Page 78

Instinct.

The safe house is quiet now that everyone’s stable. Lupo is as good as I can make him. Diana will keep—the hip needs surgery, but that’s not happening here. Enzo’s shoulder is a graze I closed with fourteen stitches. The men have the perimeter. There is, for the first time since a car hit us from behind, nothing my hands are required to do.

That’s the danger, because hands with nothing to do give the rest of me room to catch up. I’ve been outrunning the day since a stuck drawer this morning—the manifests, the fight in his study, the packed suitcase, the road. All of it has been waiting behind the work, patient, and the work has just run out.

Which is when I make the mistake of checking my phone.

It’s been buzzing for hours. I ignored it the way you ignore an alarm you can’t attend to.

Attending to it now is overstimulating after everything. Adeline, six times. Mark, more. Numbers I don’t recognize, a voicemail from Pruitt’s office. And notification after notification from news apps.

I open the first one with a thumb that finally, finally shakes.

The headlines don’t agree on the wording, but they agree on the target. Reuters is cautious, an Italian daily translates to lurid English, an aggregator has already turned it into something with my headshot and a red banner.

But the one that stops my heart is the Boston one.

It’s from my hometown paper, the one that would have run my department-head announcement in a better version of this year. There’s my face above a headline that uses the words international counterfeit pharmaceutical scheme and American physician and Sartorre in a single breathless line.

I read it standing in a warehouse with blood drying under my nails, and the irony is not lost on me. I’ve spent the night keeping people alive while a story spread across the world explains that I help kill people.

The facts are the cruelty of it. Not one of them is faked. That’s the genius, the thing that will make this impossible to fully undo. Every image is real, every date is accurate, every payment happened.

Allegra didn’t have to invent a thing. She just had to arrange the truth into the shape of a lie and hand it to editors who’d never check whether the shape was honest.

The story masterfully insinuates itself through credible fragments. A doctor who disappeared from a Boston hospital mid-career. A rushed marriage to a man whose name is considered disgraceful by Italian authorities. Photographs show me at the gala with Lupo in Milan, and at a sunny café with Allegra, smiling like co-conspirators in this context.

Payments, it says, large and irregular, into the physician’s accounts. It stops just short of every accusation and lands them all anyway. Medical credentials in service of a trafficking network. A doctor who knew.

Allegra’s signature is unmistakable here—the ruthless manipulation, the carefully staged setup, and the café photo she took precisely for this moment, aligned with this timeline. This is her handiwork, without a doubt.

Matteo brought the guns tonight. His sister brought the knife, and the knife went into the one thing I had left that was mine, which was my name, my license, the decade of work. All of it, dead.

Mark will see this. He’s probably already seen it—that’s probably what his texts and calls are about. This time I won’t have to lie to him, because the lie has become the front page.

There is no old life to go back to. That’s what the article does. It doesn’t just accuse me. It ruins me. Boston isn’t a refuge anymore. It’s my courtroom. If I took a flight there now, the authorities would pick me up when I landed.

There is no home to go to.

I ran the wrong way down a clear road for a man whose world just reached out and erased my own. Everything I am, everything I had, the person I was, all of me is gone.

28

LUPO

Lights. Too much light. Sounds—not angels. Not demons either.

A wave of antiseptic scent hits, and I want to throw up. But the middle of me hurts and says I better fucking not.

Then a low mechanical hum, a generator somewhere. And there’s that light again. Too much of it, a work lamp I flinch away from until someone dims it.

And under all of it, a sound I’d know anywhere. Someone sniffling, trying not to.

“Veda.” My voice is gravel.

“You’re awake.” Not warm. Flat, exhausted, scraped down to the metal. “Don’t move. You’ll tear the sutures I spent an hour placing, and I am not doing them twice for you. You tear them, and I’ll let you bleed out.”

“You did it?” It comes out thick. The last thing I remember is a road, and her hands, and the words safe house. Everything else is foggy oatmeal.