The most feared crime boss in Philadelphia called me worthless

The rain over Center City had turned into a dense, freezing sleet that coated the brick walkways of Locust Street in an oily, dangerous glaze.

Outside the brass-framed glass doors of Bellaforte, an armored black Lincoln Continental sat idling at the curb, its twin exhaust pipes throwing thick, white plumes of condensation into the amber glare of the streetlamps. Standing beside the rear door was Leo, the thick-necked enforcer who had smirked when Matteo called me an illiterate dog ten minutes earlier.

Leo’s smirk was gone.

He held an oversized black umbrella over the pavement, his knuckles gray as he gripped the carbon-fiber handle, his eyes darting frantically between the restaurant entrance and the dark corners of the alleyway across the street.

"Matteo," Leo muttered, his voice tight and hoarse as we cleared the revolving door. "The Santoro scouts were spotted three blocks south near the academy. We shouldn't be sitting at this curb without the chase car."

"The chase car is parked behind the academy, Leo," Matteo replied without breaking stride.

He didn't grab my arm. He didn't use force. He simply walked with his hand resting lightly against the small of my back, guiding me through the freezing drizzle with an unyielding, territorial pressure that left no room for escape.

The door of the Continental opened with a heavy, pressurized hiss.

"Get in, Miss Vance," Matteo said.

I hesitated on the wet curb.

My left shoe gave its familiar, wet sucking sound as the electrical tape peeled away against the curb stone, exposing the thin wool of my damp sock to the freezing slush.

I looked at the black leather interior, smelling of rich leather balm, cedar, and the faint, chemical tang of high-frequency radio equipment humming beneath the floorboards. In my pocket, my phone vibrated once: an automated text alert from the electric utility informing me that service to Apartment 3-B would be terminated at 8:00 AM for non-payment.

Forty-five dollars.

I was forty-five dollars short of dignity, and the man holding the car door held three million dollars in unindexed municipal bonds in his head.

I climbed into the car.

The leather seat was heated, sending a shock of radiant warmth through my chilled thighs and lower spine that made my muscles ache with sudden, overwhelming exhaustion.

Matteo slid into the seat beside me, pulling the heavy door shut with a concussive thud that cut off every sound of the Philadelphia night. The windows were four layers of laminated polycarbonate; outside, the amber streetlamps and the flashing red brake lights of the city traffic became silent, smeared streaks of color on an abstract canvas.

The car lunged forward, the twelve-cylinder engine letting out a low, predatory growl as the driver accelerated west toward the Schuylkill Expressway.

"Where are you taking me?" I asked, keeping my back pressed against the door, my hands folded tightly across the damp apron on my lap.

Matteo didn't answer immediately.

He reached into a recessed mahogany console between our seats, pulled out a crystal decanter of twenty-five-year-old scotch, and poured two fingers into a heavy lowball glass. He didn't offer me a drink. He held the amber liquid against the passing light of the expressway signs, took a slow, measured sip, and set the glass back into its weighted brass ring.

"Your father’s sister lives in a retirement community in Cherry Hill, New Jersey," Matteo said, his voice flat, rhythmic, and clinical. "Her monthly nursing fees are four thousand two hundred dollars. They were paid on the first of every month by a cashier’s check drawn from an account at the Meridian Bank in Wilmington."

I turned my head, my eyes wide in the gloom of the cabin. "How do you know about Aunt Clara?"

"Because three days ago, the check bounced," Matteo said, turning to face me.

In the dim light of the dashboard, his pale scar stood out like a white wire across his cheek.

"The account in Wilmington was closed under an emergency federal seizure warrant signed by the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania," he continued, leaning forward until his shoulders blocked the window. "The warrant was issued because someone inside the Delaware River Basin Commission uploaded sixteen digitized manifests from nineteen ninety-eight to a public whistle-blower server in Frankfurt."

"The manifests..." I breathed, my mind racing through the fragments of my father’s old files. "The dry-dock leases."

"The dry-dock leases that allow the Moretti family to move eight thousand shipping containers a month through the South Philadelphia port without state customs inspections," Matteo whispered, his amber eyes boring into mine with a terrifying, diagnostic intensity.

He reached out his right hand, his fingers resting lightly on the knee of my worn service trousers.

"The whistleblower used a cryptographic signature that belongs to an academic workstation in the Department of Philology at the University of Florence," Matteo murmured. "An account registered to a student named Tessa Vance."

My stomach dropped into an icy abyss.

"I didn't upload anything," I gasped, my hands flying to my chest. "I haven't logged into that university account since twenty-nineteen! I was working double shifts at Bellaforte! I was paying for radiation treatments!"

"I know you didn't upload them, Tessa," Matteo said softly.

He did not remove his hand from my knee. His thumb traced a slow, deliberate line across the fabric, warm and heavy against my skin.

"If I thought you had uploaded those manifests, you wouldn't be sitting in a heated car on the Schuylkill Expressway. You would be at the bottom of the turning basin in Wilmington with forty pounds of scrap iron wired to your ribs."

"Then who did?"

Matteo looked out the rain-streaked window as the Lincoln cleared the exit ramp toward the dark, forested estates of Chestnut Hill.