“Dario, Alessio, you’re with Paolo. Full tactical. Matteo, get Enzo and whoever else is on call. I want a perimeter before anyone goes through a door.”
The room erupts into motion. Controlled, efficient, lethal. These men have done this before. Phones come out. Voices drop to operational tones. The machine turns over, and it turns over fast.
“Matteo.” Lorenzo’s voice cuts through. “Take Ms. Kozlov to the safe house on Warm Springs. Have someone stay with her until we have confirmation.”
The words are polite enough. The meaning underneath them is not. Keep me alive. Keep me out of the way. Keep me where they can find me if this turns out to be a trap.
“No.”
The word is out before I mean to say it.
Lorenzo looks at me.
“No?” he repeats.
“I left him once already. I’m not doing it twice.”
His mouth flattens. “That was not a request.”
Under any other circumstance I might have folded under that voice. My father trained that reflex into me young. Lower your eyes. Apologize before the man in the room decides you’ve become inconvenient.
But my mother is dead because she tried to run. Boris is dead because I refused to stay where I was put. Luca is on a concrete floor somewhere because my father found out about me.
No more.
“My father has Luca because of me. Because I wasn’t careful enough. Because my brother found the phone, and they werewatching me, and I led them right to him.” My voice is shaking and I don’t care. “I’m not sitting in a safe house while other people fix what I caused.”
Dario looks up from the table. Paolo goes still again. Even Matteo pauses halfway through checking a magazine.
Lorenzo’s face does not change.
“You think that means you belong in a live-fire assault?”
“I think it means I’m done being handled.”
Lorenzo raises an eyebrow. It reminds me so much of Luca that the ache in my chest nearly buckles my knees.
“You’ll be a liability,” Dario says. Blunt as a hammer.
“I’m Anton Kozlov’s daughter. I can walk through the front door of that warehouse and every man inside will hesitate before pulling a trigger. Can you say the same?”
That lands. I see it register on Dario’s face, on Paolo’s. The tactical logic of it.
“She’s got a point,” Matteo says. It’s the first full sentence I’ve heard from him, and it’s so matter-of-fact that it almost makes me laugh.
Lorenzo is quiet for three seconds. They feel like thirty.
Finally he says, “If you get in the way, I will have you dragged out over your own objections.”
“Then I’ll try very hard not to get in the way.”
That does it. Dario barks out a short laugh that sounds more startled than entertained. Matteo drops his head like he’s hiding a reaction. Even Paolo’s mouth shifts at one corner.
Lorenzo does not smile.
He holds my gaze for one more beat. Then he nods, once, and turns to the room.
“Move.”
