truth.
"Not directly. If you come for me, Matteo will know, and neither of us will live through what comes next."
"I'll come find you."
He is not arguing. He is informing.
Enzo still carried influence within the family, old loyalties predating prison and bloodshed. But Alessandro had become the acting Don the day Vittorio Moretti was arrested fifteen years ago. Nobody questioned whose orders mattered now.
I take a breath, I do not let it become a breath. The kind a woman takes when a man has just walked past every wall she has built in fifteen years and is standing on the other side of them, bleeding, not asking, not negotiating.
Stay on the operation, Nadia.Eight men on the floor. Matteo is two hours out, less, once he hears. A story to build, a lie to tell, and a man to get out of this forest alive.
I cross to the kitchen counter and unscrew the lamp base. The same base he opened and resealed when he thought I was asleep.
The tracker is small. Black. Waiting patiently where he left it.
I hold it up between two fingers.
His jaw does that tiny thing. That tiny twitch a man makes when the woman he has been running an operation against looks at him and saysI see you.The second time since the warehouse, I have made his face do that.
"Take it with you."
I let it fall into his palm. His fingers brush mine. I do not flinch. He notices I do not flinch, and I think that is worse for him than if I had.
"Who are you, Nadia?" He steps closer.
His voice is not a cop's voice. It is a man's voice. The man who had me against the wall and wants the rest of me.
I cannot give him the rest of me.
"Get out."
He looks at me one more time, the wall in it, the lamp in it, and thewho are youin it.
Then he goes.
Through the back, through the trees. Wounded. On foot. Eighteen miles to the nearest road. His dressing soaking through.
He is goingto make it.
Not optimism. Operational assessment. He moves like a man who has survived places far worse than any forest. He has the gun. He has the dressing. He has been in worse geometry than this, and his body knows it, and his body is going to carry him out whether the rest of him cooperates or not.
There is another thing. The thing underneath the assessment. I am going to sit with it only for the time I have left before Matteo arrives.
The men who have decided things about me have not always survived the decision. Men decide to want me. Men decide to use me. Men decide to stand between me and whatever is coming. They do not always come out of that intact.
No one has ever died from me deciding I want them alive.
I have not made that decision often. I can count the people I have actively decided to keep alive on fewer fingers than I have. Alessandro. Matteo, before I knew him. The woman in Ginevra whose name I will never say in any room that might be listening.
Sean Donovan is on the list now.
I made the decision somewhere between the kitchen window and this doorframe. I did not consider the operational implications or the seventeen reasons this is the worst possible decision to make about a man who has my name on a federal warrant.
