CHAPTER 1: VALENTINO
THE LOCK ONmy apartment door stuck like it always did, and I had to jiggle the key twice before the mechanism finally gave. Four in the morning and my hands were shaking badly enough that even this simple task felt monumental. I shouldered the door open and stumbled into my cramped Brooklyn studio, dropping the messenger bag full of files onto the floor with a heavy thud that probably woke my downstairs neighbor.
I didn't care.
The files could stay there. The story Luca had just handed me—some councilman taking kickbacks from construction companies, real estate fraud, the kind of mid-level corruption that would make headlines for exactly one news cycle—could wait until I'd slept. Or tried to sleep. Sleep had become theoretical lately, something other people did while I lay awake cataloging my moral compromises.
I locked the door behind me. Both locks. The deadbolt too. Then I checked the locks again because paranoia had become my constant companion ever since Luca Romano walked into my life three months ago and turned everything I thought I knew about myself into a lie.
My reflection caught in the darkened window over the kitchen sink. I looked like hell. Curly hair I'd forgotten to cut weeks ago stood up in wild directions. My dress shirt—the one nice one I owned that wasn't actively falling apart—was rumpled from the cab ride home. Dark circles under my hazel eyes mademe look older than twenty-five. I'd lost weight I couldn't afford to lose, my already lean frame verging on gaunt.
The stress was killing me slowly. Nearly two months of this arrangement with Luca and I barely recognized myself anymore.
I splashed cold water on my face and told myself the shaking would stop eventually.
The apartment was exactly as I'd left it six hours ago: chaos barely contained within four hundred square feet. Books everywhere because I'd never met a research source I didn't want to keep. Stacks of newspapers and printed articles covering every surface. My laptop open on the tiny kitchen table that served as my desk, surrounded by coffee cups in various states of abandonment. The narrow bed shoved against the far wall, unmade because I hadn't been sleeping in it much lately.
Hadn't been sleeping here at all some nights.
I sank onto the bed and stared at the messenger bag across the room. Inside were the files on Councilman Rodriguez and his very illegal real estate deals. Information that had fallen into my lap—been placed into my lap—by Luca. Another story I'd write. Another truth I'd expose. Another way I'd be doing exactly what Luca wanted while telling myself I still had integrity left.
My phone buzzed. A text message lit up the screen.
Unknown Number:Did you get home safely?
I stared at it. Luca had never texted me after one of our meetings before. Usually our contact was limited to his summons—terse messages telling me when and where to appear—and my eventual compliance.
This was different. This was almost... concerned.
I typed back:You put a tracker on me or something?
The response came immediately:I prefer to think of it as being attentive.
That's a yes.
Get some sleep, Valentino. You'll need it for the Rodriguez story.
I threw my phone across the room. It bounced off the cheap futon I used as a couch and landed on a pile of laundry I'd been meaning to wash for a week. The screen stayed lit, mocking me with its evidence that Luca Romano was in my head.
I needed to sleep. Tomorrow I'd wake up and write the Rodriguez exposé and collect another award I didn't deserve for journalism that had been handed to me instead of earned. I'd take Luca's information and I'd craft it into something that looked like investigative reporting instead of what it really was: me being his puppet.
But sleep felt impossible. My mind was already spinning, replaying the last three months in vivid, humiliating detail.
It had started so differently. So innocently, if anything about Luca Romano could be called innocent.
***
The coffee shop on the Lower East Side was one of those aggressively hip places where everything cost twice what it should and the baristas looked at you with judgment if you ordered anything less complicated than a pour-over with oat milk and cinnamon. I'd chosen it specifically because it was neutral territory, public enough to be safe, trendy enough that nobody would pay attention to two guys having coffee.
I arrived fifteen minutes early. Old habit from journalism school: never let a source control the meeting. Get there first, pick the table, establish yourself as the professional.
Except Luca Romano was already there.
He sat at a corner table with perfect sight lines to both the door and the windows, a tiny espresso in front of him that he hadn't touched. Even in a coffee shop full of Brooklyn creatives in artfully distressed denim, he stood out. The suit alone probably cost more than my monthly rent—gray, perfectlytailored, worn with the kind of casual elegance that said he put on thousand-dollar suits the way normal people put on jeans. Dark hair swept back from a face that was all sharp angles and calculated charm. He was maybe thirty-five, maybe older, the kind of man who'd look thirty-five until he hit fifty and then would age into distinguished instead of old.
He looked up when I walked in. Made eye contact across the crowded shop. Smiled.
That smile should have been a warning. It was too perfect, too practiced, the smile of someone who'd learned exactly how to disarm people and had spent years perfecting the technique. It saidtrust meandI'm harmlessandwe're going to be friendsall at once.
