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A pause. The kind of pause Emiliano uses when the next sentence carries a blade.

"There is a secondary channel running parallel to your operation. Someone is duplicating your work. You are being shadowed inside the Marchese infrastructure."

My stomach drops. Cold. Physical. Fear — and I recognize it as fear because I stopped pretending I don't feel it about six hours and one almost-kiss ago.

"How long?"

"Unknown. Vittore is running it back. But the routing predates your contract by at least eighteen months."

Eighteen months. Someone was inside the operation before the operation existed. Before the Marchese hired me. Before I spread surveillance photographs across the hood of a rental car and saw the King's jaw on a living face and felt the ground shift under me.

I close my eyes. The corridor disappears. What replaces it is Dante's face — not the photographs, not the file. The face from an hour ago. Looking down at me. His body hard against mine and his hand beside my head and the chain humming behind him and his mouth two inches from mine asking what I wanted in a voice that had nothing left in it but want.

"He identified Corsetti from my hand placement," I say. No softening. The honesty I save for the one person on this earth who carries my whole picture. "He read my pulse through six inches of chain. I didn't pull away. My heart was racing, Emiliano."

Silence.

Then he says my name again. Quieter. The way you say a word you've been carrying in your chest for two decades — not as greeting but as proof that the woman it belongs to is still alive.

The memory doesn't arrive through thought. It arrives through heat.

Emiliano's voice is the match and my body is the accelerant and the flashback hits me as temperature against the skin between my shoulder blades before it hits as anything I can name.

Corsica. Twenty-six years old. Three years past the eleven minutes that unmade me.

The safehouse sat in the hills above Ajaccio — stone walls thick enough to stop a bullet, narrow windows cut for a century that didn't know what the next one would learn to do with fire. I was working. I had turned my own annihilation into a profession because the alternative was lying down in the wreckage of the harbor city and admitting Giovanni had won.

I don't lie down.

The smell hit before the light did. Chemical. Sharp. The kind of accelerant designed to eat a building faster than a body can run.

Someone wanted me dead. Or someone wanted to watch me run. Both produce the same immediate result.

I moved.

Down the corridor. Through the kitchen — past the window where basil grew in a cracked clay pot on the sill. The first basil. The original. The one I stole from a market vendor in Messina when I was twenty-one and stupid enough to believe a woman like me got to keep living things.

The heat found my back. The skin between my shoulder blades knew it was burning before my brain caught up. Two seconds. That's the window. Two seconds to decide whether you're a woman who burns or a woman who runs.

I ran.

The basil burned. The clay pot cracked. The kitchen I'd been standing in thirty seconds earlier was swallowed by flame that climbed the walls like something alive and hungry and personally fucking offended by my continued existence.

I hit the rear door with my shoulder. The wood gave. The Corsican night swallowed me — cold air against burns already forming across my upper back, the temperature difference so sharp it felt like being slapped by God. I ran down the hill. Scrub tore at my legs. The fire behind me turned the sky the color of rage.

The first detonation was Giovanni's eleven minutes — the erasure of my name.

The second was the fire — the erasure of the lie that the ghost was safe. I had no country. No documentation. No protection. And the world I worked in would burn me as easily as it burned the basil.

I came down the hill barefoot with burns across my shoulders and the taste of smoke in my throat and the knowledge — bone-deep, permanent — that the only version of me the world couldn't kill was the hardest one.

His voice found me before my feet found the ground.

A comms unit. Short-range. A frequency I didn't know he had. One word across two hundred meters of Corsican dark.

"Run."

Not shouted. Not panicked. Calm. Measured. The voice of a man who had already mapped every exit and was telling me which one to take because he'd calculated the trajectories while the building was still standing.