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Like I was a person who needed coffee.

Dante’s hand caught mine as I turned toward the garage. Not a grip — a brush. Fingertips across my knuckles. His green eyes held mine for half a second. The King’s color carrying something the King never put in it — not command. Permission. Go. Come back.

I wanted to kiss him. In front of his brother, in front of Santino and Pia and the bleeding physician zip-tied to a kitchen chair. I wanted to put my mouth on his and taste the coffee and the blood still sitting at the back of his teeth. I didn’t. Some things you earn before you take them.

The industrial corridor opens ahead. I know these streets the way I know scar tissue — by feel, by history, by the way my body tightens when I drive through the blocks where I parked at two in the morning and watched surveillance feeds of a family I was being paid to dismantle. Seven years. Warehouses. Loading bays. Handler calls from the front seat of a rental with the engine running and my thighs pressed together because my body was still running hot from a concrete room where a nineteen-year-old’s cock pressed hard against my stomach and his mouth hovered three inches from mine and I pushed him away and my hand shook doing it.

That was a different week. A different woman.

The woman driving tonight fucked him against a steel door four hours ago while his split knuckles left blood on her hip and her back arched against cold metal and the sound she made was not performed, not currency — it was the sound of a woman whose body remembered what wanting felt like before twenty years of rooms turned wanting into a tool she deployed and discarded and never once kept for herself.

She kept this one.

The irony sits in my chest like a swallowed blade. The woman Giovanni erased is driving toward the industrial corridor to dismantle Giovanni’s network alongside the family Giovanni’s system was designed to control. I am going to burn the infrastructure that funded my contract using the training of the man who built my hands, in service of the family whose youngest son reached through chains and saw what twenty years of men with agendas and paychecks never bothered to look for.

The woman underneath the ghost.

I’ve been aimed by other hands my entire professional life. Pointed at targets chosen by men who paid for my direction the way they paid for hotel rooms and ammunition — as expenses, line items, the cost of doing business that never appears on a balance sheet. Tonight I chose the target. The choosing changes something in the way my body sits behind the wheel. The shoulders settle differently. The grip on the steering wheel is looser. I am armed. I am running at full capacity. But for the first time in twenty years, the woman is driving.

Santino is a statue carved from the same stone as the loading dock.

He stands at the staging point with the stillness of a man who spent ten years inside a priest’s collar and converted the discipline into something the collar was never built to hold. Arms loose. Weight centered. Dark eyes — not Giovanni’s green, not Bella’s warmth. Something forged in the space between his parents’ wreckage. Those eyes have been running an assessment since the kitchen — since I sat at his family’s table and delivered intelligence while the mug Nova gave me cooled between my hands.

He spreads the map on the hood. Three relay points. Red circles on a city grid — three buildings where the King’s communications are still running through wires he buried before his sons knew the walls had ears.

“First relay. Basement of a textile warehouse. Loading bay access. Two guards, possibly three.” His voice is flat. Professional. The voice of a man briefing a team that includes the woman who chained his youngest brother. “Second, four blocks east. Ground-floor electrical room. Third is underneath a shipping office on the waterfront.”

He taps each circle. His knuckles are still dark with Costa’s blood.

“Rules of engagement.” He looks at Pia. Not at me. “Neutralize and secure. Equipment tagged. Nobody leaves those buildings without my confirmation.”

Pia nods. One hand on her hip, the other flat against the vehicle’s panel. She is compact, quiet, and carries herself the way women carry themselves when they learned violence before they learned to trust the people standing next to them.

Santino folds the map. Looks at me.

“You enter behind me. You hold your sector. You do not deviate.”

I remember every word from the hallway. Not because I memorized them — because words that are true leave marks the way training leaves marks. In the body. Permanent. He said being good at violence doesn’t erase what my violence cost his brother. That catching feelings in a concrete room doesn’t build a foundation. His voice carried the precision of a blade laid flat — not threatening. Showing the edge.

Every goddamn word was earned. I’ve spent twenty years in rooms where men said things to me — threats whispered against my throat during jobs, propositions delivered while my hands were still wet, lies dressed as leverage by handlers who thought I couldn’t tell the difference between performance and truth.

Santino’s words were not performance. They landed because they were accurate. Truth is the one thing I’ve never learned to deflect. I can redirect a knife in under two seconds. I cannot stop a true thing from reaching my chest.

He doesn’t trust me. He may never trust me. The rejection isn’t cruelty — it’s the hardest-earned honesty anyone has offered me since Dante told me the contradiction between my training and my care was the most important thing about me. I would rather operate beside an honest blade than a comfortable lie. I’ve fucked men who lied to me in four languages. I am finished with comfortable.

“Understood.”

“Move out.”

The loading bay door goes up and the smell hits first. Mildew. Old concrete. Rust. The stale breath of a building that’s been drawing power from the grid for years because the King’s communication lines don’t care whether the building above them makes textiles or silence.

Santino goes first. I follow — behind him, where he put me, where the unknown goes so the man running the show can watch it. Pia takes the rear, covering the exit with her whole body.

The basement stairs are narrow. My hip protests on the third step — the left one, the old injury, the torn thing from Marseille that’s been limiting my lateral movement for six years. I shift right. Compensate. My body does it without asking.

Two guards at the bottom. Armed. The first sees Santino’s shape in the stairwell light and reaches for his belt. Too slow. Santino’s hand catches the man’s wrist and the rest happens fast — impact, breath punched out, skull meeting concrete at the angle that drops without killing.

The second turns toward me.