But if she didn’t want people to see them, I’d respect it. Telling her what I saw didn’t matter, but maybe showing her would.
I offered my hand. “Ready?”
Her fingers intertwined with mine. For a moment, we just stood in the dim light, caught between what had almost happened and whatever news awaited us downstairs.
She lifted our joined hands to her lips, pressing a soft kiss against my knuckles before lowering them again.
“Rav…” Her voice carried a note of hesitation. “The team is going to know. About us.”
“They won’t judge us, if that’s what’s worrying you.”
“I’d prefer if we kept things quiet. Professional. At least until the mission’s complete.”
My stomach tightened. I wasn’t ready for her to pull away so soon. “Brooke?—”
“I’m temporarily assigned to your team, and I don’t want anyone questioning my focus.” Her thumb traced a small circle against my palm. “Or yours.”
The words were a knife to my chest. I hadn’t thought about anything past the walls of this room since the moment she’d shown me her scars. That was the exact same failure I’d had in Barin Kala. I’d missed the gunman because all I saw was her. And now I’d forgotten about the Greek Fire, also because all I saw was her. I was still a failure. I released my hold of her hand, but she held tight. “Understood.”
“I meant everything I said.” She squeezed my hand before finally letting go. “And I hope you did, too.”
“I do.” I kissed her cheek and opened the door for her.
As we stepped out, I already missed her touch. But the strategist in me respected her reasoning. We needed the team’s confidence.
If we survived the next forty-eight hours, we could figure out the rest later.
The villa’s study hummed with activity when we arrived. One tablet was propped at the end of the table, displaying the camera feeds from Pompeii alongside scrolling data analysis of temperature and noise levels.
Drew sat at his laptop, tracking multiple screens. Jayce, Zac, and Malcolm studied something on a couple of other tablets. Emmett and Scarlett stood together in front of the main display, chatting with Brie, whose face filled the video call window.
Scarlett nodded to Brooke and me, then said, “Brie, we’re all here. What have you got?”
“Something big!” Brie split her screen, so her face filled only half of it. “We hacked into the event planner’s system without much trouble, and we found some correspondence that helped point us to specific sections of the Fenix data we recovered from Mnemis. It was like a Rosetta Stone, translating what we’d been looking at.”
Images flashed across the screen as she spoke—spreadsheets, financial records, fragmented documents.
“Will pieced together partial images from the robot dog’s memory, which we cross-referenced with the Mnemis files.” More windows appeared, showing blurry photographs. “Will tweaked one of his AI models to fill in the missing details of the second face in the Enzo photo. That was enough to make some matches on social media.”
And it would have started an avalanche of discovery.
She paused before bringing up a professional photograph of a distinguished man in his late sixties: silver hair, aristocratic features, expensive suit.
“Stefano Martinelli,” she announced. “French-Italian multi-millionaire, philanthropist, and biotech investor.”
Martinelli? Why was that familiar?
“Philanthropist?” Brooke’s brows furrowed, and she pulled out her phone.
That wasn’t it. I knew the name from somewhere else.Think, man.
“Exactly. But there’s more to his story than charity galas and hospital wings.” She pulled up news articles and photographs—Martinelli at ribbon-cuttings, receiving awards, standing with political figures.
“He and his wife are active in the Naples social scene,” Brooke read from her phone, skimming down a list of highlights she’d found. “He funds medical research across Europe, donatedto various projects at the Castel dell’Ovo, the university, and a…” She paused, covering her mouth with one hand.
“A what?”
She tilted her phone screen to me, showing a photo of Stefano Martinelli in front of the Pompeii Amphitheater.
