I think about his heart hammering under my palm. I think about the way he said "mine" — not like a claim but like a confession, like the word was dragged out of him against his will. I think about his mouth on my neck and his hands pushing up my dress and the hard length of him pressed against me.
My fingers find the ache. My breath catches.
I think about Nico.Only Nico.
His hands on the desk, pulling me forward. The way his voice dropped when he said "Tell me to stop" — not a dare, not a game, a genuine offering of control that made me want to give it right back to him. The weight of him between my legs. The way he held my wrist — firm enough that I felt it, gentle enough that I chose to stay. That's the thing about Nico Konstantinos. He holds you just tight enough that the staying is always your decision.
My fingers move faster. My breath catches, breaks, catches again.
And when I come, his name is caught in my throat — silent, bitten back, mine.
It doesn't help. It makes it worse. Because now I know exactly what I want and I'm alone in a room thirty feet from the man who could give it to me, and the door between us is the only thing keeping me from walking down that hallway and taking what we both know is inevitable.
I look at the door that connects our rooms. My hand moves toward the handle.
I stop.
Not tonight. But soon. God help me…soon.
Chapter 13
Nico
The Butcher's Work
* * *
One light. One chair. And the man in it has stopped crying.
The warehouse is on the Southie waterfront — a Greek-controlled property that doesn't exist on any city record, a corrugated steel box that smells like salt and diesel and the particular copper tang of fresh blood. I've been here before. Many times. The chair has a drain beneath it for a reason.
The man is Bratva. Low-level, barely worth the rope holding him upright, but he was running surveillance on one of our safe houses and Lex caught him on a camera review. He's been in the chair for four hours. Lex did the preliminary work of a broken nose, two cracked fingers on the left hand, the kind of precise damage that communicates scale without reducing function. The man can still talk. That's the point.
I pull a chair across the concrete. The metal legs shriek against the floor. I sit across from him, close enough to see the burst capillaries in his eyes and the dried blood caked in the stubble along his jaw.
"My name is Nico Konstantinos." I keep my voice low. Conversational. The tone I use at dinner parties and business meetings and the quiet negotiation of alliances. "You already know that, which means you know what happens in this room. I'm going to ask you questions. You're going to answer them. If you answer quickly and truthfully, this ends faster than you think. If you lie to me, my brother will break another finger and we'll start again."
The man looks at Lex, standing against the wall with his arms crossed. The tattoos on Lex's forearms catch the single overhead light. The man looks back at me. He starts talking.
Reznikov shipping routes — three containers a week through a shell company operating out of the Revere port. A safe house in Dorchester where Viktor's lieutenant holds court on Tuesdays. Names: Andrei Volkov, Pyotr Semyonov, a third man called Kolya who handles the money. Viktor's schedule is irregular. He moves, never stays more than two nights in one location, surrounds himself with a rotating detail of eight.
I listen. I ask follow-up questions. The man answers. He's cooperative now — pain has that effect, the calculus of suffering shifting toward anything that makes it stop. I don't enjoy his pain. I don't take pleasure in the information either. This is extraction. Arithmetic. Lives on one side of the ledger, intelligence on the other, and the balance is paid in someone's blood every time.
"Is there anything else?"
The man shakes his head. His chin drops to his chest. He's done — wrung out, empty, a container with nothing left to give.
I believe him.
I draw the Beretta from my waistband. The man hears the slide and his head comes up. His eyes are wide but resigned. He knows. He's known since the chair.
"You've seen our faces. You've heard our questions. You know what we're looking for."
He doesn't beg. I respect that, for what it's worth.
One round. Center of the forehead. The sound is enormous in the steel box — a crack that bounces off every wall and comes back as an echo that sounds like a second shot. The man slumps. The drain beneath the chair begins its work.
I lower the gun. My hand is steady. It's always steady. The cost of this isn't in the hand — it's somewhere deeper, a place I stopped visiting years ago because the ledger there doesn't balance. It never does.