I Mean Ever…

I Mean Ever…

Enzo

Gino’s “Where do we start?” hung over the table like a pulled pin.

Enzo let the question sit. He watched the room the way he watched a street before a deal—measure the angles, listen for what wasn’t being said. Dom’s fists were tight enough to dent bone. Gino’s eyes were furnace-hot under a lid. Jake had finally stopped typing, which told Enzo more than any report. Lola, she was the one he felt like weather, a pressure change against his skin. Not the bright chaos he knew. Something steadier. Meaner. Alive.

We move too fast, I bury more men.

He set his palms on the table. “We don’t start blind.”

Dom’s head snapped his way. Gino didn’t blink. Lola didn’t move at all.

Enzo kept his voice low, flat steel. “Dottie gave us shape, not names. Jake can’t pull a thread that isn’t there. We swing now, we hit smoke and get shot for the effort.”

Jake cleared his throat, grateful for the cover. “I can build nets, filters on trust papers, private endowments, quiet scholarships, to catch anything that smells like a finishing school hiding under philanthropy. But… yeah. I need a seed.”

“Good.” Enzo looked to him. “Build the nets. Cast them wide. Private academies, ‘leadership institutes,’ fellowship pipelines. Cross anything that intersects with judgeships, procurement boards, corporate boards, and political staffers. Quiet donors, new trusts, dead foundations resurrected with fresh cash. If it hums like grooming, I want it on a wall.”

Jake nodded, already moving. “On it.”

Enzo turned to Dom and Gino. “Tighten the perimeter. No hero runs, no spooking birds. Rotate safe-houses. Fresh phones. Switchbacks on every route—if you can predict it, change it. Lola doesn’t touch a door without eyes on glass and hands on triggers. If you so much as think you’re being mirrored, you are.”

Dom grunted assent, the sound like gravel. Gino’s jaw ticked once.

He looked to Lola last. He didn’t need to say anything to her; she could feel the plan forming under his skin. Still, he made a point of meeting her eyes, letting her read what he wouldn’t voice in front of the crew.

I won’t lose you. Not to a ghost. Not to a myth. Not to men who thinks he runs the world.

Dottie watched him from the end of the table, cane balanced against her shoulder, gaze unreadable and sharp. It felt like being graded by an old general who already knew which soldiers would live and which ones would break.

“Hold,” Enzo said, cutting a hand through the space before anyone could stand. “I want paper scrubs by midnight. Any trail that leads back to Lola gets boxed or burned. We lock down every camera around her life, our feeds only. Pull old logs to cold storage. If a city camera so much as twitches toward her block, it finds a loop we wrote.”

Jake’s fingers flew. “Already building a silo.”

“Good.” Enzo nodded once. “We also go quiet on outward money. Nothing that looks like we’re gearing up. Anyone who sells us bread we’ve been buying for ten years, keep buying the same bread. The men we’re hunting count patterns. We give them nothing to count.”

He watched the orders sink in. Dom’s shoulders dropped a fraction, understanding, not relaxation. Gino leaned forward just enough that Enzo knew he’d already allocating men in his head and assigning jobs. The room steadied on that, like a ship taking the first clean set from a seasoned captain.

Lola’s hand was still under his, bones delicate and strong all at once. She hadn’t spoken since Dottie’s stories. He could feel the heat of her, the new line that grief had soldered into something, a weapon.

“Questions,” he said.

Dom scratched his jaw. “What about pushback? Russians left gaps. Everyone thinks we’ll flood them. We stand down, it reads wrong.”

“We fill gaps with ghosts,” Enzo said. “Shells and stooges. Let the city think we’re dumb with victory while we get smart in the dark. They want noise? Feed them decoys. Let Dmitri’s leftovers choke on the scraps.”

Gino’s mouth twitched, the closest he got to a smile. “I’ll pick the stooges.”

“Pick men who like money more than glory,” Enzo said. “They live longer.”

Dottie’s cane tapped once against the tile, the sound like a sentence ending. “About time someone in this room remembered patience is a weapon.”

He didn’t rise to it. She wasn’t wrong.

