Chapter 4
She called Alex at eleven at night.
Not because she wanted to — because the bouquet of eleven roses on her kitchen table was staring at her like a warning, and she couldn’t close her eyes knowing someone had climbed three flights of stairs in her elevatorless building to leave that particular message at her door.
He answered on the second ring. He didn’t say hello. He said her name, as if he’d already known it was her, as if he’d been sitting there with the phone in his hand waiting.
“The flowers,” she said, voice steadier than she felt. “Someone left a bouquet at my door. No card. Eleven roses instead of twelve.”
Silence. Not a brief silence. A stretched one. The kind with weight to it. The kind that presses on the chest of whoever is on the other end of the line.
She’d expected anger. She’d expected cursing, questions, something that gave her a direction to move in. He did none of that. He went quiet in a way that was worse than any outburst. Because the silence of a man who always had an answer meant the situation was bad enough that even he needed a beat before acting.
“Don’t leave the apartment.” Every trace of warmth was gone from his voice. It was pure instruction. “Tav will be there in twenty minutes.”
“Alex, I don’t —”
He’d already hung up.
In the old tradition of certain Italian families, a bouquet missing a single flower was a message. Not an outright threat — a warning. We know where you are. We’re counting.
Inside of twenty minutes, there was a knock. This one sounded nothing like Alex’s — shorter, drier, no cadence. She opened the door to find Tav in the hallway, dark coat over a black shirt, carrying that particular kind of presence that didn’t need a visible weapon to be intimidating. Behind him, on the street below, a black sedan with tinted windows idled at the curb.
“Boss’s orders,” Tav said, skipping both greeting and explanation. “You’re coming with me.”
“Where?”
“His penthouse. Downtown.”
“I don’t need a babysitter, Tav.”
He looked at her with the placid patience of a man who’d heard that exact sentence many, many times and knew how it ended. “I’m not a babysitter. I’m the person who makes sure you get there alive. Car’s out front. Take what you need.”
Her phone rang before she could come up with a counterargument. Alex.
“Nina. Someone left a mob message at your door. You can argue with me from inside a secured apartment or from the backseat of a car that’s already on its way. Choose one.”
She looked at Tav. She looked at the third-floor hallway of her building — its flickering bulb, the silence drifting in through the stairwell window.
She grabbed a bag, shoved her laptop, a change of clothes, and her charger into it, and followed Tav down the stairs without another word.
Alex’s penthouse sat in the financial district. Plain facade, no name on the door, a private elevator that went straight up. Floor-to-ceiling windows framing the whole of Boston. Deep wood, dark leather, the smell of cedar and coffee. Lighting kept low enough to make the place feel more intimate than its actual square footage had any right to.
Tav left her at the entrance and disappeared without saying goodbye. She stood there with her bag, looking at the space belonging to the man she was supposed to be keeping a safe distance from.
Alex appeared from a hallway at the back. No suit this time — shirt with the sleeves pushed up, barefoot, hair messy. He looked younger like that. More human. And that disarmed her faster than any of his provocations ever had.
“Did you eat?” he asked. The question was so ordinary, so unglamorous, that it took her a second to process.
“No.”
He tipped his head toward the kitchen. On the dark marble counter sat covered plates, glasses, an already opened bottle of wine, cloth napkins — a full dinner, set out before she’d arrived. Which meant that when he’d said Tav was on his way, he’d already known she’d end up here.
“You had this laid out before I said I was coming.”
“I had it laid out the second I saw your call come in.” He uncovered one of the plates. “I knew you’d come. You’re too smart to sit in an apartment with no security after a warning like that one.”
They ate. Or rather, she ate — because she was starving and the food was absurdly good — and he sat across from her with a glass of wine, watching her with a focus that under almost any other set of circumstances would have made her self-conscious. But there in that kitchen, with the whole city shining on the other side of the glass and hours of adrenaline still thrumming in her veins, self-consciousness was beyond her. There was only hunger, and the odd quiet realization that for the first time in a long time, she was in a place where nobody was going to leave anything at her door without answering for it.
