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

By four in the morning, the penthouse forty-seven floors above Atlantic Avenue felt less like a palace and more like an observation post at the edge of a war zone.

Damian had refused to let me return to my apartment in the North End. Two of his men had already gone there, cleared out my laptop, my passport, my medical licenses, and my cat, and brought them to the secondary suites on the forty-fifth floor.

I stood by the floor-to-ceiling windows looking south toward Fort Point Channel.

The fog was rolling in thick from the outer harbor, swallowing the lights of the cargo cranes in South Boston one by one. The crimson dress lay crumpled on an armchair behind me; I had changed into black tactical trousers and a dark gray cashmere sweater that Nico had pulled from Damian’s guest closets. The sweater was three sizes too large, smelling faintly of cedar and clean linen, the sleeves rolled twice over my wrists.

A mug of black coffee was set down on the glass console beside me.

“Drink it,” Damian said.

He was wearing clean clothes—a charcoal henley and dark denim. Without the formal armor of his dinner jacket, the true scale of him was impossible to ignore. His shoulders were wide, his torso tapered like a swimmer’s, and the corded veins in his forearms stood out under the pale skin like topographical lines on a map.

“You’re going to kill him, aren't you?” I asked, looking down into the dark surface of the coffee.

“Julian Mercer has been a tumor on this city’s liver for eight years,” Damian replied, leaning one shoulder against the window mullion. “He thinks because his brother sits on the State Senate Transportation Committee, he can dictate who controls the deep-water berths. He’s wrong.”

“And the clinic?”

“The clinic is closed as of three o'clock.”

I turned my head sharply. “You can't do that. We have four long-term trauma patients in the recovery suites. One of them is on peritoneal dialysis.”

“They’ve already been transferred to a private facility in Manchester,” Damian said, his voice flat, pragmatic, unyielding. “Mercer knows about Crosswell. That means the basement is compromised. By midday tomorrow, the building will be surrounded by either Mercer’s shooters or federal marshals acting on an anonymous tip about unlicensed surgical waste.”

He looked down at me, his eyes dark in the half-light.

“I don't leave flank positions exposed, Elena.”

“I’m an exposed flank.”

“No,” he said, stepping closer until the heat of him pushed against the cold glass behind me. “You’re the center of the line now.”

Before I could ask him what that meant, the lights went out.

Not just the penthouse lights.

Below us, across the entire length of the Fort Point Channel, the amber streetlamps, the architectural illumination on the historic brick warehouses, and the red beacon atop the Boston Wharf building vanished simultaneously.

A localized grid failure.

A heartbeat later, the emergency generator in the penthouse’s utility core clicked, groaned, and died before it could turn the turbines.

“Sabotage,” Damian said, his voice dropping into that dead, lethal register.

He didn't draw a gun; he already had it in his hand. A custom Sig Sauer P226 with a threaded barrel.

He grabbed my wrist with his left hand, his grip crushing the bone, and dragged me down behind the low mahogany credenza beneath the east windows just as the glass forty feet above our heads shattered with a deafening, percussive roar.

High-velocity rounds. Heavy caliber.

The rounds didn't whistle; they cracked through the room like lightning strikes, disintegrating the Italian plaster, turning the antique mahogany bookshelf into a cloud of splintered matchsticks.

“Snipers on the rooftop of the cold storage plant across the channel,” Damian whispered against my ear. His body was completely covering mine, his chest pressed against my back, pinning me against the floorboards. “They’re using thermal imaging. The cashmere won't hide your heat signature for more than thirty seconds.”

“Where do we go?” I gasped, my face pressed into the wool of the carpet as plaster dust rained down on my neck.

“The interior corridor. There’s a reinforced panic shaft behind the wine cellar. But we have six paces of open exposure between here and the archway.”

*Crack-crack-crack.*

Another three-round string punched through the floorboards three inches from Damian’s boot heel.

“Damian,” I said, my voice dead level despite the terror clawing at my throat. “Your hand is bleeding again.”

He looked down at his left palm. A jagged piece of structural glass from the window frame had driven itself two inches into the meat of his thumb when he pulled me down.

“Doesn't matter,” he muttered.

“It does matter if you can't use your support hand to steady the muzzle,” I hissed.

I didn't wait for his permission. I reached inside the sleeve of my oversized sweater, ripped a six-inch strip of linen from the cuff of the shirt I was wearing beneath it, and wrapped his hand with three vicious, tight turns, securing it with a square knot that bit into the wound.

Damian stared at me through the darkness, the muzzle of his weapon pointing toward the ceiling. Plaster dust was in his hair, on his eyelashes, across the sharp bridge of his nose.

“You’re an unusual woman, Elena Vance,” he murmured, the corners of his mouth twitching upward in the middle of a sniper bombardment.

“I’m an underpaid woman, Mr. Cross.”

“That,” he said, shifting his weight forward onto the balls of his feet, “is about to change dramatically. On three.”

“One,” I said.

“Two.”

He didn't say three.

He lunged upward, hauling me up by my belt with one arm, using his massive frame to shield my entire torso as we broke through the splintered debris of the dining room and plunged into the pitch-black mouth of the private elevator hall.