I drift off to sleep.
And for the first time in three days, I don't dream of blood. I dream of green eyes in the dark, and the taste of mint, and the feeling of falling without hitting the ground.
Chapter Eleven
ALESSANDRO
The data doesn't lie,but it refuses to speak.
I am sitting at the desk in my home office, the room plunged in darkness save for the cool, blue glow of three monitors. It is 2:00 PM on a Sunday, and outside, the city is grey and weeping rain against the glass, but in here, time has stopped.
I have been staring at the same string of hexadecimal code for three hours.
The financial transaction logs from the shell companies linked to the Russians are a mess of intentional obfuscation—routed through Cyprus, Malta, the Cayman Islands, bouncing through servers in Estonia and Singapore before vanishing into the digital ether. I am tracing a ghost.
But my focus is compromised.
It keeps slipping. It isn't the fatigue. It isn't the caffeine headache pulsing behind my temples. It is the memory of the kitchen.
The sound of a knife slamming into a cutting board. The heat of a body pressed against mine. The taste of whiskey and violence.
On your knees.
The command echoes in my head, overlaying the transaction logs. I close my eyes, and for a second, I am back there. I feel the cold floor under my knees. I feel the rough, calloused hands in my hair. I feel the surrender.
It wasn't surrender. It was a tactical choice. A release valve for a situation that was about to explode.
Liar.
I open my eyes. I force the memory down, locking it in the same mental vault where I keep my grief for my mother and my fear of my father.
I close the transaction logs. I open the file from Marco's phone.
Rocco retrieved the device from the evidence lockup before the police could process it properly. He bribed the shift commander with an envelope of cash and a bottle of scotch. The device itself is standard issue for Falcone personnel—encrypted, secure, sanitized.
I cracked the primary layer in ten minutes. The contents were unremarkable: call logs to his wife, text messages about grocery lists, photographs of a golden retriever puppy. The digital footprint of a man who lived a quiet life in the shadow of a violent one.
But buried in the system architecture, hidden behind a partition wall that shouldn't exist on a factory-standard OS, is a file.
It’s small. Forty-seven kilobytes. A text document compressed and encrypted with a protocol I don't recognize.
I have run every decryption algorithm in my arsenal. RSA. AES. Blowfish. I ran a brute-force attack that consumed four hours of processing time and returned nothing but gibberish. The encryption isn't commercial. It isn't military. It doesn't follow any mathematical logic I’ve ever seen.
I stare at the raw data displayed on the center screen.
C-R-U-I-N-N-I-U ...
The character clusters are irregular. They repeat in patterns that suggest phonetic grouping, not algorithmic substitution. Consonant-heavy. The vowel distribution is skewed—predominantlyaandi, with almost noeoruin the standard frequency positions.
It isn't code. It’s language.
I lean back in my chair, the leather creaking in the silence. The realization settles in my gut, heavy and cold. It’s a cipher based on a natural language. But which one?
The syntax is archaic. Compressed. It doesn't match English, Italian, Russian, or any of the seven languages I speak fluently. I pull up a linguistic database, running a comparison script against the phonemes.
It matches nothing in the standard European lexicon.
I broaden the search parameters. Celtic. Gaelic. Welsh.
