“I can.”
“How long.”
“Seven nodes total. Four primary relays we have to cut by hand.” I keep my voice level, the way I learned to do in rooms full of men waiting for a woman to be wrong. “The deepest one is under the Gold Coast property. The tap we planted lets us listen and map commands, but it can’t cut the relay without hands on the hardware. Killing a relay takes hands on the hardware. Give me hands, give me Vincenzo on the intercepts, and give me ten hours, and when we’re done, killing Alvarado Vane won’t trigger the switch.”
Silence. Dominic studies me the way he must have studied a thousand threats, and I let him, because I’m not one, and we both know it.
“Twelve hours,” he says at last. “Not a second more. And Alessio—if another civilian gets hit while we’re being patient, I’m taking the whole North Side down and the lawyers can bill me.”
“Natalia heard that,” somebody says.
“Natalia is counting on it,” Natalia says from the doorway, and doesn’t look up from her tablet.
The room breaks into motion—assignments, radios, the machinery of a family that’s been at war for twenty yearsspinning up one more time. Alessio’s foot finds mine under the table, one press, there and gone. The only signal he gives.
It’s enough.
They load the cars in the rain: equipment cases, tactical vests, medical kits, Vincenzo’s black hardware bags.
I’m checking the equipment cases in the garage when Alessio catches my wrist and pulls me behind the racks, into the one angle Alessio knows is covered only by his own feed, and for a second he just looks at me—soaked hair, tactical black, eleven years of secrets and no sleep—like I’m the only fixed point in a spinning room.
“Ten hours,” he says.
“Ten hours,” I agree. “Then Vane’s switch is a paperweight, and you can put that ghost in the ground.”
“And then I tell them.” His thumb drags across the inside of my wrist, right over the pulse. “All of it. Dominic. Matteo. Turi in the holding room. The logs. The Guardian messages. I watched Matteo make him a plate this morning, Amara—I stood in the hall and watched, and I let him.”
“I know. I was there.” I flatten my hand against his chest, over the heart that’s been carrying this house alone since before I met him. “You let him have one more morning of believing. That’s not weakness, Alessio. That’s mercy.”
Something moves through his face—a crack, a light through the crack. He catches my hand and holds it where it is, pressed to his sternum, hard enough that I can feel his heartbeat argue with mine.
“You’re with me,” he says, rough and low, like it’s being torn out of him. “You understand that? In the vault, in the war, in the dirt if it comes to that. Whatever happens in the next twelve hours, we stay in sight and we stay together.”
There he is. The man the whole city is afraid of, asking for one thing in the world like he expects to be refused it.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I say. “I have ten hours of work to do and a very large man following me around. Someone has to carry the cases.”
He laughs. It startles both of us—a real one, quick and low, gone as fast as it came, and I decide on the spot that getting that sound out of him is going on my list of life’s work.
We come out of the shadows. The engines are turning over, and the rain is hammering the city into a blur of gray and gold, and somewhere out there Alvarado Vane is checking a switch he doesn’t know is already dying.
Alessio opens the car door for me. Before I can get in, he leans down, his mouth at my ear, his voice pitched for me alone under the drum of the rain.
“When the clock hits zero,” he says, “and Vane is dead, and the truth is out—you and I are going to have a different conversation. About what stays.”
He straightens up and walks around the hood like he didn’t just detonate something in the middle of my chest.
I sit in the car with my heart hammering and the rain drumming and ten hours on the clock, and I think: I have spent my whole life knowing exactly where the exits are.
And I don’t want one.
12
ALESSIO
By the timewe get back inside the Gold Coast server room, the rain has turned the city silver. The air is sterile, vibrating with the hum of hardware that costs more than a suburban zip code. My grip stays tight on the Beretta. The weight of the steel provides the only anchor in a world that’s currently spinning off its axis.
Amara Osei is hunched over a terminal, fingers flying across the keys. She moves with a terrifying, rhythmic precision. The data matters. The switch matters. But my body has narrowed the world down to the curve of her neck and the fact that she is still breathing. The only thing real is the curve of her neck under the fluorescent lights and the steady, stubborn rise and fall of her shoulders. She’s pulling the teeth out of a monster’s mouth, and she’s doing it with a snarl.
