The cigar smoke curled lazily through the dimly lit room, the scent clinging to the air like a ghost. Emilio DeLorenzo sat at the head of the long, polished table, his fingers tapping an unhurried rhythm against the wood. His face was unreadable, his sharp, fox-like eyes scanning the scattered documents in front of him. To anyone else, he looked relaxed, almost bored. But she knew better.

She had spent enough time around him to recognize the signs. The slight tension in his jaw. The measured stillness of his posture. Emilio DeLorenzo was thinking—calculating. And that was always a dangerous thing.

She wasn’t supposed to be here. Not at this table, in this room, sitting across from the man whispered about in the underground as The Fox. She wasn’t a consigliere, a capo, or even one of the blood-soaked men who enforced the family's will in the streets.

She was something else entirely. A wildcard.

The kind of woman who existed on the fringes of the Moretti empire, threading the line between loyalty and reckless defiance. The kind who made powerful men nervous because she couldn’t be bought or predicted. Maybe that’s why Emilio had taken an interest in her—because he couldn’t quite figure out what she was.

Tonight, she was here for a reason.

The problem lay in the papers in front of him—accounts that didn’t add up, transactions that whispered of betrayal. Money siphoned off in amounts too careful to be coincidence. Someone was playing their own game behind the Moretti family’s back, and she had been the one to find the first crack in the foundation.

She watched as Emilio slid a page toward her, his fingers lingering on the edge just long enough for it to feel deliberate. A silent invitation. A test.

She took it, skimming the numbers, the names—fake, all of them. But there was a pattern.