Chapter 4
“Camila has a security sweep scheduled at ten. Automatic. She changed the code last week — I don’t know the new one for the east perimeter gate. We have maybe six minutes before the cameras in this corridor cycle back on.”
Enzo looked at her. “The cameras are off right now.”
“I killed the east wing feed at 8:40. I was watching for you.” She caught his expression. “I knew you were coming back. The Calabresi meeting — when I understood you’d gone yourself, I knew the moment you walked into that room and realized something was wrong, you’d turn around and come home. You’re not the kind of man who waits for confirmation.”
The accuracy of it hit him somewhere undefended.
“How long have you been watching the cameras?”
“Since the second month.”
He absorbed that. He thought about every room he’d walked through in six months. Every phone call near a window. Every conversation in the kitchen at two in the morning when he couldn’t sleep.
He didn’t know how to hold that yet, so he didn’t try.
“The tunnel,” he said.
Sophie blinked.
“You know about the tunnel?”
“My father built this house. I know every inch of it. The storm tunnel runs from the east basement to the maintenance building at the back of the property. Half a mile.” His jaw was tight. “Camila has never gone into the basement. She says it smells like mold. She’s not wrong, but that’s beside the point.”
Sophie was looking at him differently now — not with the cautious, measuring look she’d worn since the pantry. Something had shifted between them so quietly and completely that neither had acknowledged it. They were not captor and captive. Not hunter and target. They were standing in a dark corridor, boxed in by the same enemy, and the arithmetic of survival was forcing a partnership neither had planned.
“The tunnel exit opens onto the alley behind Carver Street,” Enzo said. “I have a contact four blocks from there. We can be off this property in eight minutes and completely dark before Camila’s sweep starts.”
“And then?”
“And then we figure out exactly how many people Santino has in position around the city. And we make sure every single one of them is looking the wrong direction when I come back.”
Sophie was quiet a moment.
“Then you’re going to need resources. Money. Men. Safe communication. Santino will have flagged everything connected to your name — your accounts, your phones, your regular contacts. If he’s been building this for a year, he’s already moved on the infrastructure.”
“I know.”
“So what do you have left?”
Enzo thought for exactly three seconds.
“Two things. The drive you just gave me. And the fact that everyone who wants me dead currently believes I’m somewhere on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.”
He looked at her steadily.
“In my experience, that’s enough.”
Something in her face — the rigid, controlled thing she’d held together for eight months and eleven years before that — fractured just slightly. Not into weakness. Into something more complicated.
“I need you to understand something,” she said. The urgency was still there, but underneath it now was something raw. “I came into this house to end you. That was real. It wasn’t a performance. I meant it. And for a long time, it was the only thing keeping me moving forward.”
“I know.”
“I need you to understand that before you decide whether to trust me.”
“I do understand it.”
“Then how?” She stopped, started again. “How are you standing there talking to me like this?”
Enzo was quiet a moment. When he spoke, his voice carried something she hadn’t heard from him before — not authority, not threat, not the controlled cold of a man managing a crisis. Something underneath all of that.
“Because your father was a good man,” he said. “And I have spent fifteen years knowing that what I did was wrong. Not strategically wrong. Morally wrong. Carlo Valente refused a demand that no man with integrity would have accepted. And I killed him for it.” A pause. “I’ve done a lot of things I could rationalize. That one I never could.”
Her breath came out unsteadily.
“That doesn’t bring him back,” she said.
“No. It doesn’t. And I’m not asking you to forgive me.” He held her gaze. “I’m asking you to get through this corridor with me, because right now you’re the only person in this city who knows I’m alive and hasn’t tried to use that to their advantage.”
He paused.
“That makes you the most important person I know.”
The clock on the wall ticked. A chair scraped in the study. Closer this time.
Sophie reached out and touched his sleeve — not gripping, just the same light point of contact as before, that small anchor in the dark.
“The basement door is behind the wine rack,” she said. “There’s a lever on the left side, third shelf. From the bottom, the tunnel has power for the first hundred yards, then it goes dark.”
“I know.”
“Do you have a light?”
He reached into his coat and produced a small tactical flashlight. Black. The size of a finger.
She almost smiled. “Of course you do.”
“Move,” he said.
Behind them, through the study door, Santino Russo was pouring himself a third glass of Barolo and telling Camila about the call he planned to make in the morning — the one to Enzo’s attorney, to begin the formal process of death in absentia. He was already thinking about the press statement. A tragic accident. A great loss. The organization will continue in his name.
He was already thinking about what chair he’d put at the head of the table.
He did not hear the faint, distant sound of a basement door closing. He did not hear the soft crunch of footsteps moving through the dark beneath the house. He did not know that the man he had spent a year erasing from the earth was already gone, and already planning.
He raised his glass again, smiling, and took a long sip of a very expensive wine.
He had no idea he was already out of time.
The tunnel smelled exactly the way Camila always said it did. Damp earth, old concrete, and something organic underneath. The smell of a place sealed and forgotten.
Enzo moved through it with the flashlight cutting a narrow path ahead. Sophie two steps behind, close enough that he could hear her breathing. Neither of them spoke for the first three minutes. There was nothing to say that the darkness didn’t already understand.
When the power cut out at the hundred-yard mark, exactly where he’d said it would, Sophie didn’t make a sound. She just kept moving.
He respected that. He filed it alongside everything else he was learning about her — a growing list that was simultaneously the most dangerous and the most useful information he had acquired in years.
The maintenance building at the tunnel’s end was cold and locked from the outside. Enzo produced a key from his coat — a spare, old, the kind that predated the renovation Camila had commissioned three years ago. Which meant it was a key Camila didn’t know existed.
The door opened.
He stepped out first, checked the alley. Empty.
“Four blocks north,” he said quietly. “Don’t walk next to me. If something moves wrong, you go left, I go right. Don’t stop. Don’t look back.”
Sophie nodded once.
They walked.
The contact’s name was Dario Fenn, and he operated out of a print shop on North Halsted that had been producing legitimate business cards and wedding invitations since 1987, and illegitimate documentation for the Moretti family for nearly as long. He was sixty-one, built like a fire hydrant, and deeply committed to the principle that what you didn’t know couldn’t be tortured out of you — which meant he made a point of knowing only what was absolutely necessary about the people he served.
When Enzo knocked on the back door of the shop at 9:47, Dario opened it, looked at him for three full seconds, and said, “You’re supposed to be dead.”
“Not yet.”
“I heard different.”
“You heard wrong.”
May you like
Dario looked past him at Sophie. Looked back at Enzo. His expression shifted through several things and settled on the one that had kept him alive thirty years in this city: professional neutrality.
“Come in,” he said. “Both of you.”
