His face flashes behind my eyes—jaw set on the altar, eyes ruined for God and everything else. Guido clutching his sleeve. Romeo’s stare in the dark. Giovanni’s body falling. My father’s hand reaching and never finding mine.
All the men who died for what they thought I was worth.
Or what they thought I could buy them.
A weapon made of loss.
A thief with a dead father and a ledger-shaped blade hanging over her spine.
Now a target with a priest’s heart wrapped around her throat.
I lean forward as far as the cuffs allow.
“You tell your boss,” I say, low and lethal, “that if Santino walks into this for me, I’ll tear his empire down with my bare fucking hands before I die.”
Carlo doesn’t blink.
He just pats my cheek.
“Sweetheart,” he says. “You’re not supposed to bring him.”
He nods.
That’s when I see it.
My phone is on a metal tray. Dark screen. Cracked case.
“We already did.”
The Evidence They Want
Carlo circles me like I’m already a corpse.Not rushed.Not excited.Just patient—the way men get when they know there’s no exit.
“You really think you were slithering around that church for nothing?” he says, boots whispering over concrete. “You think we don’t track every cockroach that crawls near Giovanni’s ghost?”
My pulse stays steady.
Fake it until it’s real.
“If I had what you think I have,” I say, cold and bored, “I wouldn’t be rotting in your basement.”
Carlo stops directly behind me.
I feel him before I hear him—heat at my back, weight in the air, the faint metallic snick of a blade being thumbed open near my ear.
“Wrong,” he murmurs.
He fists a hand in my hair and yanks my head back so hard my eyes sting.
“You’d be right here either way,” he says pleasantly. “But that ledger?” His breath grazes my cheek. “That’s the difference between dead tonight… and useful.”
Ledger.
The word hollows me out.
So it’s not paranoia.Not coincidence.
They know.
