I tear it from the ledger, lift it to the light.There’s no mistaking the way Giovanni wrote that R — heavy, carved, final.
ROMEO.
The room blurs.
The shelves.The ledgers.The cold vault walls.Everything dissolves into white noise as the blood roars in my ears.
My brother.
My fucking brother.
The same brother who looked me dead in the eyes last night and said:
“If you open that vault, you’ll wish you never did.”
He wasn’t warning me away.He was protecting himself.
My fingers seize the ledger so hard the spine cracks. Paper groans under the pressure of my shaking hands.
Fragments of memory slam into me — Romeo pacing the hallway.Romeo dodging every question about Giovanni’s final hours.Romeo shadowing Pia as if she carried a detonator.Romeo watching me like he was weighing how close I was getting.
My chest tightens.
I drop the slip. It flutters to the ground like ash.
And Giovanni’s last confession echoes in my skull:
“A son will be my undoing.”
A line I dismissed as melodrama.Paranoia.The dying rant of a tyrant who saw ghosts everywhere.
But now — now it slices through me like a blade.
My throat burns.
Because Giovanni knew.He fucking knew.
And I didn’t see any of it.
Romeo — the son who laughed the loudest, lied the easiest, loved the least.
My stomach heaves, nausea climbing fast.
“Romeo…” The word breaks out of me, cracked and raw. It sounds too small. Too young. Too impossible to be true.
But the ledger doesn’t lie.The slips don’t lie.Giovanni didn’t lie—not about this.
I drag both hands over my face, fingers digging into my scalp as the truth crushes me from all sides.
Romeo betrayed him.Romeo met him the night he died.Romeo stopped whatever “plan” Giovanni was about to execute.
And if that torn slip is right — if the missing half said what I think it did—
Romeo killed him.
My pulse pounds so violently I feel dizzy.
The weight of it — the betrayal,the blood,the truth — slams into me all at once.
