She Wore a Crimson Dress to the Mafia Boss’s Party—Then She Spotted the Assassin

The basement loading dock smelled of wet diesel and salt water.

The Harbor Crown Hotel was built over the old wharf pilings, and at low tide, the sea pushed its breath straight up through the drainage grates. I sat in the rear passenger seat of the reinforced Suburban, the Glock sitting on my crimson silk lap, my hands resting on either side of the grip like it was a live grenade.

The door flew open ten minutes later.

I raised the muzzle.

“If you pull that trigger, Vance, you’re doing the paperwork,” Damian’s voice sliced through the dark.

He slid into the leather bench beside me, pulling the heavy door shut until the pneumatic locks engaged with a heavy *thud*. His bow tie was gone. The top three buttons of his white dress shirt were ripped open, exposing a throat smeared with soot and a dark streak of blood that ran from behind his left ear into the hollow of his collarbone.

“Driver, move,” Damian said into the intercom.

The engine rumbled, four tons of armor plate and supercharged horsepower surging forward up the concrete ramp toward Commercial Street.

I dropped the gun onto the leather between us and reached into my evening clutch, pulling out the small trauma kit I had tucked behind my compact and lipstick.

“Let me see it,” I said, my voice shaking despite my best efforts to keep my clinic tone.

“It isn't mine.”

“Damian, sit still. You have an arterial bleed three inches from your jugular.”

He turned his head toward me in the dim ambient light of the dash monitors. His breathing was slow, measured, completely out of sync with the violence that had just unfolded forty floors above us. He looked down at my hands—the gloves had come off, the red silk was stained with hydraulic oil from the fire door, and my knuckles were white.

“I told you to go to the car,” he said softly.

“I am in the car.”

“You waited at the bottom of the ramp until Nico cleared the exit.”

“Because if you were shot, Nico wouldn't know how to stop a thoracic collapse, and you would have suffocated on your own blood before you cleared the tunnel.” I tore open a sterile gauze pad with my teeth, soaked it with antiseptic from a glass ampoule, and pressed it hard against the base of his skull.

Damian hissed through his teeth—the first sound of genuine discomfort he had made all evening.

“You’re rougher than Marcus,” he muttered, referring to the clinic’s chief of surgery.

“Marcus has thirty years of whiskey shakes and a pension paid by your shell companies,” I snapped, leaning closer to inspect the laceration under the dome light. “I don't. Hold this.”

I took his large, calloused hand and pressed his fingers over the pad. He didn't pull away. Instead, his thumb moved slightly, brushing across the curve of my jawline where a drop of cold sweat was trailing down toward my throat.

The car took a hard left onto the Fitzgerald Expressway, tires squealing against the damp tarmac.

“How did you know?” Damian asked.

“The tattoo.”

“Lots of men in Boston have ink.”

“Not that ink. Julian Mercer had three enforcers tagged with that exact pattern in South Boston when I worked the graveyard shift at Boston Medical Center four years ago. It’s an initiation mark. You don't get the scythe until you’ve killed a state witness or an officer.” I pulled a small suture pack from the kit, my fingers moving on muscle memory despite the swaying of the chassis. “And the champagne glass was too full. In high-end catering, flutes are filled to two-thirds to allow the bouquet to gather. That glass was filled to within a quarter-inch of the rim to disguise the displacement of whatever he’d dissolved in the bottom.”

Damian was staring at me.

Not the way he looked at the blueprints of the seaport towers. Not the way he looked at his capos when they came into his office to explain why a container had gone missing from the Chelsea docks.

He looked at me as if he were trying to read a manuscript in a dead language.

“You’ve been working eight floors beneath my desk for seven hundred and thirty days,” he said, his voice dropping into that dangerous, intimate register that made my spine go rigid. “You’ve seen seven of my men come in with third-degree burns, nine with compound fractures, and forty-two with gunshot wounds that didn't exist according to the Department of Public Health.”

“Forty-four,” I corrected automatically. “Two of them died on the table. We sent the remains to the incinerator in Brockton.”

“And you never asked a single question.”

“I didn't care who you were.”

“And now?”

I threaded the nylon suture through the curved needle with steady hands. “Now someone just tried to blow your lungs out through your teeth while I was standing close enough to get bone fragments in my eyes. I think that qualifies as an interest in your current life expectancy.”

Damian let out a short, rough breath that sounded suspiciously like a laugh. He didn't move as I brought the needle toward the laceration behind his ear.

“Keep stitching, nurse,” he said, leaning his temple against the leather headrest. “Because by dawn, Julian Mercer is going to find out that when you fail to kill Damian Cross, you don't get a second chance. You just get an obituary.”

The Suburban cleared the entrance to the Atlantic Avenue underground parking complex. As the hydraulic security gate descended behind us with the finality of a tombstone, I drove the first stitch through his flesh.