FUCK THIS.
Midge was under the blanket. I saw the shape of her—a small trembling lump that growled when I crouched down, a sustained low-frequency warning that said I will end you with the conviction of something that weighed less than a bag of sugar. I put my hand out. Palm down. Waited.
She bit me. Of course she did. Not hard—a test bite, a negotiation. Not the way her momma had bit me. I didn't pull back. She sniffed my knuckles, sniffed again, and something in the smell—her owner, maybe, the traces of the woman who'd been in my house for hours—made the growl fade. She climbed into my hand. Warm. Bony. One ear up, one ear gone. Shaking with the whole-body tremor of a creature that ran hot and scared and brave all at the same time.
I drove back to Oak Brook with a chihuahua on my lap and my stitches weeping and I didn't call Dante.
I should have called Dante.
Instead I walked into the guest room where she was sleeping—boots on, fists clenched against her chest, the scarred knuckles up like a barrier between her body and whatever the world might try next—and I put the dog on the pillow next to her face and I left.
I wasn't going to examine why I did that. Not now. Not here. Not with Dante about to walk through the door with his don's face on and his questions loaded.
The back office door opened. Marco first, eating a cannoli. At eight in the morning. He dropped into a chair across from Vito's old desk with the ease of a man who'd never met a moment he couldn't make casual, crossed one ankle over his knee, and bit into the pastry with the serene confidence of someone who believed the world would wait for him to finish chewing.
Dante came in behind him. Closed the door. Didn't sit.
I gave it to them straight.
"Someone broke into my house last night. While I was at the sit-down. A woman. Mid-twenties. She was after the laptop from my study and the jewelry from the bedroom safe."
Marco stopped chewing. Dante didn't move.
"I caught her on the way out. She fought." I touched the spot above my ear without meaning to. "She fought well. She's at my place now. Locked in the guest room."
"Alive?" Dante. One word.
"Alive."
Marco swallowed the cannoli. Wiped his fingers on a napkin. His face had shifted—the casual mask still in place but the eyes underneath it doing different work, faster work, the calculation that people never saw because they were too busy underestimating the nightclub brother.
"The timing," Marco said. "The sit-down was yesterday. Enzo asks for Bridgeport, and the same night someone hits your house?" He shook his head slowly, the motion carrying the weight of a conclusion already reached. "That's Valenti. That's Enzo probing. He wanted to see what you had, what was exposed, maybe grab something he could use as leverage."
Dante's chin dipped a fraction. Agreement.
"She's not professional," I said. "Her gear was amateur. Cheap jacket, stolen medical tape on her hands. Someone gave her the security code and the safe location, but she's not trained—not by anyone with resources. She's a tool."
"A tool can still cut," Marco said, gesturing at my forearm. "Apparently."
"She needs to go to the safe house. In Archer." Marco leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "Let Nico handle the extraction. He'll get a name, find the chain back to whoever sent her, and we'll know by Thursday whether this is Enzo or someone freelancing."
Extraction.
Something in my chest tightened. Not my wound—deeper, behind the ribs, in the space where I kept things I couldn't afford to examine. A compression, like a fist closing around something soft.
"No."
The word came out harder than I intended. Flat. Final. The kind of no that didn't have a negotiation behind it.
Marco's eyebrows went up. "No?"
"She's not a professional," I said again. "She's a disposable asset. Someone pointed her at my house and didn't care what happened when she got there. Sending her to Archer tells whoever sent her that we're rattled. That we're escalating over a little girl."
Marco opened his mouth. I kept going.
"I'll handle it. My place. My problem."
The way I said it surprised me. The finality of it, the possessive weight —my place, my problem— as if the woman in my guest room had become something I was claiming rather than something I was managing. I heard it after it left my mouth, and I couldn't take it back, and the silence that followed wasthe particular silence of two very smart men deciding not to say what they were thinking.