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“Nothing I need to—” Her eyes are flashing and she crosses her arms across her chest, glaring at me. “You know what, no. No. I am so sick of that sentence.”

I stand up, hands up as if trying to placate her. “Katerina, if you could just listen⁠—”

“No,” she snaps. “No, you listen to me. And for the five thousandth time, my name is Kat!” She takes a deep breath and I brace myself for impact. “I am not one of your soldiers,” she tells me as she steps all the way in and nearly slams the door shut behind her. “You don’t get to tell me nothing you need to worry about every single time something happens in this house. I have been trying—since the kitchen and the library…” Her cheeks are getting rosy. “I have been trying to actually work with you. To not run. To not hate you every waking minute even though I have every right to.” She takes another breath and I’m frozen, listening to every word come out of her mouth. “I deserve to know what is happening around me and in the house I am currently trapped in. That is not a lot to ask.”

She’s right.

I know she’s right before she’s even finished the sentence, and something about hearing it out loud, from her, in that voice, makes it impossible to keep doing what I’ve been doing.

I sit back heavily in my chair and gesture to the chair in front of me, the same one Luca always sits in.

“Sit down,” I say quietly.

Katerina’s eyes dart toward the chair before she looks up at me, her eyebrows furrowed in confusion. I smile gently, if not a little strained. “This isn’t a trick, Katerina.”

She scowls at my refusal to call her by that infernal nickname, but she crosses the room and sits, spine straight arms still crossed over her chest,

So I tell her everything.

Well, not everything. I don’t tell her about what I learned this morning or that somebody inside my own crew is talking to my enemy.

She doesn’t need to know that.

Not yet, maybe not ever.

But I tell her about Russo and the extraction and how it was never only about her, about the plan to use Seraphina to start a war and let the Corsicans clean up after.

I tell her about the two names on Russo’s list narrowing down to one.

I tell her about Dino.

The morgue.

The insignia.

She flinches when I talk about Ana but other than that, she remains silent, listening intently.

By the time I stop talking, she’s silent and I brace for whatever’s coming, whether that be tears, anger, or her walking straight back out that door and never speaking to me again.

To my surprise, she doesn’t do any of that.

She turns her head, tapping a finger against her lip and my eyes are fixated on that single digit, as I struggle to maintain my composure.

“How much time do we have?” she asks finally.

That wasn’t the question I was expecting, and I blink owlishly at her as I struggle to compute what she just said. “I don’t know,” I tell her honestly.

Katerina frowns and I expect her to get up then and leave, the weight of all of it to finally be too much.

But she doesn’t. Instead, she settles back into the chair instead, and a familiar focused look creeps on her face.

I’ve seen that look before in photographs and I’ve even seen it in person when I was her patient at the hospital. It’s a look that says she’s going to give orders and nobody better dare argue with her.

I’ve never had it turned on me before and it kind of turns me on.

“Why do you work for them?” she asks as she plays with the hem of her shirt and it takes everything in me to not watch. “The Corsicans, I mean. You clearly have your own lines and your own version of right and wrong. You saved Seraphina from what would have been automatic death and you brought her here.” She cuts her eyes toward me and raises a brow as if to say “don’t even try to deny it.” She continues, “So why work for people who don’t share them?”

For a moment, I’m speechless. Nobody’s asked me that in a long time.