POV: Dante
I stand in the foyer for a long time after she goes upstairs.
I can still hear her voice. Did you kill him? Steady. No shaking. Just the question, clean and direct, looking me right in the eyes while she asked it. Bare feet on cold marble, three days of someone else's cruelty sitting on her shoulders, and she still looked like she would not move an inch until she had her answer.
She has his eyes. She always did. That same dark, still quality like water that looks calm on top but is moving very fast underneath. When she said my name in the foyer I felt it somewhere in my chest that I do not have a word for.
I told myself on the drive over that it would be simple. I would bring her here. I would keep her safe. I would find who killed Marco and then I would figure out what comes next. Neat. Controlled. Nothing personal.
Then she looked at me and said did you kill him and nothing about it felt neat or controlled or simple.
"She is going to be a problem."
Luca. Appearing at my shoulder like he always does, like he has a talent for standing exactly where I do not want anyone to stand. He is using his reasonable voice the one that means he has already decided what he thinks and is now explaining it to me like it was my idea.
"She is an asset with complications," he continues. "Caruso already knows you have her. The longer she stays here, the more it looks like "
"Go home, Luca."
A pause. "Dante "
"I said go home."
He goes. I hear his footsteps cross the foyer and the front door close and then the house is quiet again. The kind of quiet this house has had for four months the kind that sits in the corners and does not move.
I go to my study and close the door.
The bottom drawer of my desk has a lock that only one key opens. I keep that key on my person at all times. Not because of what is worth money in that drawer. Because of what is worth everything else.
I open it and take out the photograph.
Marco Russo has his arm around a seventeen-year-old version of me and we are both laughing at something outside the frame. I do not remember what was funny that day. I remember the day a Sunday in late October, cold enough to see your breath, and Marco had just told me I was going to run the eastern accounts by myself for the first time. I was terrified and trying not to show it and he saw through it immediately and said something that made me laugh despite myself. He was good at that. Finding the one thing that broke through.
I was eight years old when he found me outside his restaurant. I had stolen a bread roll from the kitchen delivery and I was eating it in the alley and I heard his footsteps and I ran but he was faster than he looked, and he caught my arm, and instead of hitting me he crouched down to my level and looked at me for a long moment and then said: "Are you hungry or are you in trouble?"
Both, I told him. I did not know why I told him the truth. I just did.
He took me inside and fed me a real meal and asked me questions and I answered all of them because something about him made lying feel like an insult. Two weeks later he came back to the street I was sleeping on and told me I could have a room in his house if I was willing to work for it.
I worked for everything he ever gave me. I made sure of that. I never wanted him to think I was there for what he had. I was there because of who he was.
And then four months ago someone took him away in the space of one phone call I did not answer in time.
I set the photograph down and press my hands flat on the desk and breathe.
I made that drive in twenty-two minutes. I drove through three red lights and the wrong way down a one-way street and I got there and the ambulance was already outside and the light in the upstairs window was the wrong color too blue, too still and I knew before I got through the door.
I was twenty minutes too late.
I have lived inside those twenty minutes every single day since.
I open the second drawer.
The letter is there where it always is. Marco's handwriting on the outside my name, just Dante, the way he always wrote it, like a period at the end of a sentence. The envelope is unsealed. He never sealed his letters to me. He said sealed letters are for people who are not sure they will be believed.
I have read this one a hundred and sixteen times. I know every word. I read it anyway.
Dante. I am going to tell you something and I need you to not do anything dramatic about it until you have thought it through carefully, because you have always been better at thinking than I gave you credit for and worse at waiting than either of us would like.
I found something. In the accounts. A pattern I should have seen two years ago and did not because I trusted someone I should not have trusted. I am not going to write the name here because I am not certain yet and I will not accuse anyone in writing without being certain. You know me well enough to know that.
What I am certain of is this: someone close to me has been feeding information to Caruso for at least eighteen months. Someone with access to my private accounts and my movement schedule and my family.
If something happens to me before I can resolve this and I do not think it will, but if it does I need you to find Mia and keep her safe. She does not know anything about any of this. I made sure of that. But that will not protect her once I am gone because the people who want the empire gone will not care what she knows. They will only care what she is.
She is my daughter. She is stubborn and sharp and better than this world I built. Get her out of it if you can.
If you cannot get her out of it keep her alive. That is all I ask. Keep her alive and do not let her face this alone.
Trust yourself. You always knew more than you thought you did.
Marco
I fold the letter the way I always fold it. Three times. Back into the drawer.
He knew someone close to him was the leak. He did not name them. He had eighteen months of evidence and he still did not name them, which means either he was still gathering proof or the name was someone he loved and naming them felt like the last thing he wanted to do in writing.
I think about the short list of people with access to Marco's private accounts.
I think about the long list of people who knew where Mia was being held before the auction.
Both lists are short. Both lists have the same names on them.
My phone buzzes on the desk. A message from an unknown number.
I open it.
It is a photograph of Mia taken tonight, inside the auction house, before she walked onto the stage. Taken from an angle that puts the photographer inside the building. Inside the controlled area.
Someone in that room was feeding information before the sale even started.
I look at the photograph for a long time.
Then I open my contacts and dial a number I have not called in four months. It rings twice.
"I need everything you have on the night Marco Russo died," I say. "Every name. Every movement. Every phone call made from inside that house in the six hours before he was killed."
A pause on the other end. Then: "That is a short list, Dante. You are on it."
"I know," I say. "Send it anyway."