"He's also been reaching out to Ilona." The words taste wrong in my mouth, like I'm betraying her by discussing this in a room full of men who calculate human behavior for a living. "A letter arrived at the mansion two weeks ago. Handwritten. The concerned father asking for a second chance. It’s bullshit, but it has her questioning everything she thinks about him."
Rafael turns from the window, the movement unhurried but carrying the weight of full attention. He crosses his arms over hischest, his dark eyes moving to mine. "That doesn't fit his profile. Enzo Marchetti doesn't apologize," he grunts.
"Agreed. It's a play." Drake's voice carries the flat precision. He's seen this play time and time again, starting with our own power-hungry fathers. We all have. Starting with our own power-hungry fathers. His thumb traces the crease in his trouser leg, a rhythmic motion that belies the sharpness gathering behind his eyes. "So he thinks he’ll soften her up. Make her believe he's changed. Use the relationship to get access to us. Smart. And I bet she’s falling for it."
"Of course she is. She’s his daughter. Wouldn’t we do the same for our fathers?" Kon's accent sharpens on the consonants, a tell that surfaces only when his patience wears thin. "The question is will she fall for it and what’s the final end game he’s after? Her or us?"
“Both,” I offer simply. "She's been exchanging messages with him since the letter." I force the confession past the tightness in my chest. "She wants to believe he's changed. I've told her to be careful, but I can't order her to cut off contact without becoming the thing she's trying to escape."
Rafael holds my gaze from across the room, his arms still crossed, and the slight incline of his head tells me he understands the impossible position I'm in. He's walked this road himself, loving a woman who arrived in his life tangled up in the very danger he was trying to eliminate. Persia taught him that protecting someone and controlling them are not the same thing, and the patience in his expression tells me he's extending that hard-won wisdom to me now.
"There’s something else." I pull up the security briefing on my laptop and turn the screen to face the room. "Our externalservers were accessed forty-eight hours ago. Whoever got in didn't take anything. But they were sloppy enough to leave some traces behind that told me they were trying."
The room goes still. Every man freezes in place, conversations dying mid-breath, the only sound the distant hum of climate control pushing air through vents that suddenly feel like they're the loudest thing in the building.
"What did they get?" Rowan leans forward in his chair, his ice-blue eyes sharpening beneath the dirty blond hair that falls perpetually across his forehead, the top button of his shirt undone despite the early hour.
"Enzo is searching for leverage on us." Drake reads the diagnostic summary with narrowed eyes, his jaw tightening as he scrolls through the data. “It seems the access point was a peripheral node. Low security. Nothing classified was exposed."
Massimo straightens his cuffs, the monogrammed initials on his shirt catching the light as his fingers smooth the fabric with an automaticity that tells me he's already running worst-case scenarios behind those whiskey-colored eyes. "Even so, do we know if they accessed any of the contract archives? Every Red Letter agreement we've ever signed lives on those servers."
"The contracts are safe." I set my coffee on the desk and pull up the diagnostic report Drake already reviewed. "The breach hit a peripheral node, low-level access only. Whoever got in was browsing, not stealing. They touched the surface and backed out before our security flagged the intrusion."
“Pretty fucking ballsy,” Rowan reaches for the reports and I hand them over. “I don’t buy it.”
“Neither do I.” Rafael steps away from the window and crosses to my desk. His fingers close around the stack of surveillance reports and he leafs through them with unhurried precision, his dark eyes scanning each page before flipping to the next. He absorbs and discards information at a speed that reminds every man in this room why he sits at the head of our table. His jaw tightens with each new piece of evidence. "We push the timeline. What else do we need?"
I lift a shoulder and let it drop. "Bodies willing to testify. Financial records from his offshore accounts. And someone inside his organization who can give us the trafficking routes. More than that, if we could get tracers on the containers he’s dumping in the middle of the ocean, that would be enough to put him in a grave." I tick them off on my fingers, the leather of my chair creaking as I shift. "My informant is good, but he's mid-level. We need someone closer to the throne."
Kon speaks, his voice dropping into the register he reserves for family matters. "My cousin. Cristian Vetrov."
Every head turns. Even Rowan straightens in his chair, his casual posture vanishing.
"Shade," Kon continues, his thick fingers lacing together on one knee. "Moves priceless pieces through shadow networks across three continents. Art, jewels, information. If it exists and it's valuable, Cristian can find it, acquire it, and move it without leaving a fingerprint. He could work up a deal with Enzo and we could take him down that way. Or I can put a bullet between his eyes and we can call it a day. Up to you."
“We’re trying to get out of the murder-for-hire business, brother,” Rafael reminds Kon.
Kon holds his hands up as if in defeat. “Easy fix. Just saying.”
Rafael sighs heavily and I see him consider it for a minute. Ever since he welcomed his baby girl into the world, he’s been trying to leave the graves and blood part of the work in his past and forcing us to do the same.
Now that I’m in the same family man boat as him, I am starting to understand his reasoning.
Rafael lowers himself into a chair, looking as worried as he does tired. “We stick to gathering intel and then we decide.”
Everyone nods.
"Back to your cousin. He would help us because?" Massimo asks, one eyebrow arched, his tie finally knotted to his satisfaction.
"He's Vetrov. Blood is blood. We need him, he’s in. Count on it." Kon's expression brooks no argument, his dark eyes carrying the certainty of a man who doesn't invoke family lightly. "And he's wanted access to Chicago for years. This gives him a reason."
Rafael considers this for a long moment, his fingers steepled beneath his chin, the light from the windows throwing his shadow long across the carpet. "Bring him in. When Marchetti falls, I want his empire picked clean before the body's cold. We can use help we can trust."
“Da, moy brat.” Yes, my brother.
Kon gives Rafael a nod and there’s a million words behind that one action that sums up to trust.
I file the name away, my thumb tracing the rim of my coffee cup where the ceramic has gone cold. Cristian Vetrov. If Kon is vouching for him, the man is either extraordinary or familyloyalty runs deeper than I realized. Given what I know about Kon, it's probably both.