He straightened, letting the chair legs scrape, a deliberate sound. “We break for now. Jake, I want your nets live by morning. Dom, Gino double the detail on Lola for the ride up and down the tower. No one crowds her, no one hovers. Patterns, not faces. If she feels stared at, we’re doing it wrong.”

Dom lifted two fingers in a lazy salute. “Copy.”

Gino nodded once. “Already moving.”

Enzo squeezed Lola’s hand once, then let go. He felt the loss like a drop in pressure, a warning before a storm. “Dottie,” he said, voice even. “You’ll come with me. I’ll show you your room.”

Dottie stood without a groan, which told Enzo she’d made of iron long before the cane. “Finally. I was beginning to think the famous Marchesi hospitality was a rumor.”

“Depends who you ask,” Enzo said, starting for the door.

They moved as a unit: habit, grief, work. The guards outside parted without words. The corridor felt colder than the room, a strip of polished stone and mostly-silent footsteps. Lola’s presence lingered behind him like heat from a hand that had just left his arm.

He didn’t let himself look back. If he did, he might turn the meeting into a wake and the plan into a riot.

At the elevator, Dottie leaned on her cane and looked him up and down like a tailor measuring old scars. “You chose right,” she said. “Standing down from stupid. Men die of stupid.”

“Men die of waiting too,” he said.

Her mouth tipped. “Only if their impatience gets the better of them.”

The elevator chimed. He hit the button for the guest floor and stood in silence with her while the city hummed around their metal box. He could feel her glance, not unkind, the way a hawk might watch a man who thought he knew the wind.

The door swung open to a corner suite; two rooms, windows overlooking the strip, a sitting area already set with tea. Dottie stepped inside like she’d been there before, her gaze sweeping over the furniture, the view, the small details.

“Clean linens. A chair I won’t hate. I approve,” she said, tapping the edge of her cane against the rug before moving deeper into the room.

Enzo followed her in, gesturing toward the secure comm line on the desk. “You’ll have a line to the war room.”

“I’ll make some calls to old friends and enemies,” she said, voice casual but laced with something heavier. Then she turned toward him, eyes sharp. “And I’ll tell you what I find. Then you decide what the rest need know.”

“Fine.”

Dottie took a slow circuit of the room, fingers brushing over the back of a chair, the drape of the curtains, before finally lowering herself into the seat by the window. She set her cane neatly across her lap, settling it like a soldier setting down a weapon, and looked up at him,
“You know this is the first person she’s ever lost,” she said.

Enzo’s brow furrowed. “You mean—”

“I mean ever,” Dottie interrupted, voice rough. “Not a mother. Not a father. Not a friend. No one. It’s only ever been her and me. And I’m still here.”

He stood there a moment, the hum of the city beyond the glass barely registering.

“She’s been through so much already,” he said finally.

“More,” Dottie agreed. “But grief’s a different kind of animal. You can’t fight it, can’t outsmart it. You just live with the teeth marks.”

He didn’t answer, jaw tightening.

“She obviously cared deeply for that boy,” Dottie went on, softer now. “I’ve never seen that girl look so defeated. You’ve no idea what I’ve had to do to get her ready for this world; what I’ve had to take from her just to make sure she survived it.”

Enzo’s hands closed, slow and deliberate, against his knees. She’s learning to breathe through holes the world keeps cutting into her.

She set the cane beside the armchair and before he could walk out, “Enzo, don’t mistake her fire for something you can control.”

“I’m not trying to control her.”

“Good,” Dottie said, gaze steady. “Because the moment you try, you’ll smother her. Let her burn hot, Enzo. Just make sure she doesn’t turn to ash.”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.

Back in the corridor, the door whispered shut behind him. He stood still for a count of three, letting the quiet settle into his bones.

We don’t start blind. But we start.

He turned toward the elevator, toward Lola, toward the work waiting under the hum of the city; nets to be cast, footprints to be erased, a world to pry open with patience.

And when the names finally surfaced, he’d make good on what he had already promised in the street and in the shower and in the marrow of his teeth:
He’d pull them out by the roots.