CHAPTER FOUR: ONE NAME LEFT

VIENNA

The file arrives at 9 a.m., exactly when Voss said it would, because if there’s one thing nine years has taught me about the man, it’s that his promises about timing are the only promises he never breaks.

I open it standing up, coffee going cold on the counter, and for a full three seconds the photograph doesn’t make sense to me — not because I don’t recognize the face, but because I do, and the recognition arrives faster than my mind can build a reason for it.

Matteo Romano.

The Don himself. Not a lawyer, not a lieutenant, not one more careful man who signed things he could pretend not to understand — the man at the very top of the family that burned my house down with my parents still inside it.

My hand goes unsteady around the coffee cup. I set it down before it can betray me.

I call Voss instead of texting, which I never do, because some things need a voice attached to them or they don’t feel real.

“It’s him,” I say, when he picks up. “The last one is Romano himself.”

“It was always going to be him, Vienna.” His voice carries the particular calm he uses when he’s already decided how a conversation ends before it starts. “Did you think I was building toward a lawyer? A lieutenant? Fifteen names were never the point. Fifteen names were the path to the sixteenth.”

“You never told me that.”

“Would it have changed anything?”

I don’t answer, because the honest answer is no, and some part of me hates him a little for already knowing that.

“He’s careful,” Voss continues, businesslike now, already past the moment I’m still standing inside. “More careful than the others. You won’t get a second chance the way you did with Ferrara. You go in once, you go in clean, and you don’t hesitate — not for a second, not for anything he says. He’ll try to talk. They always try to talk, at the end. It’s the last weapon a man has left.”

“I know how to do my job.”

“I know you do,” he says, and something in his voice softens, just slightly, just enough that for one disorienting second I’m seventeen again, kneeling on cobblestones, being told I’m safe now by the only person who ever bothered to say it. “This is the last one, Vienna. After tonight, it’s finished. You can finally put all of this down.”

I want to feel relieved by that. I search myself for it the way you search a pocket for keys you’re sure you had a minute ago, and I come up with nothing but a strange, hollow static where the relief is supposed to be.

“Vienna.”

“I’m here.”

“You sound uncertain.”

“I’m not uncertain,” I say, too fast, the way you say things when you’re trying to convince the part of yourself that’s listening more than the part of you talking. “I’m tired.”

“Then finish it, and rest,” Voss says, gentle again, final. “I’ll see you when it’s done.”

He hangs up before I can say anything else, which is its own kind of answer, if I let myself hear it that way.

I stand in the middle of the safehouse for a long moment afterward, phone still warm in my hand, and let myself notice something I’ve been careful not to notice through fourteen names before this one — that every single time, it has been Voss who decides when the conversation ends. Never me. Not once in nine years have I been the one to hang up first, and I don’t know if that’s discipline or something closer to obedience, and I don’t have time tonight to sit with the difference.

I spend the day the same way I always have before a job that matters — methodical, empty of anything that isn’t useful. I clean the gun I’ll use twice, though it never needs it twice. I study the floor plan of Villa Corvo until I could walk it blind, memorize the guard rotation Voss’s contact inside the estate has fed us for months, the exact hour the west wing goes quiet.

Kestrel calls once, late afternoon, her voice tinny through the burner. “Heard it’s tonight,” she says. No preamble. We were never a hello-and-goodbye kind of trained.

“It’s tonight.”

“You want company?”

“I want it done,” I say, which isn’t an answer to her question, and we both know it, and neither of us says so.

“Be careful of him,” she says instead, quieter. “I’ve heard things about Romano. He doesn’t rattle. Not ever. Not once in eight years running that family.”

“Everyone rattles with a gun at the back of their skull.”

“Maybe,” Kestrel says, and there’s something underneath the word I don’t examine closely enough, not that day. “Just— call me after. However it goes.”

I promise her I will. I mean it when I say it, the way you mean most promises made the same day you plan to end a man’s life.

I lay my equipment out on the bed the way I always do — gun, spare magazine, blade, gloves, the small flat case of tools that gets me through locks Voss’s contacts haven’t already bribed open — and I catch myself standing over it for longer than the ritual usually takes.

The first name on my list was a shipping broker named Aldo Conti. I remember his face better than I remember my own mother’s, some nights, which is its own quiet horror I’ve never said out loud to anyone. I remember how certain I was walking into that job, twenty years old and freshly finished at the Nest, no doubt anywhere in me bigger than the width of a hair.

I don’t feel that same certainty now, lying my gloves flat beside a photograph of a man I’ve never spoken to, and the absence of it sits in my chest like a stone I swallowed without meaning to.

I pick the photograph up. Matteo Romano doesn’t smile in it — it’s a surveillance still, grainy, taken from across a street outside some restaurant, but even flattened into black and white and thirty meters of distance there’s something in the set of his jaw that doesn’t match the file Voss built around it. The file says cold. Calculating. A man who inherited cruelty the way other men inherit a family business. The photograph only shows someone who looks tired, walking fast, shoulders braced against weather I can’t see.

I tell myself it doesn’t matter what he looks like tired. Ferrara looked ordinary too, going over his manifests with his tie loosened like a man with nothing on his conscience worth the name. Ordinary has never once meant innocent, not in this city, not in this family. I put the photograph face-down on the nightstand so I don’t have to keep looking at it while I dress.

By nine that night I’m dressed in black, gun checked twice, the same cold clarity settling over me that’s carried me through fifteen names already. I stand at my window and look toward the cliffs where Villa Corvo sits behind its black iron gate, lit gold against a dark sky, and I tell myself the same thing I’ve told myself before every job for nine years.

This is the debt. I am only the one who collects it.

I don’t know yet that the man behind that gate is about to look at the gun in my hand and ask me a single question I have no answer for. I don’t know that nine years of certainty is about to come apart in less time than it takes to pull a trigger, or that the photograph face-down on my nightstand is about to become a voice I can’t stop hearing long after tonight is over.

I only know that tonight, finally, the list ends.

I leave the safehouse a few minutes past nine, and I don’t look back at it, because I’ve never once looked back at anything I meant to finish.