Past two men I put down without slowing. Past a broken window spraying glass across the hallway floor. Past the painting Lorenzo had owned for thirty years, the one he said reminded him of something he would not name, now hanging sideways with a bullet through the center of it. My shoulder clipped the wall on the turn. I felt it. I did not stop.
His study door was open.
I went in.
And then my legs stopped working.
He was on the floor beside his desk. One arm stretched toward the drawer he never reached. Blood spreading beneath him in a wide dark circle that was already too large, already too far gone, already telling me something I refused to hear. The room smelled like gunpowder and cedar and something else underneath both of those things that I would not name either.
My body moved before my mind caught up.
I crossed the room and dropped to my knees beside him and pressed both hands to the wound and the blood came through my fingers instantly. Warm. Thick. Too much of it. My jaw locked so tight I felt it in my back teeth. I pressed harder. Like pressure alone could fix this. Like my hands had ever been built for anything other than taking and maybe just this once they could be built for keeping instead.
His eyes opened.
Dark. Steady. Calm in a way that made something inside me crack straight down the middle because Lorenzo Ferragamo was lying on his own floor bleeding to death and he was still the calmest person in the room and I did not know whether to be grateful for it or destroyed by it.
"You came fast," he said.
His voice was wrong. Thin at the edges. Frayed in a way I had never heard before in twenty three years of knowing this man.
"Do not talk." My voice came out flat. Controlled. The way he taught me. "Save your strength."
"Nadia."
"I said do not talk."
"Look at me."
I was already looking at him. I had not stopped looking at him since I walked through the door. But the way he said it made me go still in a different way. The way I went still when he used that tone. The one that meant stop everything and listen because what comes next matters.
My hands kept pressure on the wound.
My eyes found his.
"Trust no one inside these walls." His voice was low. Certain. Like he had rehearsed it. Like he had known this moment was coming and had chosen these words in advance and was using the last of himself to deliver them correctly. "Not one person. Do you hear me."
My throat went dry.
"Tell me who did this." The words came out quiet and hard. "Give me a name. One name. That is all I need."
Something moved across his face. A shadow. Old and heavy and carrying a weight I could not measure.
"The lakehouse," he said.
I stared at him. "What?"
"Go to the lakehouse." His breath was shortening. I could hear it. That horrible shallow sound of a chest losing its fight. "The chair by the window. Everything I could not say is there. Everything you deserve to know."
The back of my eyes burned.
I did not cry. I had not cried since I was four years old and even then I could not remember it clearly. But the back of my eyes burned and my hands were shaking against his chest and I could not make either of those things stop.
"You can tell me yourself," I said. "Right now. Whatever it is. Say it right now and then we are going to get you out of here and you can say it again when you are not bleeding and I will listen both times. I promise I will listen."
He looked at me.
Long and deep and full of something that felt like goodbye.
"I loved you," he said. "That part was never a lie."
His hand found mine.
Held it.
Let go.
His chest went still.
His eyes stayed open.
And just like that the only world I had ever known was gone.
I stayed there. Kneeling in his blood with my hands still pressed to a wound that no longer needed pressure and the silence of the room pressing in around me like something physical. Like walls closing. I could hear my own heartbeat. Too loud. Too fast. The only sound left.
I do not know how long I knelt there.
Long enough for the warmth to start leaving him.
Long enough for the voices in the corridor to get close enough to understand.
"Seal the east wing."
"She is still inside."
"The order stands. Find her."
I lifted my head.
The order stands.
Not find the attackers. Not secure the perimeter. Not protect the heir.
Find her.
Me.
Something cold moved through my chest and settled there. Not panic. I did not panic. Lorenzo had removed that capacity from me before I was old enough to ride a bicycle. But something cold and certain and clarifying moved through me and I understood in the space of one breath what I was looking at.
This was not an outside attack.
The guard rotations. The access points. The timing. All of it was too precise. Too clean. Whoever came through those walls tonight had walked them before in the daylight and memorized every blind spot.
This came from inside.
And the order they were carrying had my name on it.
I looked at Lorenzo's face one last time. The silver hair. The dark eyes open and still. The silver ring on his right hand that caught the low light of the study lamp the way it always caught the light when he sat at that desk and I sat across from him and the world felt like it had an order to it.
I pressed two fingers to his jaw.
"I will find every piece of it," I said. Low. Just for him. Just for the room. "I promise you."
Then I stood.
Picked up my gun from the floor.
Rolled my shoulders once.
And walked out of the room that had just become the before and after line of my entire life.
The first man came around the corner fast with his weapon high and his eyes certain and I moved through him before he finished drawing breath and kept going and the corridor exploded into noise around me and I moved through all of it the way I had been trained to move. Clean. Fast. Without hesitation. Lorenzo's voice in the back of my head the way it always was during the worst moments.
You are the best thing I ever built. Do not waste it.
I put three men down and hit the service stairs and came out through the kitchen into the cold New York night and the city swallowed me whole. Sound and light and movement in every direction. Indifferent. Enormous. Alive in the way cities are alive when you are the only person in them who feels like they are dying.
I pressed my back to the exterior wall and breathed.
Once.
Twice.
My hands were covered in his blood. I looked at them in the low light of the alley. Both palms. Dark and cooling against my skin.
In my earpiece the comm crackled.
A voice. Smooth. Unhurried. A voice I had heard at dinner tables and strategy meetings and quiet conversations in long hallways for two decades.
Corvus.
"The vote is already decided," he said to someone I could not see. "By morning the transition will be complete."
My blood stopped moving.
"And the girl?" another voice asked.
A pause.
Short. Comfortable. The pause of a man who had already answered this question a long time ago and was only now saying it out loud.
"Issue the order," Corvus said. "Full contract. Every available asset. I want her gone before she starts asking questions we cannot afford to answer."
The comm went silent.
I stood in the alley with the city roaring around me and Lorenzo's blood going cold on my hands and twenty three years of loyalty curdling in my chest into something I did not have a name for yet.
He had been planning this.
All of it. The attack. The vote. The order with my name on it.
While Lorenzo was alive Corvus had smiled at me across dinner tables and called me the pride of the Court and meant none of it. Not one word of any of it.
And somewhere inside the estate I had just run from the man who raised me was lying on a dark wood floor with his eyes open and his chest still and a secret he had taken to his grave instead of giving to me while he still had breath to spend.
The lakehouse. The chair by the window. Everything I could not say.
What could Lorenzo Ferragamo not say.
What truth was so large that a man who had ordered executions without blinking could not find the words for it in twenty three years.
I did not know yet.
But I was going to find out.
I pulled my jacket tighter against the cold. Checked my weapon. Counted what I had on me. Cash. One spare magazine. A burner phone with three contacts left that I was no longer certain I could trust.
I stepped out of the alley and into the city.
Hunted. Alone. Carrying a dead man's last words and a promise I intended to keep no matter what it cost me.
I did not know then what it was going to cost.
I did not know that the truth at the lakehouse would not just change everything I believed.
It would destroy it.
And I did not know that somewhere on the other side of this city a man I had never met was about to find me bleeding in the dark and make a decision that would ruin both our lives in the most beautiful way imaginable.
I did not know any of that yet.
All I knew was the cold. The city. The blood on my hands.
And the name on a kill order that used to be the name of the most protected woman in New York.
Mine.
/1/116006/coverbig.jpg?v=857290af646be22c59b7b7ed9991ecf4)
View More Comments on App
