Stefano Reyes.
Five Families. Old blood. Old grudges. Quiet enough to be underestimated and arrogant enough to mistake quiet for invisibility.
I stare at Piotr for a long moment, then I stand.
Kai is already moving on the tablet, pulling threads, cross-checking. Maksim’s expression has sharpened fully now. Tatiana looks delighted in the way only my sister can when a room gets worse.
I should call Vincenzo back.
The thought arrives instantly.
I should call and tell him the name, tell him he was right to be angry, tell him I was wrong. I should do it now before pride has time to rot the apology in my mouth.
Instead, I stare at the man in the chair and feel the colder part of me take the wheel.
“Tanyusha,” I say.
My sister’s face lights up. “Yes?”
“You get five minutes.”
Piotr makes a broken sound of terror.
Tatiana pushes away from the wall with a smile sharp enough to cut bone. “Finally.”
I turn toward the door because if I stay, I will do the work myself, and right now, I need a different kind of violence.
The kind with maps, names, accounts, and men who thought putting a bounty on my head would go unanswered. Behind me, Piotr starts begging before Tatiana even touches him.
I walk out into the corridor with Vincenzo’s last words still ringing in my skull and my mood carved down to pure black decision.
When this night is over, someone is going to learn exactly what happens when they threaten what belongs to me and make me fight with the man I love in the middle of it.
thirty-four
Vincenzo
Bythenextnight,I am still angry enough that every room feels too small for me.
Not loudly. I stopped being loud about anger before I was old enough to understand what that kind of control would cost later.
So, I spent the day calm. Terrifyingly calm, according to the way three men at the council table suddenly forget how to breathe when I ask one simple question about offshore movement tied to Reyes. I speak softly. I listen carefully. I let men think they are explaining things to me while they hand me the rope I’ll eventually use to hang them with. It is one of my few reliable talents.
But beneath it, I am furious.
Nikolaj knew. That is the part I keep returning to, no matter how much work I throw at the day.
Not the bounty itself, although the idea of someone putting a price on his head still makes me violent.
Not Helena Byrne’s channel being used as smoke, or Reyes’s name beginning to appear in the uglier parts of the financial trail, or the nauseating certainty that someone inside the Five Families is stupid enough to believe killing Nikolaj Dragovich will make the world simpler.
No, the part that has its teeth in me is that Nikolaj knew and chose not to tell me.
A month, give or take, he said.
A fucking month.
That means he knew before Isle Lucia.
