I step into the hall. The door clicks shut behind me, soft and final, and something inside my chest snaps like a wire pulled too far. The calm I built for Nico doesn’t follow me out here. It stays behind the door with him, fragile and temporary.
I don’t slow down. I go straight to Turo. I don’t knock. Knocking implies hesitation, permission, time, and I don’t haveany of those. I walk into the room where he’s standing over security feeds and hold the phone out to him like evidence. Like a weapon. Like a truth I can’t carry alone for another second.
He takes it. Reads. And goes completely still. Not anger. Not violence. The kind of stillness that terrifies me, because it means he’s already ten moves ahead and every one of them hurts someone.
“When did this arrive?”
“Five minutes ago.”
My voice sounds strange to my own ears. Too controlled, like it might shatter if I let it bend.
He’s already dialing, already gone somewhere colder. “I need a trace on a number. Burner. Immediate.” He recites the digits without looking, like he’s branded them into memory. “Yes. Priority.”
He ends the call and turns back to me. “This number,” he says. “Who has it?”
“My sister,” I say. “Only her. She’s in Madrid. I’ve been careful. I’ve been?—”
“I know,” he cuts in, but his jaw tightens, anyway, hard enough that I see the muscle jump. “Then someone’s been watching close enough to get it. Or someone with access shared it.”
The room feels smaller suddenly. The same name forms in my head at the same time I see it flicker in his eyes. Heavy. Rotten. Inevitable.
I don’t wait for him to say it. “I can help.”
The words come out sharper than I expect, edged with something like panic and something like fury. He opens his mouth immediately, instinct kicking in. The reflex to move me back, to shield, to put distance between me and the blade.
I don’t let him.
“I plan events,” I say, stepping closer, my pulse roaring in my ears. “I map people and movement. I track timing, access, who’s always exactly where they need to be. I read rooms for a living.” My hands are shaking now, but I don’t hide it. “Let me help you.”
“Lucia,” he says quietly, warning threaded through the softness. “This is dangerous.”
A laugh rips out of me before I can stop it. Not amused. Not hysterical. Just raw.
“I’m already in danger,” I say. “So is Nico. Waiting in another room while men decide my life doesn’t make me safer. It just makes me blind.”
Silence stretches between us. He studies me. Not like something fragile. Like something forged.
“All right,” he says at last. “We do this together.”
The shift is immediate. I’m not escorted away. No one tells me to sit, to wait, to be calm. He brings me in. The security center hums around us. Screens flickering, feeds looping, maps layered with information that smells like threat and control.
He talks. I listen. And I start seeing what he can’t. The timing. The proximity. Who always knows just enough.
“Enzo,” I say quietly.
He doesn’t deny it. “I know,” he says. “I’ve been building the case.”
“How long?”
“Since the attack,” he admits. “Maybe before.”
My stomach twists. “What are you going to do?”
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to. I nod, because I understand his world well enough now to hear what silence means.
“When?”
“Soon,” he says. “When I have proof that holds.”
