When I come the second time, it breaks me apart.
I scream his name into the pillow, my body clenching around him so hard he chokes out a curse. He follows me seconds later, burying himself to the hilt, his forehead pressed between my shoulder blades, his body shuddering against mine. I feel him pulse inside me, feel his breath come in ragged, broken gasps against my skin.
We collapse together. His weight on top of me, my face in the pillow, both of us destroyed. He rolls to the side, pulling me against him, and for a long time there's nothing but the sound of our breathing syncing in the dark.
I don't know how much time passes before my brain reassembles itself.
Minutes. An hour. The room is dark except for the courtyard lights through the window, casting pale stripes across the ceiling. Leone is on his back beside me, one arm behind his head, the other draped over my waist. His breathing has evened out but his eyes are open, staring upward.
I trace the scar on his ribs. The knife fight at seventeen, he told me once. The skin is raised and smooth, a white ridge cutting across his left side. My finger follows its length, from front to back, and he lets me without comment.
"You said Aurelio approved us," I murmur. "What exactly did you tell him?"
"The truth."
"Which version?"
His mouth twitches. "The version where I told him you matter to me, and to the organization and he needs to work with it or he’d be stupid to let you go.”
"And he chose to work with it."
"He chose to observe. Aurelio doesn't commit until he's certain. But he respects what you've done with the financial analysis. You've given him a lead his entire intelligence team couldn't find." He pauses. "That earns a lot of patience in his world."
I press my cheek against his chest. His heartbeat is steady under my ear, slow and strong. The heartbeat of a man who has stopped fighting the thing he wanted most.
"The compromised terminals," I say. "How bad?"
"Three confirmed. Backdoor access at the firmware level. Emilio thinks they've been active for months, possibly since installation. If Apex Meridian consulted on our systems, they built the vulnerability in from the start."
"Meaning everything you've communicated through those terminals, every order, every strategy, every piece of intelligence, has been visible to whoever sits behind that company."
"Yes."
I close my eyes. The scale of it is staggering. Not a mole. Not a leak. A complete infiltration, built into the foundation, watching from inside the walls. Renzo was a symptom. The disease is much bigger.
"We need to trace Apex Meridian's client list," I say. "If they consulted for the Bonaccorso’s, they probably consulted for the Castillo’s too. Same backdoors, same access. Whoever controls that company can see both sides of the board."
"I told Aurelio the same thing. He's pulling every contract, every invoice, every record of external consultation from the last five years."
"And the photo? The one sent to your phone?"
His arm tightens around my waist. "Claudio's working it. The camera that captured the image was one of the compromised feeds. Someone accessed it remotely, pulled a still frame, and sent it through an anonymous relay."
"So it wasn't someone physically inside the compound."
"Not necessarily. It was someone with access to our surveillance network. Which, if we're right about Apex Meridian, could be anyone connected to that company."
I open my eyes and stare at the pale stripes on the ceiling. The pieces are connecting, slowly, like a puzzle assembling itself in the dark. A tech company that builds security systems. A logistics company that moves weapons. Shell corporations that funnel money to both sides of a mafia war. And behind all of it, someone invisible. Someone patient. Someone who has been engineering this conflict from the beginning and is only now starting to show their hand.
"They sent that photo because I'm getting close," I say.
"Yes."
"They want me to stop digging."
"Yes."
I sit up, pulling the sheet with me. Leone watches from the pillow, his face half in shadow. I look down at him. At the scars and the muscle and the dark eyes that watched me fall apart twenty minutes ago and are now watching me put myself back together.
