Pia crouches beside me, knees drawn up, coat shifting around her like armor. “The battery's probably dead,” she says.
“Yeah.” I flip the lid open. Nothing. Black screen. “But he was paranoid, not stupid. If it gets a pulse, it’ll talk.”
The outlet on the wall looks like it might catch fire if I breathe on it wrong, but the plug slides in. I wiggle the cord until a tiny, sickly power light flickers on.
The fan coughs once, then starts its low, grinding whine.
Pia wraps her arms around her legs, watching the boot screen crawl to life. “This feels… invasive,” she says quietly. “Like we’re eavesdropping on the dead.”
“We are.” I don’t look at her. “He did it to everyone else. He can live with it.”
She huffs out a humorless sound. “He’s dead, Santino.”
“Yeah.” I watch the loading bar inch forward. “And he’s still fucking up my life.”
The antique operating system drags itself upright, icons popping into place like ghosts reclaiming their spots. My reflection stares back from the cracked glass—tired eyes, blood on my collar, a bruise blooming along my jaw.
I plug in the flash drive.
For a second, nothing.
Then the icon appears. I click it open.
Folders blink onto the screen.
SECURITY.EXPORT.ROUTES.AUDIO.
My stomach drops.
Of course. Every way he could keep control—movement, words, patterns. The King never trusted memory when surveillance would do.
Pia leans closer, shoulder brushing mine. “Security first,” she says. “If there’s proof… it’ll be there.”
My hand hesitates over the trackpad.
Not because I don’t want to know.
Because once I see it, there’s no unseeing. Once I know, I can’t pretend otherwise when I look at Romeo’s face.
I open the SECURITY folder.
File names. Dates. Times.
And then—staring back at me like it’s been waiting.
ANNEX_HALL_A_CAM03_—time stamped the night Giovanni died.
My chest tightens.
I double-click.
Grainy footage fills the screen, black-and-white and jittery. A hallway in the church annex. Narrow. Familiar. The cheap camera warps the edges, so the world looks like it’s bowing inward.
Giovanni walks into frame first, coat collar up, shoulders squared, moving like a man who expects everyone to move or bleed.
He’s not alone.
Someone else stands at the edge of the frame, mostly in shadow. The camera catches only fragments—an arm, a hand clawing through hair, the twitch of a restless body.
