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

Julian Mercer was fifty, thin as a whip, with graying hair swept back from a face that looked like it had been carved out of salt cod. He wore an expensive vicuña overcoat that looked absurd against the industrial decay of the shipyard, and his hands were tucked casually into his pockets.

Behind him stood two men with assault rifles, their muzzles pointed directly at my chest.

“Drop the Glock on the deck, Miss Vance,” Mercer said pleasantly, as if we were discussing the price of haddock at the fish pier. “Or my friends will turn that cockpit into a very messy piece of modern art.”

My hand was inside the sweater pocket, my finger curled around the trigger of the small automatic.

I could draw. I could fire.

And I would kill one of them before the other two turned me into red mist.

I took a slow, deep breath, remembering the steady cadence of the cardiac monitor when everything was going wrong in Bay 1.

*Control the variables you can see.*

I pulled the Glock from my pocket by the extreme tip of the slide, using two fingers, and let it drop onto the fiberglass deck with a sharp *clack*.

“Smart girl,” Mercer smiled, revealing a row of small, sharp teeth that looked entirely carnivorous. “Damian always had an eye for talent. Though why he spent two years letting you empty bedpans when you look like that in red silk is something I’ll have to ask him before I take his lungs out.”

He snapped his fingers.

One of the enforcers stepped forward, grabbed me by the collar of the cashmere sweater, and hauled me off the boat onto the slippery timber of the pier with enough violence to bruise my shoulders.

“Where is he, Julian?” I asked, forcing my voice to remain cold, clinical, detached.

“He’s upstairs, playing with my distraction team,” Mercer said, leading the way along the rotting catwalk toward the central pump house. “Damian is very predictable when he’s angry. He thinks with his forward momentum. You give him four targets in the open, and he charges like an angry bull. Meanwhile, the back door stays wide open.”

They pushed me into the interior of the dry dock pump house.

The room was vast, damp, and lit by four halogen construction lamps hung from the rusted iron rafters. In the center of the concrete floor sat Brenda Hayes, tied to a wooden chair, her face bruised and swollen, a bloody towel pressed between her bound knees.

On the table beside her lay three external hard drives and a manila folder thick with financial printouts.

“Brenda,” I said, trying to step toward her, but the guard’s arm was an iron bar across my throat.

“I’m sorry, Elena,” the older woman sobbed, her voice muffled through split lips. “They had my boy. They had Kevin in the lockup at South Bay. They said they’d put him in general population with the Mercer crews if I didn't give them the gate codes.”

“She’s a mother, Elena,” Mercer said, picking up a silver utility knife from the table and sliding the blade in and out with a series of tiny, metallic clicks. “You can't blame a woman for protecting her own blood. Just like I can't blame Damian for coming all the way down here for you.”

He turned, the knife blade catching the white halogen light.

“He’s going to trade,” Mercer continued, his eyes glittering with manic certainty. “He’s going to sign the release for the East Boston terminal rights, he’s going to hand over the port authority manifests, and then he’s going to watch me put this blade through your carotid artery before I shoot him in the knees.”

“He won't trade,” I said, looking him dead in the eye.

Mercer laughed—a dry, rattling sound. “You don't know men like us, nurse.”

“I know Damian Cross,” I replied, my voice steady, carrying through the vast, echoing cavern of the pump house. “He doesn't negotiate with infections, Mercer. He cuts them out.”