Dante stands near the fireplace, his face carved from stone. The others settle into chairs and sofas—Bruno rigid with barely contained rage, Lorenzo with Sophia tucked against his side, Nico leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. Vittoria sits beside Dmitri, her laptop already open on her knees.
"The week after my meeting with Alejandro," Dante begins, his voice flat and controlled, "gave me time to think. To plan."
I watch him speak, and suddenly pieces click into place. The distant looks. The way he'd stare at nothing for hours. How he'd hold me at night but feel a thousand miles away.
I shake my head slowly. "I was wondering what was going on with you."
Dante's eyes meet mine for a brief moment.
"Alejandro had Webb," he continues, turning back to the room. "The tech entrepreneur I went to collect from in Denver."
Lorenzo shifts forward. "The one who set you up."
"Webb was too valuable to Alejandro to risk in a firefight. He's one of the most intelligent people in coding. Was." Dante pauses. "Alejandro had him working on something specific. Breaking through Vittoria's security systems."
Vittoria's head snaps up from her laptop. Her jaw tightens, but she nods once. "He did."
The admission costs her something. I can see it in the way her fingers curl against the keyboard.
"Webb had access to every single Sartori member," Dante says. "Every phone. Every computer. Every camera in every property. Even the staff. Alejandro paid him millions to do what he did. Webb built surveillance into the foundation of your digital infrastructure. He knew where everyone was, what everyone said, who everyone talked to."
Bruno's fist slams against the arm of his chair. "How the fuck did we not know?"
"Because Webb made his own system." Vittoria's voice is tight. "It wasn't a hack. It wasn't malware I could detect. He created something from scratch—a parallel architecture that piggybacked on our existing networks. Completely invisible. Completely untraceable."
She looks up at her brothers, and I see something I've never seen on her face before. Shame.
"I couldn't know," she says quietly. "Because there was nothing to find. No signature. No footprint. Nothing."
Lorenzo reaches across Sophia to squeeze Vittoria's shoulder. "This isn't on you."
"The moment I arrived at the compound," Dante continues, "I found a moment where I was alone with Lorenzo."
I remember that first day. Dante disappearing for an hour while I unpacked. Coming back with that same distant look in his eyes.
"I put music on in Lorenzo's office. Loud enough to cover our voices from any listening devices." Dante's gaze shifts to Lorenzo. "I whispered everything. What Alejandro told me. What he wanted me to do. The surveillance. All of it."
Lorenzo nods slowly. "The next morning, I went to Vittoria. Did the same thing. Music playing, voices low."
"We couldn't risk any digital communication," Vittoria adds. "No phones. No texts. No emails. Everything had to be face-to-face, in spaces we could control acoustically."
I stare at them. At the elaborate dance they performed right under my nose. Under everyone's noses.
"Webb is dead," Dante says, and his voice drops to something colder. "That night in Denver. When his men shot me. I shot him back. Throat wound. He bled out before I left the building."
"But Lorenzo said the office was cleaned," I hear myself say. "No bodies. No blood."
"Alejandro's people," Nico answers. "They sanitized the scene. Took Webb's body. Probably thought they could save him." He shrugs. "They couldn't."
"Webb dying was the first crack in Alejandro's plan," Dante explains. "Without Webb, the surveillance system started degrading. Vittoria noticed anomalies three days after we arrived in Chicago. Small glitches. Gaps in coverage. She couldn't trace the source, but she knew something was wrong."
Vittoria pulls up something on her laptop screen. "By the time of Lorenzo's 'funeral,' the system was operating at maybe sixty percent capacity. Alejandro was getting incomplete information. He saw what we wanted him to see."
I keep looking at them. At this family that orchestrated an elaborate deception while I cried myself to sleep thinking Lorenzo was dead. While Sophia screamed herself hoarse with grief.
Unbelievable.
Dante
