Chapter One: Claudio
Thearmoryistheonly room in this compound that makes sense to me.
Concrete floor, big lights, no windows. Weapons racked by caliber on the south wall. Ammunition crates stacked in the corner, counted and logged every seventy-two hours because I'm the one who counts and logs them. The workbench is mine. Scarred oak, bolted to the floor, stained with grease and old blood that won't come out no matter how many times I scrub it. I don't mind the stains. They remind me where I am.
It's four in the morning and I've got my Beretta in pieces on the bench. Third time tonight. The gun doesn't need cleaning. I need my hands doing something that isn't wrapping around someone's throat.
Six hours.
That's how long it took for a professional hit team to show up at Charlotte Richardson's apartment after we flagged her in our system. Four men. Suppressed MP5s. Breaching charges on the front door like they were raiding a fucking cartel compound, not a legal assistant's studio apartment with a cat and a dying fern.
I intercepted them in the stairwell. Two went down before the other two figured out they weren't the most dangerous thing in the building. The third caught a round through his kneecap and screamed loud enough to wake three floors. The fourth ran. I found him in the parking garage trying to hotwire a sedan. He was still trying when I put him on the concrete.
I didn't kill that one. He's in the basement now, and Carmelo's been having conversations with him that involve less and less of his fingers.
The point isn't the hit team. Hit teams I can handle. I've been handling violence since I was fifteen and Aurelio put a gun in my hand and told me to earn my keep. The point is the six hours. You don't mobilize a crew like that in six hours unless someone picked up the phone the second Charlotte's name hit our intake log.
Which means someone inside this compound made a call.
We killed Renzo. Cut that rat out of the operation and buried him where the dogs won't dig. But the leak didn't stop. It got worse. Faster. Whoever's left is embedded deeper than Renzo was, and they're smart enough to have let him take the fall while they kept feeding.
I slot the barrel back into the slide. The click is the only relaxing sound I've heard all day.
The door opens. I don't look up. Leone walks the way he always walks. Left side heavy, favoring the ribs he won't admit still hurt from that round he caught through his vest. Big man, bigger ego about pain. He'll cover it up until it heals and deny it every time someone asks.
He drops into the chair across from me. Scrapes it on the concrete. I grit my teeth but don't say anything.
"You sleep at all?" he asks.
"No."
"You planning to?"
"No."
He rubs a hand over his face. He looks like shit. Alexandra's been running him ragged with whatever she's found in the financial data, and the war on top of it is grinding everyone down. I've seen Leone tired before. This is past tired. This is a man operating on caffeine and the stubbornness of someone who refuses to drop a weight he picked up voluntarily.
"Aurelio wants a shift," he says. "No more brute force. He wants the quiet work. Assassin type shit. Your kind of shit."
"About time."
"Don't be smug. It doesn't suit you."
"Everything suits me."
Leone almost smiles. He won't give me the full thing. Never does. "Alexandra found a connection. Apex Meridian, the shell corporations, the offshore accounts. All of it traces back to Westpoint. Old money, political dynasties, some kind of secret society. The Silent."
I set the Beretta down. "The academy you were sent to protect Dahlia in."
"Yeah, well. Now it's got a paper trail. And the woman upstairs is helping Alexandra connect the pieces."
The woman upstairs. Charlotte.
I met her forty-eight hours ago when I dragged her out of that apartment and into the back of an SUV while her neighbors called the cops and her cat hid under the bathtub. She didn't scream. Didn't cry. Didn't beg, plead, bargain, or do any of the things civilians usually do when a man twice their size throws them over his shoulder and carries them down three flights of stairs.
She bit me.
Left a bruise on my forearm shaped like a crescent moon. I'd been almost impressed if it hadn't hurt like a motherfucker.
