The stink of cordite clung to Renzo’s linen coat like grease. Blood dripped from the knuckle of his right index finger, landing with a soft patter against the linoleum.
Savia slumped further into the steel swivel chair. Her spine felt like overcooked spaghetti. She raised a hand, rubbing the knot behind her ear where a persistent dull ache beat like a drum. “I fix cracked circuit boards,” she muttered. “Or at least, that’s what I’ve done for eighteen months. Before that? Empty air. Blank tape.”
Renzo didn’t drop the pistol. His chest heaved once, twice, ribs straining against his vest. “You dropped a hydraulic gate on a professional butcher with three milliseconds to spare. That isn't soldering iron muscle memory, Savia.”
“I know.” She drew the black USB fob from her pocket and set it down on the console between them. The metal housing was scuffed, nicked by years of neglect. “I wiped myself. A surgical neuro-chemical scrub, or some black-market butcher’s cocktail. I woke up in a rooming house off the southern docks with four grand in cash, a passport, and a headache that made me vomit yellow bile for a week.”
Renzo stared at the plastic drive, then lifted his chin, his features sharpening into flint. “Why?”
“I don’t know why. But I found photos on this drive three days ago. One of them shows me sighting a sniper rifle on Vittorio Calvetti’s motorcade five years ago. I killed him, Renzo. And the debt my parent owes your syndicate? I staged it. I funneled the ledgers so you’d drag me out of that shop and into your fortress.” She tipped back, bracing her shoulders against the cold metal. She was too tired to flinch. “So shoot me. It saves me the trouble of decoding the rest of this garbage.”
Renzo took three heavy strides forward. The weapon clattered onto the desk, completely discarded.
His palms cupped her cheeks with a force that bordered on savage, dragging her up from the seat. His thumbs dug hard into the soft flesh under her cheekbones. She waited for the crack of bone, for the squeeze of a man who realized he had sheltered his rival’s most dangerous phantom. Instead, his forehead slammed against hers with bruising intensity.
“You foolish, arrogant wretch,” he snarled against her mouth, his breath hot, tasting of iron and sulfur. “You think I care if you worked a trigger for the old dead bastard? You think I care about stolen coin?”
Savia blinked, her eyelids heavy. “I lied to you.”
“You survived,” he spat, his voice dropping into a ragged growl. His arms encircled her waist, hauling her flush against his ribs, crushing her sweatpants against his ruined, blood-spattered suit. He held her with a feral, possessive desperation that drove the oxygen straight out of her lungs. “Someone cornered you until you had to rip out your own thoughts just to stay breathing. Name them. When you find that name, give it to me. I will skin them from the heels up and burn their family to tallow.”
Savia stayed rigid for a beat, bewildered by the furnace heat of him, before the sheer gravity of her exhaustion won. She let her forehead drop against his collarbone. “You’re getting arterial spray on my clean clothes.”
“Buy ten thousand more,” Renzo whispered savagely, burying his face in the crook of her neck, inhaling her like an addict starved for clean air. “Every vault in this house belongs to you. Every bullet belongs to you.”
He stepped back just enough to grip the USB fob. He jammed it into the auxiliary slot on the primary panel. “Show me.”
Savia dragged her stool closer, stifling a yawn that cracked her jaw. Her hands moved over the keys out of pure reflex, muscle remembering pathways her conscious mind couldn’t fathom. “The file structure relies on a rolling cipher tied to the Porto Vellamo maritime tide tables. My previous self had an irritating flair for drama.”
Renzo hovered over her shoulder, one scarred hand resting flat on the console beside her hip, his heat enveloping her back. “Tullio told me you were studying logistics when he broke your door down. He thought you were cataloging execution vectors.”
“I was playing Minesweeper,” Savia murmured, tapping the execute command.
The monitor flashed amber. Rows of hexadecimal code rearranged themselves, falling into structured accounts with international routing prefixes. Seven separate transactions from eighteen months prior populated the ledger.
Renzo’s gaze hardened. He leaned closer, the scent of gunpowder radiating from him. “Those aren't my offshore holdings.”
“No,” Savia said, tracing the recipient routing code with an ink-stained thumb. “They belong to the Calvetti family’s private maritime shell company. Specifically, an entity titled *La Sirena Di Ferro*. That’s Nereza’s personal slush account.”
“The twenty million your parent supposedly defaulted on,” Renzo realized, a low, vicious laugh rumbling in his chest. “You didn't steal it for yourself. You wired it directly under Nereza’s personal signature, masked it with her personal tax credentials, and then locked the transaction history behind a timed delay.”
“I framed her,” Savia said flatly. “To her own syndicate elders, it looks like Nereza Calvetti stole twenty million from the shipping syndicate to fund an unsanctioned coup. They’ve probably been auditing her books this entire week.”
“Which is why she sent six squads of cutthroats to rip this place apart tonight,” Renzo murmured, his lips grazing the shell of Savia’s ear. “She wasn't just chasing petty jealousy. She was trying to scrub the ledger before her uncles put two slugs in the base of her skull.”
“It’s a neat trick,” Savia admitted, fighting off another swell of bone-deep fatigue. “Too bad I can’t remember how clever I felt when I did it. I just want eight hours of unbothered sleep on that sofa upstairs.”
A harsh, high-pitched warble shattered the air.
It didn't come from the fortress mainframe. It came from the burner phone sitting inside Savia’s pocket—a cheap three-button disposable piece she kept for grocery deliveries. She slid it out. The small liquid-crystal panel flashed with an incoming video signal, bypassing the local cellular jammer Renzo kept active.
Renzo reached for his pistol with one hand while keeping his other arm anchored around Savia’s waist. “Accept it.”
Savia flicked the switch.
The grain of the tiny screen resolved into a dark, damp concrete floor, lit only by the glare of an overhead sodium lamp. Saltwater dripped somewhere in the background. In the center of the frame sat an older woman, tied to a wooden freight pallet with industrial ratchet straps. Her face was swollen purple beneath her right eye, grey hair matted with grime.
“Mom,” Savia said. Her tone remained level, but her throat went completely dry.
A polished Italian leather boot stepped into the camera frame. Nereza Calvetti bent down, tilting the camera toward her own face. Her dark curls were pinned back, her lips painted a wet crimson that looked black under the sodium bulb. A silver-plated revolver rested loosely against the older woman’s temple.
“Hello, little technician,” Nereza purred, her voice crackling through the cheap speaker. “Your husband has very good walls, but the old woman's apartment in the North Slums had a rusted deadbolt. A child could kick it through.”
Renzo bent toward the microphone pickup, his voice terrifyingly calm, quiet enough to chill iron. “Touch her again, Nereza, and I will hang you from the harbor crane by your intestines.”
Nereza didn't flinch. Her eyes flicked toward Renzo’s voice, a wild, manic gleam burning behind her irises. “Save the poetry for her wake, Morata. Pier 42. Berth nine. The salt warehouse. You have sixty minutes, Savia. Come alone, or I will paint this shipping container with your mother’s brains.”
The screen cut to static.