Reina POV
She hung up before it rang.
Not out of fear. Out of strategy. Showing up in person was harder to dismiss than a phone call. A phone call could be ended with one button. A person standing in your lobby at midnight required a decision.
She changed her clothes, fixed her face, and left the house through the side door without telling anyone.
The Salvatore building was everything the Moretti house was not. No history. No warmth. Glass and steel rising twenty floors above a street that was too clean and too quiet for this part of the city. It looked like a law firm from the outside. The kind of place that processed money and never asked where it came from.
Two men at the front door. Big, quiet, professional. They clocked her before she reached the steps.
She did not slow down.
"Reina Moretti," she said. "I need to see Dante Salvatore."
The taller one looked at her the way people look at someone who has just said something deeply stupid. "Mr. Salvatore doesn't take walk-ins."
"I'm not a walk-in. I'm a Moretti." She held his eyes. "Tell him I'm here. If he says no, I'll leave. But you need to ask him first, because turning away a Moretti without asking is the kind of decision that ends careers."
It was her father's voice coming out of her mouth. She had not planned it. It arrived on its own, fully formed, and it worked the man's expression shifted slightly. He spoke quietly into an earpiece. He waited. He stepped aside.
She walked in.
The room they put her in was white and cold and had nothing in it except two chairs and a table. No artwork. No windows. The kind of room designed to make people feel small while they waited.
She sat with her back straight and her hands folded and she used the twenty minutes to build a wall inside herself brick by brick, feeling by feeling. Every memory she had of Dante Salvatore she picked up and set aside. The rose garden. The rain. The way he used to say her name like it was something he was glad existed. She put all of it in a box and she closed the box and she set it somewhere she would not be looking during this conversation.
She needed the businessman tonight. Not the girl who waited two years for a boy who never came back.
The door opened.
He walked in and her wall cracked straight down the middle.
Not because he was beautiful though he was, in that hard, serious way she had not expected. Not because he was bigger than she remembered, or stiller, or carried himself like someone who had never once been afraid of anything in a room.
Because for one half-second one fraction of a moment before his face locked down completely she saw something move behind his eyes when he looked at her.
Recognition. And something older than recognition.
Then it was gone. His face was stone. He stopped on the other side of the table and looked at her the way you look at a problem you are deciding whether to solve.
"Reina Moretti," he said. Her name in his mouth, after five years, was almost unbearable. His voice was deeper. Controlled. "You have five minutes."
She almost said something real. She almost let the wall come down completely and said: You left without a word. I need to know why. I need to know if any of it was real before I ask you for anything.
She said none of that.
"My father was murdered two nights ago," she said. "Someone inside my family arranged it. I have financial records and a communication trail pointing toward both the inside man and an outside party someone above my family in this city's structure. I need someone with the network and the power to help me build a case and present it to the other family heads before my brother finishes burying the evidence and burying me with it."
Silence.
Dante looked at her. She looked back.
"No," he said.
"I can pay "
"I don't need your money."
"Then what do you need?" She kept her voice flat. "Name it. I'll tell you whether I can give it."
Something shifted in his expression. So small she almost missed it. He pulled out the chair across from her and sat down. He rested his arms on the table and looked at her for a long moment with those dark, unreadable eyes.
"You want my network. My men. My resources. Three to four weeks of operational focus, minimum." He paused. "That has a price that has nothing to do with money."
"Name it," she said again.
"You move into this building tonight. You stay until the job is done. You appear publicly as my associate." A pause that lasted exactly one second too long. "My companion. Close enough that the other families understand you have Salvatore backing. Close enough that Marco thinks twice before he moves against you directly."
She stared at him. "You want to use me as a shield."
"I want to use the alliance. It benefits both of us." His voice was completely even. "Your presence here gives me a legitimate reason to investigate Moretti internal matters without it looking like aggression. Your safety is better guaranteed inside this building than anywhere else you could go right now."
"And the companion part."
"Is necessary for the optics."
She sat with that for a moment. She thought about her father on the dining room floor. She thought about Marco's perfect smile. She thought about the clock running on everything her father built while she sat in a cold white room negotiating her own dignity.
"If I agree," she said slowly, "I need full access to every briefing. Every piece of information your people find. No managing what I'm told and when."
"Agreed."
"And when it's over when Marco is finished and I have my family back I walk away. Clean. No further obligation."
He looked at her for a moment.
"Agreed," he said again.
She stood up. She extended her hand across the table. He stood and took it his hand was warm, his grip firm, and she felt the contact like a current running from her palm to somewhere in her chest that she refused to acknowledge.
"Then we have a deal," she said.
She turned and walked to the door before her face could do anything she would regret.
The night air outside hit her like cold water. She walked toward the car, breathing carefully, counting steps. One. Two. Three. She was doing well. She was completely fine.
Behind her she heard Dante's voice low, quiet, meant for the man beside him. She could not make out the words. Just the tone. Something careful in it. Something that did not sound like a man who had just closed a clean business transaction.
She heard Renzo respond. She caught none of that either.
But she turned her head slightly as she reached the car door and caught Renzo's face over her shoulder.
He was watching her walk away with an expression she recognized after a moment.
Pity.
Not cruelty. Not contempt. The specific sad look of someone who knows how a story ends before the people inside it do.
She got in the car. She closed the door.
What does he know that I don't?