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Mutually assured destruction. It’s the only way this can end, if he doesn’t take my offer. I burn them down, the fire takes my house with theirs, and the only thing that walks out of the ash is the truth. The network dead, the labs dark, no more chalk moving under my name.

My grandfather would call it madness. He’d be right that it’s madness. He’d also never seen his own daughter swallow a pill and wondered, for one black second, whether the medicine keeping her alive was the same chalk moving under his name. I have.

“It’s a lot to give up,” Nick says. Not an argument.

“Giulio gave up more. The kids Matteo kept sick or worse? They gave up more.” I square the pages. “I’m gonna say something once, and I never want to think about it again.”

“Say it.”

“There’s a version of me that Allegra knows. The version that she’s always coming after. The one that would burn the dossier and keep myself clean. Cut the Sartorre sections, feed the state a partial map, survive whole. Or worse, forget all of it, take her sweetheart deal, and never look back.”

Nick’s mouth flattens into a line. “I remember that guy. He was a good time. An asshole, but a good time.”

“What do you think happened to that guy?”

“His little girl got sick.”

He’s right about that. All of it.

“Yeah, well, that version doesn’t get to keep looking his kid in the eye. Leave it all in.”

Nick gathers the dossier into its case, and his soldier’s face has gone quiet and satisfied. His approval arrives as an absence of objection, which is louder from him than a speech would be from anyone else. “How do we release it? Do you have an order in mind?”

“Simultaneous. The hour after the sit-down goes wrong—and it will go wrong. The Ministry of Health, the financial police, and three newsrooms I listed, all at once so no single office can bury it, and no single editor can be bought off to sit on it. It hits everywhere, and then it can’t be stopped.”

“I’ve got a technical man in Rotterdam who does nothing else. He holds the whole package on a dead-man release—if anything happens to me between now and Thursday, it goes out on its own.”

“Good man.” We both know a soured deal could mean our deaths, but talking about it won’t change things.

“And the buyout offer at the table?”

“Genuine. I offer Matteo the clean exit one final time, in front of the capos, and he refuses it, because he can’t imagine a world where I’d set fire to myself to spite him.”

“And when he refuses?”

“Every family has watched me try the civilized road twice.” I shrug, because there’s not much else to say about that. “Then the paper flies, and I’m the man who was pushed to it, not the one who started it. War needs a villain, and it’s going to be him.”

Nick nods slowly. “You’ve thought about the doctor in all this.”

Everything else on this desk is just numbers. She isn’t. I go to the window. Dawn’s coming up gray over the cypress. “When the dossier hits, my name’s in the mud in every paper in Europe. She’s the wife on paper Allegra’s been digging at, a doctor who vanished from Boston and surfaced beside a drug trafficker.”

“So the story catches her.”

“If it runs before I clear her, the Brancatis frame her into it. Duress becomes complicity, medical role becomes cover, and she loses her license, her name, everything.”

“So we clear her first,” Nick says, like it’s a simple thing.

It isn’t.

“The dossier proves the counterfeit network was one I was destroying, that she was recruited under duress and never touched anything but Sarah’s care, that the payments to her were medical fees and nothing more. The same documents that burn me clear her. She will look like my victim, not my accomplice.” I hate how close to the truth that is.

She wasn’t my victim yesterday. What happened in our bed, it was a revelation. And in some ways, a farewell.

“That’s the plan for after,” Nick says carefully. “What about before? She doesn’t know any of this, Lupo. Not the dossier, not the war’s real shape, not that you’re about to detonate your own life. You’ve had her at your table for weeks, deciding her fate for her. She’s going to hate you for that.”

I don’t answer right away, because he’s found the rot at the center of my careful plan and named it plainly, which is what I keep him for. “I know.”

He shoulders the case. “You keep saying you won’t be the man who decides for people. From where I stand, you’ve been deciding for her since the moment you met her. That’s how she’s going to see it too.”