DANTE POV
Dante tracked threats the way other men tracked time.
He did it without thinking, the same way a person breathed without paying attention to their lungs. Four low-level concerns scattered through the pavilion. Two men in conversation with a city alderman who owed a debt to the wrong people. One woman who kept looking at Sera with the intensity of someone gathering intelligence. Nothing he couldn't manage. Nothing that required attention.
Then he saw Cole.
The prosecutor was standing near the bar in a gray suit, his glass raised, his expression pleasantly predatory. He was looking at Sera with the kind of interest that suggested he had just found something valuable that he thought he had lost.
Dante crossed the room before his brain finished the thought.
He didn't make a scene. He moved with the casual confidence of someone simply steering his date toward a better view. His hand found the small of her back, light and controlled, and he guided them toward the far side of the pavilion where the terrace doors were accessible and the wall at their backs would give him sight lines to every entrance.
She went with him without hesitation. That meant she had already spotted Cole.
They stood looking out at the crowd and she said quietly, "He is not here by accident."
"No," Dante agreed.
"He knew we would be here."
That one landed differently in his chest.
He had kept the gala arrangement internal. Only Nina knew. Only Priest. No one else. The circle of information was small enough that he could have drawn it on paper. Which meant Cole had either gotten to someone inside his operation or Cole had resources that Dante didn't know about.
Neither option was acceptable.
"When did you spot him?" Dante asked.
"Thirty seconds after we arrived. He was looking at me like he had found something he thought was lost."
Dante turned his head slowly and met Cole's stare from across the room. The prosecutor smiled and raised his glass again. A greeting. A threat. A statement of intent delivered in a room full of witnesses.
"We're leaving," Dante said.
"Not yet," Sera replied. "If we leave now, he wins. He gets to believe you're running from him."
She was right. Every rational part of his operation said to remove the threat immediately. Every part of him that understood optics said that leaving in visible reaction would signal weakness. But standing here with her while Cole watched them both felt like standing in a frame that was about to collapse.
"Come with me," she said.
She took his hand and guided him toward the terrace doors. The gesture was casual enough that it looked unrehearsed. Intimate enough that it looked real. She was performing again, he realized. She was being exactly what the room needed to see.
Outside, the Chicago skyline spread below them like something dangerous and beautiful. The lake was black and still. The wind coming off the water was cold enough to cut through the noise of the party inside.
"He must have contacts in your organization," Sera said, looking out at the city. "Or access to your security systems. There's no other way he would know about tonight."
"I'll find out who," Dante said.
"I know." She turned slightly toward him. "That's not why I brought you out here."
She was talking about the lake. About the way the light from downtown reflected off the water in gold and white. About the beauty of a city that had no idea it was circling around the two of them like a shark drawn to blood. She was talking about anything except Cole and threats and the fact that someone inside his world had betrayed him.
She was giving him permission to stop thinking like an operative for five minutes.
He watched her profile against the city lights. The way her jaw was tight. The way her shoulders were still braced for violence. But her voice was soft when she talked about the water, and he realized she was giving him something valuable.
She was giving him the chance to be someone other than what his world had made him.
He thought about her testimony without wanting to. The sentence that had stayed with him for five years. "I said what I saw. I did not add to it and I did not take away from it." He had spent his entire adult life surrounded by men who bent truth into shapes that served them. Men who performed for power. Men who couldn't stand still for five seconds without calculating angles.
Sera had walked into a courtroom and told the truth knowing it would destroy her.
And now she was standing beside him on a terrace, watching the city, knowing that Cole was inside the building waiting to use her against him. Knowing that the night was about to become dangerous. And she was still talking about the light on the water like that was the only thing that mattered.
He didn't realize he had gone quiet until she turned and looked at him.
"What are you thinking about?" she asked.
He couldn't tell her the truth. He couldn't say that he was thinking about how dangerous it was to stand this close to her. How dangerous it was to want to protect her when his world was incapable of offering protection. How dangerous it was to believe that a woman who had testified against him five years ago was now the only person in his life he actually trusted.
"That I should have known Cole would come," he said instead.
"You couldn't have known. He's playing a game he thinks only he understands."
"What game?"
"The one where he reminds you that I'm valuable to him. That I'm a witness he protected. That he has leverage over me that you can't remove." She turned back to the city. "He wants you to feel like I'm his, not yours."
The possessive landed between them like a stone dropped in still water. She had said it casually, but there was nothing casual about standing in the dark with a woman who was implying ownership by one man or another. There was nothing casual about the fact that both of them understood the game Cole was playing.
"You're not anyone's property," Dante said.
"I know." She smiled slightly. "But Cole doesn't believe that. And neither do you, if we're being honest."
Before he could respond to that, she grabbed his arm.
"The man in the navy coat," she whispered. "He has been twenty feet behind us for the last three stops. Ten minutes ago he was by the bar. Before that he was near the dessert station. He's following us."
Dante shifted his position slightly and caught the reflection in the glass doors behind them. Navy coat. Dark hair. A build that suggested routine violence. He recognized the face immediately.
The man worked for Marco Reyes.
Marco Reyes did not hire civilians. Marco Reyes hired professionals. Men who understood tactics. Men who didn't hesitate when they were given orders.
And this professional had maintained Sera in his sightline for most of the night.
"We leave through the kitchen," Dante said. "Priest is waiting with the car. We move fast and we don't look back."
"What about the professional in the navy coat?"
"Let me worry about him."
But Sera was already moving toward the terrace doors. She walked like she had nothing to fear, which was a better performance than Dante could have managed. She walked like a woman who had just accepted that her life had changed fundamentally and was choosing to survive it with style.
The kitchen staff let them through without comment. Cash spoken louder than words. Priest was waiting with the car running, the back door already open. Dante pulled Sera inside and they were moving before either of them could think about what it meant that they had just been marked.
Cole had found her.
And now Cole had sent someone to confirm that she was exactly where the prosecutor thought she was.
In Dante's world, that kind of knowledge always came with consequences.