The conversation started on security. Surveillance on her building. The Durans. The friction at the port. A briefing, steady and flat. The wine took the edges off, and somewhere between the second glass and a lull, the conversation drifted somewhere else.
“My father believed that trust was the most valuable asset a boss could have,” Alex said, turning the glass slowly between his fingers — the way she’d come to recognize as his way of organizing thoughts before letting them leave his mouth. “He trusted the right people for years. Then he trusted the wrong person.”
Anyone who worked for the Mancinis knew the story, at least the official version. Dominic Mancini, the patriarch, had been arrested three years earlier on the strength of information leaked by someone inside the family. The trial had moved quickly. The sentence had been heavy. And Alex, at twenty-seven, had inherited an organization that watched him with a mixture of expectation and quiet doubt.
“It was an informant,” Alex went on, his voice stepping out of the controlled cadence she was used to. It dropped lower, closer to skin, as if the words were being drawn from a place he didn’t visit often. “Someone who sat at my father’s table. Had dinner in our house. Knew my cousin’s names. I should have seen it. I was working in the operation. I had access to the same data. I looked at that man every week, and saw nothing.”
He paused. Drank. When he continued, he didn’t look at her. He looked at the city through the window, as though it were easier to tell the lights of Boston than to tell her.
“I took over everything at twenty-seven. No preparation. No transition. Half the family thought I was too young for it. The other half was waiting for me to fail so they could step into the space. I did the only thing I knew to do. I shut everything down. Access. Trust. Any door that would have let someone close enough to do it again.”
The kitchen went quiet. Not the kind of quiet that wants to be filled — the kind that wants to be respected.
She looked at him and saw something she’d never caught in the office or the hallways of L’Ort or the parking lot out back. Exhaustion. Not the physical kind. The kind that comes from carrying alone a weight that wasn’t built for one person.
“You didn’t make a mistake by trusting him.” The sentence arrived before she decided to send it. “The one who betrayed you did.”
Alex turned his face toward her. He looked at her the way someone looks when they’ve just heard something they weren’t expecting. Not because it was complicated — because it was too simple, too direct. The kind of sentence no one said to him anymore. Because everyone around him was too busy calculating how every syllable would land politically to waste one on the plain truth.
He didn’t answer. But the way he kept looking at her — unhurried, quiet, with something under the surface of his eyes that looked like gratitude and surprise braided together — said more than any response he could have chosen.
The distance between them narrowed without either of them making a move she could point to. Maybe she leaned in first. Maybe he did. What she knows is that one second they were on opposite sides of the counter, and the next his hand was at her face. His thumb tracing a slow line from her cheekbone to the corner of her mouth with the deliberateness of someone handling something he was afraid to break.
The kiss, when it came, was unlike any she’d known. Different from the first one — which had been collision and impulse. This one was slow. Chosen. His mouth found hers with a calm that left no room for excuses. No wrong message. No coincidence. Nothing between them to blame it on other than the plain fact that they both wanted it.
It was a choice. His and hers.
His hand slid to the back of her neck, fingers threading into her hair and closing with a firmness that contrasted with the softness of his mouth. Her body leaned toward him as if it had found its own gravity. She pressed a palm to his chest and felt his heart hitting hard against it. Too hard for a man who liked to pretend he had everything under control.
Alex went still. His forehead rested against hers for a beat, his breathing ragged against her skin, and she felt his frustration in the tension of the fingers still cradling her neck. Then he pulled back, took the phone out of his pocket, and glanced at the screen.
“Tav.” He said it more to himself than to her.
He answered. She watched the change happen in real time, as though someone had flipped a switch. The man who had been holding her seconds before vanished, and in his place stood the one she recognized from the corridors of L’Ort, from closed-door meetings, from the looks that made grown men drop their eyes. The head of the Mancini family. Cold. Calibrated. Voice dry. Eyes scrubbed clean of anything that wasn’t strategy.
When he hung up, he looked at her. And what she saw in his eyes made her swallow hard, because it wasn’t anger. It was the absence of anger. The glacial calm of a man who had moved past anger and arrived at a decision.
