Oh, my God.I need to keep digging for the truth.
Because the alternative, condemning my father on incomplete information, watching Shelby and the Syndicate destroy him based on evidence I might have misinterpreted, is unthinkable.
“Serena?”Joe’s voice cuts through my spiraling thoughts.“Did you hear what I said about the seating arrangements?”
I force a smile onto my face and pull myself back to the present.“Sorry.Run that by me again?”
As Joe launches into the logistics of tomorrow’s gala, I make a silent promise to myself.I will find the truth.Not assumptions, not suspicions, not circumstantial evidence that could be explained away.
The truth.Whatever it costs me.
Even if that truth destroys everything I thought I knew about my family.
The safe house smells like stale coffee and determination.It’s a nondescript apartment in a residential Boston neighborhood.It’s the kind of place that nobody looks twice at, which makes it perfect for what we’re doing.Three laptops hum on the kitchen table, their screens casting blue light across Shelby’s face as he monitors the feeds from my father’s office building.I’m settled at my own workstation, fingers flying across the keyboard, diving deeper into the digital layers of my father’s empire.
Shelby moves with the same lethal efficiency he always does, but I notice the way his jaw clenches when he thinks nobody’s looking.The way his hand reaches for me every few minutes, needing to confirm I’m still here, still real, still his.
After he told me about Syria, Abeera, and the children he couldn’t save, something shifted between us.It was quiet, but fundamental.He stopped running.I stopped waiting.After my chance meeting with my father at Joe’s office, I got home carrying more questions in my mind than before.Shelby and I decided to work together to find the truth about my father.Not for the Syndicate.Because if my father really built an empire on the suffering of children, that would be unforgivable.
“Got something,” I murmur, my eyes fixed on the screen.I’ve been tunneling through encrypted servers for the last six hours, following digital breadcrumbs.Giovanni is too brilliant to be careless.But he’s also arrogant.He believes his name and his position make him untouchable.Believes that the Syndicate rules protect him.
He’s wrong on all counts.
Shelby wheels his chair closer to me, his presence solid and grounding.He doesn’t hover.He waits, as if sensing I need to process this first.
“Transfer records,” I continue, pulling up multiple documents across my secondary monitors.“Wire transfers from accounts that appear to be investment but are actually shell corporations.And they’re all funneling money to a holding company registered in Cesare Dellamare’s name.”
My stomach twists when I say the name of the man my father wanted me to marry.The man I used to think was just a cold Italian businessman with questionable ethics.Before I started snooping, I didn’t know he was so much worse than that.
“Can you trace the incoming funds?”Shelby asks, his voice careful.He knows that every layer I peel back is going to hurt.
“Already on it.”My fingers move faster now, my focus narrowing to a single point: finding the truth.“The money originates from...Jesus.Shelby, these are accounts that correspond to the locations you and Nikolai identified months ago.The warehouses.The transport routes.The distribution network.”
I pull up a spreadsheet I’ve been building for the last three hours—a map of my father’s involvement in the trafficking operation.Not as a passive participant.Not as someone who was duped or manipulated.But as a planner.Someone who looked at human suffering and calculated profit margins.
“He’s not just connected to this,” Shelby murmurs.“He helped build the entire Italian side of the operation from the ground up.”
The words hang in the air between us, heavy and suffocating.I grew up understanding that the DiLorenzo name comes with blood, violence, and moral compromise.But trafficking.Women and children.The thought of using their bodies and their terror as a revenue stream suffocates me.Even the Syndicate’s code condemns this kind of venture.
“There’s more,” I whisper, as I open new files with lists of victims.The documents that catalog human beings like assets.I’m scrolling through the names when my entire body goes cold.
Lucia Rossi.
Lucia Rossi, fourteen years old.Daughter of my father’s oldest friend, Marco Rossi.A girl I’ve seen at family events since she was a toddler.A girl who played with Isabella.The last time I saw Lucia was years ago at Christmas.She asked me about my work in cybersecurity because she wanted to study computer science too.
Lucia was trafficked through my father’s operation.The date of acquisition was two years ago, when she was only twelve.The last notation in the manifest is six months old.
I don’t know what happened to her after that.I’m not sure I want to know.
“Serena.”
Shelby’s voice reaches me from far away.I’m standing, though I don’t remember getting up.My hands are shaking.My vision is blurring.The room is spinning.I can’t breathe through the searing ache in my chest.
His arms come around me from behind, pulling me back against his chest.He doesn’t ask questions.He just holds me as the realization crashes over me like a wave: my father took a girl I knew, his friend’s little girl.My father sold her and profited from her suffering.
I turn in Shelby’s arms, and he pulls me close.I bury my face in his chest.He smells like my safe place.His hand cradles the back of my head.We stand there in the middle of the kitchen, holding each other and just breathing together, sharing the weight of what we’ve discovered.
It’s grief for a girl and for the versions of her life that my father stole.Grief for the fact that the loving man who raised me is capable of this much cruelty.
