The war room smelled of coffee gone cold and the particular flat tension of men who had not slept enough. Raven dropped the Alessio file on the table and waited for the room to settle.
It settled fast. It always did now.
She walked them through it. Voice flat on the outside, but her stomach was still knotted from the holding room. "Viper gave us this. Intercept language. Parallel operation. Specific gap between Alessandro's war and Alessio's objective. Retrieve. Restore. Return."
Dante exhaled through his nose — the compressed one, not the easy kind. Adrian's jaw locked tight. Leonid said nothing, which meant he was deciding whether the problem was big enough to open his mouth for.
Sebastian leaned back, fingers loose on the table edge. "So we've got the father's war and the son's obsession running on separate tracks."
