The word lands in my gut like a fist.
"Your daughter," I repeat.
"Sera. Twenty-eight years old. Works at some museum in Boston, spends her days playing with old paintings. She's clean. Always been clean. I made sure of that." His voice hardens. "But clean doesn't matter when you become leverage."
I don't need him to explain further. Turf wars among the families have been heating up for months. I've caught enoughnews between charter runs to know the Veroni family is making aggressive moves into Mancini territory. When direct attacks fail, smart men go after soft targets.
"And you want her here."
"I want her somewhere my enemies won't think to look. Somewhere off the grid. Somewhere protected by someone who owes me too much to betray me and has no connection to my network they could trace." Another pause, heavier this time. "Priest vouched for you when you were nothing but a liability waiting to be buried. Said you were the kind of man who pays his debts. Was he right?"
Priest. I haven't heard that name spoken aloud in years. Haven't let myself think about the CIA spook who appeared like a ghost after the compromised op, made the evidence disappear, and extracted a price that's been hanging over my head ever since.
"Yeah." I rub my free hand over my face, feeling the scrape of beard I haven't bothered trimming in a week. "He was right."
"Good. She lands in Tidehaven this afternoon. Private airstrip twenty miles north of your location. You'll pick her up at three o'clock. Keep her on your boat, at your residence, wherever you think is secure. Two weeks. Then one of my people will retrieve her and you'll never hear from me again."
"And if someone comes looking?"
"Then you do what you were trained to do." His voice drops. "But Callahan? Nothing happens to my daughter. Nothing. She's the one clean thing I have in this world, and I've spent twenty-eight years keeping her that way. You understand me?"
"I understand."
"Three o'clock. Don't be late."
The line goes dead.
I stand there on the dock while the sun climbs higher and the morning traffic of Tidehaven picks up around me. Shrimpersheading out. Shop owners unlocking doors. The early yoga class doing sun salutations on the pier because apparently people pay money to stretch in public.
My phone buzzes again. Text from the Henderson party:
Running late, push to 9?
I type back a confirmation and pocket the phone.
Two weeks. A mafia princess on my boat. The daughter of a man who could have me killed with a phone call if anything goes wrong.
I should feel something. Fear, maybe. Anger at having my quiet life disrupted. Instead, there's just the cold weight of inevitability settling into my bones.
Debts always come due.
The private airstripnorth of Tidehaven is little more than a cleared field with a hangar that's seen better decades. I've used it twice for Salt and Steel ops when discretion mattered more than comfort. The kind of place where people land when they don't want records.
I arrive at 2:45 and park my truck where I can see both the runway and the access road. Old habits. The kind that kept me alive through three deployments and a dozen black-bag operations that don't officially exist.
At 3:07, a white Cessna drops out of the cloudless sky.
I watch it taxi to a stop near the hangar. Watch the door open. Watch a figure emerge into the South Carolina afternoon.
My first thought: Enzo Mancini lied to me.
This isn't cargo. This isn't a package to be delivered and forgotten.
This is a woman who walks across that cracked tarmac like she's daring the ground itself to give her trouble.
Dark hair twisted into a braid that's coming loose at the edges. Olive skin that belongs on a Renaissance painting, which tracks with what her father said about museums. Strong features rather than delicate. A face that doesn't smile as she approaches my truck, green eyes cataloging every detail of me and my vehicle and probably the last three decisions I've made in my life.
She's wearing practical clothes. Linen shirt, dark pants, boots that have actually seen use. The kind of outfit a woman wears when she knows she might need to move fast. Two bags, neither of them designer. She carries them herself.
