"Stephano is looking for a guy." Mario starts without preamble.
I plop into the chair in front of his desk, not showing how much his words set my adrenaline flying. I've been waiting for something like this. "It's hush-hush; Carlos cannot find out about this."
I understand. It's Carlos's job to find all the dirt on lawyers, judges, prosecutors, and everybody down to the cleaning crew. Mario and I exchange a glance; we wereright in our assumption that sooner or later the Contis would make a move on the Orsi territory.
The question of how Mario knows this lies on the tip of my tongue, but I swallow it down. We all have our secrets, and it seems Mario already has an in with the Contis. If I pull this off, it'll make him look even better to them and give me the in I've been looking for.
"What is it?"
Mario holds out a USB stick to me. "Get to the main server at the Consolidated Judicial Records Facility, insert this, and call Stephano; he'll tell you what to do next."
He hands me a burner phone and an ID card that says my name is Pablo Esteban, with IT.
"Give me twenty-four hours, and I'll call Stephano."
Mario holds on to the phone and ID card as I try to take them. He locks eyes with me, "This is it. Don't fuck this up."
Don’t fuck it up. The phrase tastes like blood in my mouth. I tuck the stick into my jacket; it feels heavier than it should. This is the hinge I’ve been building toward. One good job, one clean move, and Stephano stops being a voice on a burner and starts being someone whose nod matters.
The Consolidated Judicial Records Facility sits behind a strip of anonymous façades, the kind of building designed to be invisible until you need it. I walk up with the badgeon my chest and a resentful frown on my face, like I don't want to be here, keeping the slowly scarring mess that is the right side of my face averted. The security desk is full of bored men who’ve seen every variant of human drama and graded it for interest. I hand the card over like it’s routine. They look. They punch something into a terminal. A light turns green. The little rituals of bureaucracy are ideal for people who want to blend in seamlessly.
The service elevator descends to the basement, where the servers reside. The air there tastes like metal and recycled breath. Racks rise in rows, blinking like a city of small, patient stars. Technicians move in measured paths; nobody looks up from their panels unless something punctures their routine.
I scope the racks fast and quiet, the way I measure a man’s weakness in a fight. The device Mario gave me is colder than I expected. It fits in my palm like a promise. I don’t know the language of their machines, and I don’t need to. My job is a thing of movement and timing: be the hand that places a key where no one’s heart will race at the sight of it.
A tech rounds the corner with a cup of coffee and headphones looping bad jazz. For a breath, I think he’ll clock me. He just nods instead, eyes sliding past, because men who work in rooms like this see a hundred faces and train themselves not to care about any of them. I slide along the aisle, press the tape-wrapped stick into the small, hidden hollow I scoped yesterday, a crease behind a labeled panel, the sort of place thatlooks accidental to anyone who isn’t looking for it. My palm lingers a beat longer than it has to; I let the warmth of my hand stay there like a signature I never sign.
I press between two servers, pretending I'm checking on a panel, and call Stephano on the burner Mario gave me. He answers on the first ring, "You're in?"
No hello. No flourish. Just the thing that matters.
“Yeah,” I say, keeping it just as short and to the point, “It’s in place.”
The burner is warm against my ear. On the other end, Stephano is quiet for a long beat. Then I hear it: the soft, steady percussion of fingers on a keyboard. It’s mundane—typing—but in that rhythm there’s a thing I’ve learned to recognize: work being done, threads being pulled. I let the sound fill the space between us and count the beats.
There’s a click, a scrape, another set of keys. “We’re in,” Stephano says, flat, as if announcing something simple and inevitable. Then, quieter, “Pull it.”
For a second, I don’t move. It’s never that clean. There’s always the part of you that thinks: wait. Watch. Make sure. But the voice on the line leaves me no room to argue. “Now,” Stephano says. No flourish. No explanation. Just the word like a blade.
My hand slides to the seam where I tucked the metal USB drive in and pulls it back out. I yank it free in one practiced motion and fold it into the inner pocket of myjacket, fingers closing as if sealing a wound. The motion is small, obscene, and perfect. "Got it."
“Good,” Stephano says after a pause, and in that single syllable, there’s approval and a warning. “Leave. We’ll call if we need something else.”
He hangs up without another word. The line snaps dead like a switch.
I slide the burner into my pocket next to the USB drive and walk out of the building like I was never there.
For the first time since the alley, since Sophia, the hunger in my throat tastes like something that could feed me. But hunger is thin. So I keep moving, because being careful is how you stay alive long enough to take what you want.
A few minutes later, I step into the wet street and taste the future, bitter and inevitable, and I grin.
Two months before the wedding…
For now, I’m still working under Carlos's name and for Stephano in secret, but both are just a façade—a cover.
Carlos thinks I’m useful. He has no idea I’m studying his infrastructure, his blind spots. He’s the blueprint. I'm the upgrade. Stephano thinks I’m a raw asset—dangerous, useful, malleable. He thinks feeding me favors, keeping my ledger short, and my pockets warmer than Carlos will make me loyal enough to do his dirty work. He believes he can tether me with servers, cash, and opportunity, make me beholden, and then point me where he needs a hand. Let him think that. He doesn’t know I’m taking notes on his maps too.
With the money I had stashed—and the silent payout Carlos wired me for saving the girls—Mario and I bought an old, run-down computer shop in Brooklyn.
