The room is small. Maybe ten by eight. One wall is covered, desk to ceiling, in monitors. Some are dark, some show live feeds: the kitchen, the foyer, the street outside, the garage. And all across the bottom row, in gray-green night vision, different angles of the basement.
I knew this room existed. I knew, from the moment I saw the extent of the surveillance in the basement, that there had to be a control room somewhere. I even assumed it was right here behind this locked door in Dami’s room.
But knowing something exists and standing inside it are two different things.
There’s a chair—a good one, leather, worn at the armrests. A desk with a half-drunk glass of water on it, a phone charger still plugged in. Damiano Orsini sat in this chair for hours, for days, watching me curl on my side in the dark, watching me sleep and shiver and press my face into the mattress, and he kept coming back. Every angle of me. Every camera. I count seven feeds on the basement alone. Seven ways to watch one man in a personalized horror chamber.
It wasn’t surveillance. It was obsession.
“Why are you showing me this?” I mutter, backing out.
He grabs me by the arm and pulls me back in. “Because you need to understand the extent of it.”
“Why?” I’m almost begging now, pulling away from him. “I already knew. I don’t need to see?—”
“Yes, you do. You need to see and understand who I really am. And you need to stay angry if you’re going to survive what happens next. You hear me?”
I stare at him. He’s trying to make me hate him. Using his own fixation as a weapon against himself. “But why? Is there an attack coming?”
He shrugs. “Seb still hasn’t said anything more. So…maybe.”
“Then we need to organize another meeting of the Loyalists, see if they can?—”
“They can’tdoanything,” he spits. “And even if they could, I’m not letting you wander around the city looking for a bullet.”
“I can leave if I want to,” I point out spitefully. “You literally just gave me access to all the…” I trail off as he gives me an almost pitying look.
“All I have to do is this—” He goes back to the security pad, keys in a different code, and lays his finger on the scanner. An alert sounds, and the panel turns red. “And everything is locked down to the administrator. Me.”
God, he’s infuriating. “Then why give me access in the first place?”
“I gave you access to the doors so you can lock them from the inside. Keep enemiesout.”
“I want to see my people,” I say stubbornly.
“I will not let you leave this house,” he growls back.
“Then invite them here!” I snap. “But I’m not going to sit around waiting for Big Gee’s deadline to arrive while my people think I’ve disappeared. If nothing else, they’re warm bodies who will do what I ask them to do. So either let me go or kill me like you always meant to.”
The old fire comes back into his eyes. Ah, there he is. “Don’t fucking say that to me like it’s some card you can play to win the argument.”
“It’s not a card. It’s a fact. Just like it’s a fact that my Loyalists are the only resource we have right now.”
At last I see him waver, even as his hand tightens on my arm.
“Here,” he says at last. “The meeting happens here. In my house. I search everyone who comes through the door, make sure no one has a weapon. And I’m in the meeting with you the whole time, like I was at that so-called safe house.”
“No. You’ll stay outside.”
“You planning to invite the Morellis’ rat?”
“I am.”
“Then no fucking way am I gonna?—”
“You’re aGiuliano, Dami,” I say over the top as he tries to protest again. “That tattoo on your hand should be enough of a reminder. It is for me, and every other Clemenza as well. So you’ll stay outside for the duration of the meeting. But you can search the men before they come in, and relieve them of any weapons.”
He doesn’t like that. His mouth goes tight and his nostrils flare. But he doesn’t argue.
