I STOOD IN FOR A LITTLE GIRL’S MISSING FATHER AT ONE DANCE—THEN THE MAN WHO LEFT HER SHOWED UP WHERE SHE SHOULD HAVE BEEN SAFE

I stood by the floor-to-ceiling glass of Luca Ravellini’s private office, staring down at the quiet, tree-lined street three floors below. My hands were still shaking. Not from the cold—the apartment was heated to a precise, comfortable degree that felt almost obscene—but from the phantom echo of the night before.

Luca sat behind a massive mahogany desk. He wasn’t looking at paperwork. He was watching a tablet screen that displayed live security feeds from our apartment complex across town.

"They didn't just go there," Luca said, his voice flat, low, and completely devoid of emotion. "They tore it apart."

My breath hitched. "What do you mean?"

He turned the tablet toward me.

On the screen, our small, cramped living room—the one where Sofia and I had spent years eating cheap ramen and laughing over school projects—was unrecognizable. The sofa cushions had been slashed open, stuffing spilling out like white guts. Books were kicked across the floor. The framed photograph of our mother had its glass shattered, her face sliced down the middle.

"They were looking for anything," Luca said, tapping the screen to switch to the hallway camera. "A diary, a flash drive, a passport. Something she might have dropped, or something you might have hidden. They spent twelve minutes inside before my scout team tipped off the local patrol to scare them away."

I grabbed the edge of the desk. My knuckles turned white. "We left with nothing. Sofia only had her schoolbag. I had my wallet. There was nothing to find."

Luca leaned back, his dark eyes locking onto mine. "They don't know that, Leo. To the Triad, a fourteen-year-old girl holding a blood-soaked skirt is a walking ticking time bomb. They assume she has Webb’s files. They assume Webb gave her something before he died."

"He didn't give her anything!" I snapped, my voice rising before I could stop it. "She just happened to walk out of the back exit of the high school when they cornered him behind the dumpster. She didn't even know who he was until you said his name last night!"

Luca didn't flinch at my outburst. He didn't slam his hand on the desk or call his guards to throw me out. He just studied me with an unsettling, clinical curiosity, like a scientist watching a rat figure out a maze.

"I know," he said softly. "The problem is that the Triad doesn't believe in coincidences. And neither do the men backing them inside the city government."

Before I could answer, the heavy oak door swung open without a knock.

A tall man with a jagged scar running from his ear down into his collar entered. His name was Dante—Luca’s second-in-command, a man who looked like he ate nails and washed them down with gunpowder.

"Boss," Dante said, throwing a heavy manila folder onto the desk. "We tracked the clean-up crew from the apartment. They didn't go back to Chinatown. They went straight to the municipal district office. Specifically, to Deputy Mayor Vance's private parking garage."

Luca’s expression didn't change, but the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees.

"Vance," Luca murmured.

"The District Attorney is dead, and the Deputy Mayor is running interference for the hit squad," Dante said, glancing at me with cold, evaluating eyes. "And that's not the best part, Boss. The kid's school bag? We retrieved it from the locker room before the cops sealed the school."

Dante unzipped a dark nylon backpack and emptied its contents onto the desk.

Textbooks, a pencil case, a half-eaten bag of chips, and a folded-up sheet of lined notebook paper.

My heart stopped.

I knew that paper. Sofia had been drawing on it during breakfast yesterday morning.

Luca reached out, picked up the paper, and unfolded it.

It wasn't a drawing of flowers or anime characters. It was a rough, frantic hand-drawn map of the school alleyway, marked with red ink where the body had fallen, and next to it, a sequence of digits and letters scribbled in a hurried, panicked adult handwriting that didn't belong to my sister.