POV: Aria
Luca answered it before I could say don't.
He put the phone to his ear and talked low and I drove and listened to what I could catch, which wasn't much, just his side of it, the short confirmations and the pauses where Matteo was speaking and the one moment where Luca went very still and said yes, she made it, and then nothing for a stretch that felt longer than it was.
I kept the car steady. The engine was holding but it had a sound then that it didn't have before the jump, something underneath the normal noise, something that would matter if I pushed it and that I was choosing not to think about until I had to.
The road behind us was clear. Had been clear for four minutes. The gang, or whoever they were, hadn't followed past the ramp and I'd been watching long enough to believe it. They had a position and we cleared it and now they were gone, which was either good or meant they had already got what they wanted.
I didn't follow that thought. Not yet.
Luca lowered the phone.
"He wants to talk to you," he said.
I didn't take the phone. "Tell him I'm driving."
Luca looked at me. Looked at the road. Held the phone between us.
I took it.
"Are you hurt," Matteo said.
The question landed before I was ready for it. Not because it was complicated but because of how he said it, flat and direct, no preamble, like the thing he needed to know first was exactly that and nothing else.
"No," I said.
"The car."
"Running. Damaged. I'll know how bad when I stop."
A pause. "Where are you."
"South of the interchange. Moving north."
"I know a place. I'm sending the address."
I wanted to ask why he already had a place, why the answer was that quick, whether it had been prepared before the call. I didn't ask because I was driving and the engine was making its new sound and Luca was sitting eighteen inches from me in a silence I hadn't finished reading.
"Matteo," I said.
"Yes."
"Who sent them."
Another pause, shorter. "I don't know yet."
"That's not the same as no one inside your operation."
The line was quiet for long enough that I thought he was going to say something real, something that cost him. Then: "Drive to the address. We'll talk when you get here."
The call ended.
I handed the phone back to Luca. He took it without a word and I focused on the road and the address that came through thirty seconds later to his phone, which he held up so I could see it without commenting on the fact that it came to his phone and not mine.
I noticed that. I didn't say anything about it.
We drove for eleven minutes without speaking and I used those eleven minutes to run the night from the beginning. The route. The stops. The first two clean, the third exactly as the message had predicted. The car at the bottom of the ramp that had been waiting, not chasing, which meant someone had a timeline and we were on it.
Luca had known the gate was broken for eight months.
Luca had made a call when the engine died.
Luca had not been surprised by the car at the bottom of the ramp.
I looked at him.
He was looking out the window with his jaw set and something working behind his eyes, and what I saw on his face was not the face of someone who had done a thing and was comfortable with it. It was the face of someone who was now on the far side of a thing, deciding what it meant about them.
That wasn't nothing. I filed it.
The address took us to a building in the north, commercial, the kind of block that ran light traffic at that hour. I pulled into the underground entrance and the gate was already open and two of Matteo's men were standing at the bottom of the ramp and they waved me through without checking and I parked where one of them pointed and cut the engine and that time it didn't start again.
That was fine. I was done driving for that night anyway.
I sat for a moment with my hands in my lap and the sudden quiet of the car around me and let myself feel the things I hadn't for the last hour. My left shoulder ached where it had hit the door on the landing. My hands were stiff. There was a small cut on my forearm I didn't remember getting.
I looked at it.
Luca looked at it.
"There's a first aid kit in the" he started.
"I'm fine," I said.
He stopped. Looked at his hands. "I didn't know about the ramp," he said. "The car at the bottom. I didn't know that was there."
I looked at him.
"I called to report the engine failure," he said. "That's what I was told to do if anything went wrong on the run. Call in, report the position, wait for extraction."
"Who told you that."
He looked at the windshield. "Matteo."
I sat with that. The call was procedure. Which meant someone else had used that procedure, used the fact that Luca would report in, used the position he'd give to place that car at the bottom of the ramp. Someone who knew the protocol. Someone close enough to Matteo's operation to know how his people communicated on a damaged run.
Someone who had wanted me stopped in a place with no exits.
The door to the stairwell opened and Matteo walked through it, alone, no men behind him, and he looked at the car first, took in the damage, and then looked at me through the windshield and his face did something I couldn't read from there.
I got out.
He crossed to me and stopped two feet away and his eyes moved to my forearm, to the cut, and I watched something tighten in his jaw.
"The attack was internal," I said. "Someone used Luca's check-in to position the car at the ramp. Someone who knows your protocols."
He was quiet.
"Which means," I said, "either you have a deeper problem than you've told me, or you are the problem, and I need to know which one right now."
He looked at me for a long moment.
Then he took out his phone, dialled, and when it answered he said four words.
"Bring me Rael's contact."