Chapter 11
The Dock Fire
The dock should have been empty.
It wasn't.
By the time Dante and Mia reached the warehouse by the water, the lights were already too bright and the air already smelled wrong. Men moved between the containers in a pattern that was too organized to be random. Someone had wanted them here.
Mia's stomach sank.
"Trap," she said.
"Yes," Dante replied, and shoved her behind a steel column a second before the first shot cracked across the dock.
The sound was enough to split the night open.
Mia ducked, heart hammering, as Dante moved with the kind of hard focus that made everything around him feel sharply temporary. Enzo shouted from somewhere to the left. A door slammed. Metal rang. Then, in the confusion, a fire started.
It began small, a lick of orange under a pallet of crates.
Then it caught.
Heat surged through the dock like breath.
Mia coughed as smoke thickened. Dante grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the far wall, moving them through the chaos with one hand at her back, the other covering her when the light flared too close.
"Stay with me."
"I'm right here."
That was a lie and a truth both at once.
The fire lapped across the floor. Someone shouted Owen's name. Mia twisted hard enough to see a figure at the far end of the warehouse before Dante pulled her back behind cover.
There.
Not Owen.
A man running with a clipboard and a satchel.
Silvio's man.
Dante saw it too. His face went still in that dangerous way it did when the answer finally became simple.
They pushed through a side door and into a narrow service corridor where the smoke was thinner and the noise sharper. Mia stumbled once, caught herself, and looked down as a loose page slid from the satchel the man had dropped.
Dante snatched it up.
His expression changed when he read the line item.
Mia's eyes found the same thing a second later.
Hart, Elena - relocation payment.
Another line below it listed a delivery address.
A private residence.
Not a safehouse.
Not a transfer point.
A house.
Mia stared at the address until the letters blurred.
"What's wrong?" Dante asked.
She looked up at him slowly.
"That isn't just a payment," she said.
The smoke thickened behind them. The dock groaned with the sound of metal heating and shifting.
Mia held up the page with a hand that had stopped shaking only because the fear had turned into something colder.
"That's my mother."
Dante went still.
The fire roared behind them, and for the first time Mia understood that the ledger was not merely about business, or Owen, or the Romano family.
It had been about her from the beginning.