“The transfers,” he said. “They run through Renan Voss’s operating account.”
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. The last piece slotted into place. The transfers. The French phone call in the hallway. The cordial smile that now made a great deal more sense.
Alex left for L’Ort with Tav just after midnight. She stayed at the penthouse with instructions to remain inside and not to open the door for anyone. Instructions had never been her specialty. And when her phone buzzed an hour later with a message from Tav saying Renan had just arrived at the restaurant, she was already reaching for her coat.
She came in through the back door. Tav had left it unlocked. She climbed to the second floor.
The meeting room door stood ajar. Through the gap, she could see the long dark wood table where menus and vendor contracts were usually discussed. Now, on one side, sat Alex, Tav, and John Carlo. On the other, alone, sweat glinting on his forehead and his smile nowhere to be found, sat Renan Voss.
“The transfers leave accounts you manage,” Alex was saying, voice neutral, almost conversational, as if they were talking about the weather. “Going to a corporate account that doesn’t appear in any of our records. For at least three months.”
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Renan swallowed. “Alex, this is a misunderstanding. I can explain. The operating accounts have automatic transactions that —”
“Don’t insult our intelligence.” John Carlo’s voice cut in with the flat coldness of a man who had heard enough lies in his life to recognize one on the first syllable.
Renan changed strategies. The smile dissolved and was replaced by something more desperate — a mix of outrage and fear that he was trying to costume as courage.
“The Durans offered what you never did,” he said, chin lifting. “A stake. A voice. I sat at that table for four years, and I was never treated as anything more than a glorified errand boy.”
“You sat at that table because my father allowed it.” Alex’s voice had changed. Every trace of neutrality had drained out of it. What remained was low, steady, and weighted with something that made Nina curl her hands into fists. “And you used that seat to sell information about my family.”
Renan understood there was no way out. She watched it happen in his eyes — the exact moment the strategy shifted from defense to offense. He leaned forward, planted his hands on the table, and played his last card.
“Your accountant knows more than she should.” He looked straight at Alex. “If I go down, she goes down with me. And if the Durans find out she’s the one who flagged the transfers, it won’t be a bouquet at her door next time.”
Nina stopped breathing. Out in the hallway behind the half-open door, the entire length of her body went cold. Not because of what he said, but because of what it implied. He knew about the flowers. Or he’d sent them. And he was using her name as a shield.
Alex didn’t blink. Didn’t raise his voice. Didn’t shift a centimeter. He simply looked at Renan with the calm she now understood was his most dangerous register. The calm that arrived after the decision, not before it.
“The accountant is under my protection.” Each word dropped with the finality of a verdict. “And you won’t be in any position to bring anyone down.”
Tav was already on his feet. Two men she hadn’t noticed entered through the side door and took positions on either side of Renan. He was taken out. There was no violence — not there, not in front of her. But the way he walked out of that room, shoulders curled in, wearing the face of a man who understands that the world he knew has just shrunk drastically, told her what came next wouldn’t be nearly this civilized.
She should have stayed at the penthouse. She should have waited. But she was there in the hallway, holding her breath with hands that had gone cold. And when she turned to slip out before anyone noticed her, she walked straight into Alex.
He was standing three feet away, hands in his pockets, wearing the expression of someone who had known she was there the whole time.
“You should have stayed upstairs.”
“And you should stop deciding where I stay.” Her voice came out steadier than she’d expected, considering her hands were still trembling.
He looked at her. The corner of his mouth twitched — not quite a smile, just the shadow of one. Enough for her to understand that in spite of everything — in spite of the traitor and the threats and the world splintering around him — that answer was exactly what he had needed to hear.
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The drive back to the penthouse passed in silence. In the car with Tav at the wheel and Boston streaming past the window like a river of light, neither of them said a word. But at some point, in the dark of the back seat, his hand found hers. It didn’t grip. It didn’t pull. It simply stayed there — warm, steady, present.
And she knew with the clean, quiet clarity of watching a door close behind you that there was no way back from this.
