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VITTORIA'S POVBoth of us.I stood in the study doorway and let those three words settle into the room and find their weight.A file on both of us meant Reid had not arrived here tonight as a man seeking alliance. He had arrived as a man holding leverage over two people simultaneously and waiting to see which one would be more useful to what came next.I looked at Marcello.His expression was the still, careful version that meant he had already processed several steps ahead of the current moment and was waiting for me to catch up before he moved."Where is he?" I said."Sitting room," Marcello said. "Tw

VITTORIA'S POVMarcello moved through the penthouse like a current.Not loud. Not panicking. Just fast and absolutely deliberate, each instruction delivered in a low voice that carried the specific authority of a man who had prepared for something like this so many times that the preparation had become instinct.I stood in the kitchen doorway with Alberto beside me and watched the building transform around us in the space of four minutes. Men appeared from rooms I had not known were occupied. Positions taken at windows and entrances. The quiet mechanical sound of things being locked that I had not known needed locking.Alberto said nothing beside me. He was doing his own version of watching, that careful inventory he had always taken of any

VITTORIA'S POVRosa.The woman who had appeared every morning with coffee before I reached the kitchen. Who had told Marcello about Diego's visit to the service entrance with the quiet efficiency of someone doing their job? Who had looked at me after Diego left with an expression I had read as professional discretion and had apparently been something else entirely.I looked at the grainy footage on Marcello's phone screen and thought about every small interaction I had catalogued in the past few days. Rosa was setting down cups without being asked. Rosa was hovering at a careful distance during Diego's visit. Rosa appears in doorways at precise moments with precise information.Not discretion.Positioning.She had been positioning herself inside every significant moment since I arrived, close enough to observe, far enough to remain unremarkable, and I had walked past her every single time without seeing it because she had been so thoroughly invisible that invisibility itself had becom

VITTORIA'S POVI stared at Nissi's message until the screen went dark.Then I turned it back on and stared at it again."I'm sorry. I didn't know they would take him."Eight words that were doing three different things simultaneously. They were a confession. They were a boundary, drawing a line between what Nissi had agreed to be part of and what had apparently crossed even her threshold. And underneath both of those things, buried in the sorry and the didn't know, was something that looked uncomfortably like genuine fear.Nissi was scared.Which meant whatever she had signed up for when she started feeding information to Diego, and Seymour's people ha

VITTORIA'S POVI read the message four times.Each time, the four words stayed the same on the screen, unmoved by how many times I needed them to mean something different from what they meant."We have your brother."No name attached. No number I recognised. No follow-up message giving me instructions or demands or any of the things that should logically come after four words like that, which was somehow worse than if there had been twenty more sentences underneath them. The silence after a threat is always louder than the threat itself.My hands were not shaking. I noticed that distantly, the way you notice small details when your mind has

VITTORIA'S POVI stayed.Not because he had told me to. He had said it quietly enough that it could have been refused without consequence, and we both understood that. I stayed because the word had come from somewhere unguarded in him, somewhere that did not usually send words out into rooms, and walking away from it would have felt like closing a door on something that had taken considerable effort to open.I took the chair across from the desk, the same chair that had heard more truth in the last twenty-four hours than most chairs heard in a lifetime, and I wrapped both hands around my coffee cup and said nothing.Marcello looked at the map for a moment longer, then pushed it to one side and picked up his own cup.We sat li