The audio kicks in a beat later. Clean. Too clean.
“You told them where I’d be?” Giovanni’s voice slams through the speakers, raw and incandescent with fury.
Pia flinches beside me.
The second voice answers, familiar enough to make my grip tighten on the laptop.
“I thought they were bluffing, Dad—I thought if I gave them the fake route, they’d—”
Romeo.
Young. Shaking. No swagger. Just panic.
“Fake route?” Giovanni snarls. He turns, and for a heartbeat his face is fully visible—eyes blazing, lip curled. “You moved my security, you idiot—”
Romeo stumbles fully into frame like he’s been dragged there by his own bad decisions. His eyes are red, like he hasn’t slept, like he’s already been crying. His hands are up in that half-pleading, half-defensive stance he uses on cops and bouncers and furious women whose names he never remembered.
“They said they’d go after Dante,” he chokes. “After Guido. I was trying to protect them—”
Giovanni fists a hand in his shirt.
Even from this shitty angle, I see the force of it. See Romeo’s body jerk forward. See the way his head tips back, throat bared, like a kid who just realized the monster under the bed has been standing in the doorway the whole time.
“You just painted a target on my back instead,” Giovanni hisses.
Somewhere offscreen, a door slams hard enough to shake the camera. The frame judders—
And the file cuts.
Just like that.
No gunshot.No impact.No blood.
Static. Then an error message.
“Fuck,” I breathe.
My hand is trembling over the keys.
I tap the space bar. Nothing. I scrub the timeline. It jumps, stutters, and still dies in the same place—right after Giovanni’s last accusation.
I close my eyes for half a second, but the images burn behind them anyway—Romeo’s wild eyes, Giovanni’s hand in his shirt, the invisible pressure of the Vescari pressing in from the dark.
“He didn’t mean to,” Pia whispers.
I open my eyes.
She’s watching the frozen frame—Romeo half-turned, mouth parted, terror etched into every line of his face. Her expression is a knot of anger, pity, and recognition.
“No,” I say.
My voice comes out low and rough.
“He didn’t mean to. But he did it.”
Romeo moved the guards.Romeo changed the route.Romeo tried to outplay vipers and used our father as the bargaining chip.
Emiliano still swung the blade.
