POV: Aria
Luca rode in the passenger seat and didn't speak, which would have been fine except that not speaking was its own kind of pressure.
He was Matteo's man. Sent to observe, he said when he got in, like that was a neutral word for what it actually was, which was watch. He was there to watch me work and report back, and having someone in the seat beside me cataloguing everything I did turned the familiar into something I had to think about, and thinking about driving was not the same as driving.
I didn't say any of that.
The route came through at nine, as promised. Three stops. An industrial stretch south of the bridge for the first, a restaurant supply warehouse in the middle, and a private address in the north end for the third. The cargo was in sealed cases in the back. I didn't ask what was in them. I didn't look at Dez when I didn't ask, because his face would have made it harder to not ask.
The first stop went clean. Ten minutes. A man came out, checked a number on his phone against a number on the case, took it inside. No words. No eye contact. The whole thing felt like a transaction that had happened a hundred times before that day and would happen a hundred times after, and I was the most replaceable part of it.
That was fine. Replaceable was safe. Replaceable didn't get remembered.
Back in the car I checked the mirror before I pulled out. Luca hadn't moved. He was looking at the building we'd just left and his jaw was working slightly, like he was chewing on something he hadn't decided yet.
"Problem," I said.
"No," he said.
"You look like there's a problem."
He turned and looked at me with the flat, careful expression of someone who had been told to observe and not engage. "Drive," he said.
I drove.
The second stop took longer. The contact was late, which meant I sat in a loading bay for eleven minutes with the engine running and nothing to do but think. I thought about the message. When the third stop asks you to open the trunk, don't. I'd been turning it over since the night before and kept landing in the same place. Someone had known the route before I did. Either they had access to Matteo's communications or they had access to whoever built the route, which meant the inside problem was bigger than one person and had been running longer than anyone had admitted.
The contact showed. Took the case. We left.
"You're thinking about something," Luca said.
"I'm driving," I said.
"You've been quiet since the first stop."
"I'm always quiet on a job."
He looked at me sideways. "Matteo said you'd be difficult."
That landed somewhere it wasn't supposed to. Not because it bothered me, but because of the specific image it put in my head, which was Matteo saying my name to that man before that night, in a room I wasn't in, and I found I wanted to know what else had been said and I found I wanted to not want that.
"What else did he say," I asked.
Luca almost smiled. "Drive," he said.
The third stop was on a quiet block in the north end, residential, the kind of street where the houses had been there long enough to look like they belonged to themselves. I pulled to the address and cut the engine and sat.
That was it.
I looked at the building. Second floor light on. Ground level dark. No movement at the door, no one waiting outside. I checked the mirror and saw nothing on the street behind us, nothing parked wrong or sitting too long.
Everything looked fine and the message said don't open the trunk.
Luca reached for the door.
"Wait," I said.
He stopped.
"The contact comes to us," I said. "We don't go to them."
"That's not how this stop works."
"It is now."
He looked at me with something harder than the flat expression from before. "You don't set the protocol."
"I set the protocol on anything that happens inside my vehicle," I said. "If the contact wants the case, they come down and take it. Same as the first two stops. If that's a problem, call Matteo."
He held my eyes for a long moment and I could see him weighing it, the cost of pushing against the cost of a call to Matteo that early in the run, and I watched him decide that the call was worse.
He took out his phone. Texted someone. We waited.
Ninety seconds later the ground floor door opened. A man stepped out. He walked to the car and stopped at my window. I lowered it two inches.
"Case," I said.
He looked at Luca. Luca said nothing. The man stepped back, opened the rear door, lifted the case, closed the door, went back inside.
Done.
I started the engine. Luca still hadn't spoken. I didn't look at him because looking at him right then meant acknowledging that something had just happened and I wasn't ready to explain what I thought that something was. Not to him.
I pulled onto the street and took the first turn and we were two blocks out when Luca's phone buzzed. He read the screen and something in his posture changed, tightened, the way bodies did when they got information they weren't expecting.
"Change of plan," he said. "North bridge. Now."
"That's not on the route."
"It is now."
I made the turn. The bridge approach was a long straight with one lane each direction and no exits until the far side, not a road I would have chosen but it was the road he was giving me so I took it and drove and watched the far end come closer.
It was when the far end got close enough to read that my hands tightened on the wheel.
Three vehicles, spread wide, headlights on and facing toward me, sitting still and blocking every lane.
Not police. Not DeLuca.
Something else entirely.
I had maybe four seconds before I had to make a decision and the bridge had no exits and no room to turn and the only directions available were forward and back, and back meant explaining to Luca why I reversed on a job and forward meant driving into whatever had just blocked the road and was now waiting to see what I did.
"Who is that," I said.
Luca didn't answer.
I looked at him.
His window was down and his phone was to his ear and he was not looking at me at all.