POV: Mia
"Sit down."
"No."
Dante looks at her. She looks back. Neither of them moves.
She is still gripping the back of the chair. Her wrists are still raw. Her heart is still hammering so hard she can feel it in her teeth. But she will stand here all night before she sits down in this man's house like they are about to have a normal conversation.
"I don't want to sit," she says. "I want answers. You said my father sent you a message the night he died. What message. What did he say. Exactly."
Dante is quiet for a moment. Then he walks to the sitting area — two dark couches facing each other across a low table — and sits down on one of them. He does not tell her again to sit. He does not look at her like she is being difficult. He just waits.
Which is somehow more infuriating than anything else he could do.
After ten seconds she walks over and sits on the couch across from him. On the very edge. Knees together. Ready to stand up again immediately if she needs to.
He folds his hands on the table between them.
"Your father came to me fourteen months ago," he says.
"Why would he come to you?"
"Because he had been working inside Sable Voss's organization for six months and he needed someone with enough power to do something with what he found." He pauses. "He did not come to the police. He said the police were already bought. He came to me because I am the only person in this city that Sable Voss is actually afraid of."
Mia stares at him. "My father worked for a crime organization."
"Your father worked for an accounting firm that was a front for a crime organization. He did not know what it was when he took the job. By the time he figured it out, he had already seen too much to simply walk away." Dante's voice is flat and even, like he is reading from a report. No drama. No decoration. Just facts. "So instead of running, he stayed. He kept their books. And quietly, carefully, he started copying everything."
Something is happening in Mia's chest. A slow, horrible unraveling.
Because it fits.
It fits the late nights. The locked drawer. The way he would sometimes stop mid-sentence at dinner and stare at nothing. The way he hugged her longer than usual every time she visited. Like he was counting the seconds.
"He was building a case," she says slowly.
"Yes."
"Against Sable Voss."
"Against Sable and everyone connected to her operation. Which is a long list." He reaches into a folder on the table — she did not notice the folder until now — and places a single sheet of paper in front of her. "This is what he gave me. Fourteen months of financial records. Shell companies. Names. Transaction dates."
She looks down at the paper. Columns of numbers. Some of the account names are initials she does not recognize. But the format — the neat, precise columns, the way the dates are written — she knows that format. She grew up watching her father organize his paperwork at the kitchen table.
Her throat tightens.
"Someone found out he was copying records," Dante continues. "We don't know exactly when. But three weeks before he died, he sent me a message saying he thought he had been compromised. He asked me to move faster." A pause. "I was moving. Not fast enough."
"And then he died."
"And then he died."
The words sit between them like something solid.
Mia looks up from the paper. "You said someone put me in that auction room on purpose. That it was the same person who had him killed."
"Yes."
"Why? I don't know anything. I'm not part of any of this."
Dante looks at her steadily. "Are you sure about that?"
She opens her mouth. Closes it.
Information is the most powerful weapon in any room, Mia.
How many times did her father say that to her? How many nights did he sit at the kitchen table reading numbers aloud while she did her homework nearby, half-listening, half-asleep? How many account names and transfer dates and initials did she absorb without even trying, the way you absorb song lyrics you never meant to memorize?
"They think I know something," she says quietly.
"They think you might. Which, to people like Sable, is the same as knowing." He reaches into the folder again and places a photograph on the table. A man. Late fifties. Silver hair. Expensive suit. Ordinary face — the kind you would walk past a hundred times without remembering. "This is the man who gave the order for your father's death."
She picks up the photo and looks hard. Searching for something familiar. A name trying to surface.
Nothing.
She does not know him. She has never seen him before in her life.
"Who is he?" she asks.
"Someone you will know soon enough." He takes the photo back. Not unkindly, but firmly. Like there is an order to things and he is not ready to give her that piece yet. "What matters right now is that he knows about you. He is the reason you were in that room last night. He intended for you to disappear quietly — bought by someone with no connection to him, taken somewhere you would never surface again."
The full picture assembles itself in her mind.
Her father dies. She is grabbed. She is sold. She vanishes. Whatever she might know — whatever her father might have told her, read to her, shown her without realizing — disappears with her.
Clean. Neat. Like balancing a set of books.
She sets the photo down on the table. Her hand is steady. She is proud of that.
"So what now?" she asks.
"Now you stay here. You are safe inside this building. My people are on every floor, every exit."
"For how long?"
"Until I finish what your father started."
She looks at him. Really looks at him. The dark eyes. The controlled stillness. The guilt she saw for just one second before he locked it back up behind his face. She does not trust him. She is not going to trust him. But she is not stupid.
"I want to go home," she says. Not pleading. Just stating.
"I know."
"But I can't."
"No." He holds her gaze without flinching. "If you walk out of this building right now, you will be dead before the end of tomorrow."
The room is completely silent.
Outside the glass walls, the city glitters and hums, full of people going about their lives with no idea that somewhere above them a girl is sitting across from a criminal who is currently the only thing standing between her and a grave next to her father's.
Mia looks at the folder on the table.
Then she looks at Dante Reyes.
"Then I want to see everything," she says. "Every page in that folder. Every name. Everything my father gave you."
Something moves in his eyes. Not quite surprise. Something smaller and more careful than that.
"Most people in your position would be begging to leave," he says.
"I'm not most people."
He is quiet for exactly three seconds.
Then he slides the entire folder across the table toward her.
What Mia does not know — what she will not find out until it is almost too late — is that one of the names in that folder belongs to someone still sitting at Dante's table.
Someone who, right now, is waiting for a phone call to confirm that she never made it out of that auction house alive.