The man was already dead. He just didn't know it yet.

Lena Vasquez stood at the penthouse window, her fingers wrapped around a glass of water she hadn't touched, watching the street below as though she weren't watching anything at all. Casual. Detached. The way you look at something that can't hurt you.

The black sedan three floors down had been parked in the same spot for forty minutes. Wrong angle for surveillance. Too far for a drive-by. But perfect, absolutely perfect, for a man who wanted a clear line of sight to the building entrance the moment Dominic Moretti walked out.

She picked up her phone. Typed a message to a number that didn't exist in her contacts. Sent it.

Then she went to touch up her lipstick.

By the time she came back, the sedan was gone.

She was cutting tomatoes when she heard the elevator.

Dominic's private elevator. Never the stairs, always between eight and nine, when something had gone wrong. The sound of those doors was as familiar to her as a heartbeat. Three years of listening for it.

The doors opened at 8:47.

"Smells good," he said.

His voice arrived before he did, deep and unhurried, the voice of a man who assumed he'd be listened to and was never wrong. Dominic Moretti filled doorframes the way most men filled chairs. Wide. Still. The particular stillness of someone who never had to raise his voice to quiet a room.

He had a fresh cut on his jaw.

Lena looked at it for a second. Then looked back at the tomatoes.

"You're bleeding," she said.

"I'm aware," he said. He dropped his jacket over the chair like he owned the apartment, which he did, and came around the island. Close enough that she could feel his warmth. Close enough that she could have felt his presence, if she'd allowed herself to feel anything.

He looked at what she was doing.

"Tomatoes," he said.

"Very good," she said.

"You're making fun of me."

"I would never."

"You're making fun of me." He turned then, and his eyes were calm, but sharp underneath that particular sharpness he kept hidden behind the warmth, the part of him that had built an empire and held onto it. "You do this when you're thinking about something you won't tell me."

She took a slow sip. "You do this when you're thinking about something you won't ask me."

She waited.

The results came back in under a minute. She read through them quickly, the way she read everything.

Then she read the last line again.

Slowly.

Marco had run her name through an external database. Not the name Dominic knew her by.

Her real name.

Her phone buzzed in her hand. A message from a number she didn't recognize which meant she recognized it completely.

One line.

Marco isn't the only one who found it.