Lonari’s hand settles on my back, heavy and grounding. “Good.”
I blink, pulling back slightly to look at him. “Good?”
He meets my gaze. “Institutions don’t love you. They use you. You’re right not to trust them.”
The blunt validation hits me like a shock.
I swallow. “So what do you trust?”
Lonari’s eyes flick toward the ceiling, toward the unseen weight of family, power, and the Godfather’s masked fear.
Then he looks back at me, and his voice comes out low and steady, the way it does when he’s decided something and nothing is going to move him off it.
“I trust the truth,” he says. “Even if it burns my family down.”
My throat tightens.
Because that’s not a mobster line.
That’s a vow.
And in the distance, beyond the walls, the Nun keeps humming with money and lies and neon, while somewhere out in the galaxy a war is being assembled piece by piece.
I press my forehead to his chest, listening to the steadiness of him, and for the first time since Yatori, I feel something that isn’t just survival.
Resolve.
“Okay,” I whisper.
Lonari’s hand tightens gently at my back. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” I say, and my voice is steadier now. “Then let’s burn the right things.”
CHAPTER 10
LONARI
The Defrocked Nun always smells different after blood.
Not the obvious kind—the copper splash, the gun-oil haze, the hot-metal tang that hangs in the air right after a hit. That stuff burns off fast, carried away by scrubbers and money and the human talent for pretending. What lingers is subtler: an over-sweet perfume trying to cover fear, carpet fibers damp with spilled drinks and spilled secrets, and the faint antiseptic sting from crews wiping down walls like they can sanitize intention.
I’m standing in a corridor that pretends it’s private, listening to the building settle back into its usual heartbeat—music restored, lights reset, laughter returning in careful bursts the way people test a wound with a fingertip. My jaw aches from clenching. My palms still remember the merc’s throat. My head still remembers the look in Jordan’s eyes when she said Morazin is alive, like she’d just watched the universe laugh at her.
She’s inside my suite.
My suite.
That used to mean something. It still does, apparently—because the knock that comes at my door is polite enough to be insulting.
Three soft taps, then a pause that sayswe’re not asking.
I open it anyway.
Renn stands there with his shoulders squared and his eyes refusing to meet mine, which tells me the conversation he’s about to deliver tastes like poison.
“Boss,” he says, voice tight.
“Renn,” I reply, calm.
