Reina POV
She spent the whole next day trying to talk herself out of it.
That was the embarrassing truth. Reina Moretti who had sat through boardroom negotiations at age sixteen, who had memorized pack law before she could drive, who her father called his sharpest mind spent twenty-four hours actively arguing against her own instincts.
Grief makes you paranoid. That was the first argument. She had read it somewhere once. When people lose someone suddenly, the mind looks for reasons. Looks for someone to blame. It is easier to suspect your brother than to accept that your father is simply gone.
Marco is grieving too. That was the second argument. Everyone handles loss differently. Some people cry. Some people go cold. Some people throw themselves into action because stopping means feeling it, and feeling it is unbearable. Maybe that was Marco. Maybe the smooth, prepared efficiency was just his way of not falling apart.
You only saw what you wanted to see. That was the third and most persistent argument. A hand moving during a hug. Half a second. She was sleep-deprived and terrified and running on nothing but adrenaline. She could have imagined it.
She held onto that argument until about two in the afternoon.
Then she watched Marco shake hands with their father's oldest ally a man named Bertoni who had known Lorenzo for thirty years, who had cried real tears yesterday, who had looked at Marco this morning with something that was not quite grief and not quite respect but something that looked more like a negotiation already concluded.
And Marco smiled at Bertoni with that perfect smile. And Bertoni smiled back.
And Reina thought: they have already made a deal.
She stopped arguing with herself after that.
She was in the upstairs hallway at three o'clock when Fia grabbed her arm.
No warning. No text first. Just Fia's hand closing around her wrist and pulling her sideways through a door. The bathroom. The lock clicked. The fan came on.
"Fia "
"Shut up for one second." Fia's eyes were red. Not from crying from no sleep. She had the look of someone who had been staring at a screen for eighteen hours straight. "I need to show you something and I need you to not react loudly."
"When do I ever react loudly?"
"Never, which is actually concerning, but that is a conversation for another time." Fia pulled out her phone. On the screen was a spreadsheet columns of numbers, account codes, dates. "I have been going through your father's financial files since yesterday. The ones I manage. The ones I know." She scrolled down. "And then I found one I didn't know."
Reina took the phone. She looked at the numbers.
A Moretti account. Not on any ledger she had ever seen. Opened fourteen months ago. Three large payments out not small, not the kind of thing you explain as operational expenses. The kind of money that buys something significant. Something permanent.
"Where did the payments go?" Reina asked. Her voice was level. Her chest was not.
"A shell company. Registered six months before the account was opened." Fia paused. "I traced it one step further. The shell company has a parent company. The parent company has a registered agent." She stopped.
"Fia."
"I stopped there." Fia looked at her directly. "Because the registered agent's name is connected to someone in this city that I am genuinely afraid of. And I decided that was as far as I should go alone at three in the morning."
Reina handed the phone back. She looked at the bathroom wall for exactly three seconds.
"Send me everything you found," she said. "The account number, the shell company name, the registered agent, all of it."
"Reina "
"Then stop." She looked at Fia. "Stop digging. Delete your search history. Go back to your regular files and act like everything is normal."
Fia's jaw tightened. "I'm not afraid "
"I know you're not. That is exactly why I need you to stop." She put both hands on Fia's shoulders. "You are the only person in this house I trust completely. I cannot afford to lose you. Do you understand me?"
Fia stared at her for a moment. Then she nodded.
"Be careful," Fia said quietly.
"Always," Reina said.
It was almost true.
She waited until midnight.
The house was as quiet as it ever got a few soldiers at the doors, everyone else exhausted from two days of crisis management. Reina sat on the floor of her room with her back against the bed because sitting at the desk felt too formal for what she was doing. Too official. This needed to be private.
In front of her: the prepaid phone from her father's desk. Fia's records on her own phone beside it. A notepad with her own handwriting the timeline she had been building in her head, now on paper.
She went through it slowly.
The hidden account opened fourteen months ago. The first payment two months after that. Three payments total, spaced roughly three months apart. The last one the largest one six weeks before her father died.
She looked at the prepaid phone. One number. Messages deleted. Last sent three days before the shooting.
She looked at her notes on Marco. The speed of his response. The deals already made. Bertoni's face. The hand during the hug.
She built the picture piece by piece, the way her father taught her to not jumping to conclusions, not skipping steps, but following the line from one point to the next until the shape became undeniable.
When she reached the end of the line she sat very still for a long time.
Then she picked up the notepad and turned to a clean page and wrote one question at the top.
Who has enough power to finish this?
She wrote a list. She crossed off names one by one too compromised, too connected to Marco, too connected to the people the shell company pointed toward. She crossed off allies. She crossed off neutrals. She crossed off everyone who owed her family something, because people who owed things could be pressured.
She needed someone who owed the Moretti family nothing. Someone Marco had not already reached. Someone powerful enough that Marco would not dare move against him first.
She reached the bottom of the list.
One name left. A name she had not written down because she did not need to it had been sitting at the back of her mind since she started, waiting, patient as a bruise.
She picked up her own phone.
She opened her contacts. She scrolled past lawyers, allies, family friends, soldiers, advisors. A hundred names. A hundred people she could not trust tonight.
She stopped scrolling.
The name sat on her screen. She had deleted it five years ago and re-entered it a year later without telling herself why just the name and a number she was not even sure still worked.
Dante Salvatore.
Her father's enemy. Her family's rival. The boy who kissed her in the rain and disappeared without a single word.
The only person left on her list.
Her thumb hovered over the call button.
Outside her window, the city was completely quiet.
Inside her chest, everything was very loud.
She pressed call.