Chapter 2 - The Syndicate's Ledger"She’s a liability, Boss. Plain and simple."
Lucas paced the length of the private study, his silhouette cutting sharply against the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the glittering, indifferent expanse of midnight Manhattan. On the mahogany desk, a dossier lay open, its pages fluttering slightly from the central air conditioning. Emily Marcus. Age 24. No criminal record. Tax returns cleaner than a whistle. Current address: a cramped third-floor walk-up in Queens.
Enzo Dante sat behind the desk, swirling a finger around the rim of an empty crystal tumbler. In the corner of the vast, shadowy room, the dog—still answering to the name Siri, much to the bewilderment of every high-ranking enforcer in the Dante organization—was curled heavily across Emily’s feet. The girl herself sat rigid on a velvet settee, staring into a cup of chamomile tea Maria had forced into her hands twenty minutes ago.
"A liability doesn't walk into a room containing three armed professionals and disarm a four-hundred-thousand-dollar Belgian Malinois with a nursery rhyme," Enzo replied smoothly, his voice devoid of humor. He leaned forward, resting his chin on his interlaced fingers. "Tell me again, Miss Marcus. How is it that Cerberus—an animal trained in Eastern Europe to track blood scents and neutralize targets through closed steel doors—recognized you from a two-bar hum?"
Emily swallowed hard, her throat feeling like sandpaper. She kept her eyes fixed on the amber liquid in her cup, refusing to look up at the man whose name was whispered in every backroom poker game and shipping yard from Brooklyn to Palermo.
"He wasn't always Cerberus," Emily said, her voice small but steady. "When he was three months old, he was Siri. My dad brought him home in the bed of an old Ford pickup truck. We raised him on cheap kibble and tap water behind a drafty house in Queens until... until everything fell apart."
"And how, precisely, does a backyard mutt from the outskirts of Yonkers end up wearing a military-grade tactical harness in my penthouse?" Enzo asked, narrowing his gaze.
"I don't know!" Emily finally looked up, her eyes flashing with a sudden, desperate flare of long-buried anger. "You tell me, Mr. Dante. You're the one sitting on a mountain of money with a private army at your beck and call. My dog was stolen out of our backyard seven years ago while I was at school. The police laughed in my face. Two weeks later, my father was dead. Everything I loved vanished in the span of a single month. So don't sit there interrogating me like I planned this. If I had known my dog was living in a billionaire's fortress guarded by guys who look like hitmen out of a movie, I would have stayed home."
Silence descended on the study, heavy and absolute. Lucas’s hand twitched toward his holster again, scandalized by the girl's audacity. Nobody spoke to Enzo Dante like that. Nobody raised their voice in this room and lived to draft a grocery list.
Enzo stared at her for a long, unblinking moment. Then, slowly, a faint, razor-thin smile touched the corner of his mouth.
"Audacious," Enzo murmured softly. "And dangerous. Lucas, pull the shipping manifests from the docks six years ago. Check the private acquisitions handled through the Vane Shipping front company. I want to know exactly how a stray mutt from a Queens backyard wound up in my training stables in Zagreb."
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"Boss—" Lucas started to object.
"Do it now," Enzo cut him off, standing up with predatory grace. He walked around the desk, stopping just a few feet from Emily. He looked down at the massive dog resting peacefully on her shoes, then up into her terrified, defiant eyes. "You came here tonight to deliver a catering tray, Miss Marcus. But it seems fate—or something far more inconvenient—has decided you're staying for breakfast."
