Dante stands. “Set her up. Report back with what she has.” He pauses at the door. “If this is real, if your intel is what you say it is, we can work together. But if you’re playing us?—”
“I’m not playing anyone.” Her voice is flat. Final. “I want my sister back. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
He nods once and leaves.
Now it’s just us.
“Follow me.”
I lead her along the corridor to my office. Not Dante’s study. Not a spare room. Mine. The room is sparse. Desk. Two chairs. Window overlooking the east garden. No personal touches. No comfort. Just function. For years I’ve made sure no one feels welcome here.
I gesture to the empty chair. “Sit.”
She does. Close enough to hear her breathe. If I sit, I’ll be facing her. Watching her. Unable to look anywhere else.
I could have put her anywhere else. Should have.
I pull out the laptop we’ve prepared. Clean machine, monitored network, every keystroke logged. She’ll know we’re logging everything. She doesn’t seem to care.
I set it down, angled toward her. She’ll work here. In my space.
Her fingers move across the keyboard before I can blink. A login screen. Then another. Then a cascade of authentication prompts she navigates seamlessly, like it’s second nature.
“Six different servers,” she says, not looking up. “None of them talk to each other. You’d need all six to read anything, and they’re scattered across three continents.”
Words fail me.
Her hands. They’re not what I expected. Smaller than mine. Unpainted nails, bitten short. A callus on her right index finger from years of typing. They move across the keys with a precision that borders on violence. Each keystroke deliberate. Certain.
I’ve seen hands do terrible things. I’ve used my own to break bones and end lives and never once trembled. But I’ve never seen hands build something. Navigate a digital landscape like it’s a territory to be conquered.
She’s not typing. She’s commanding.
“There.” She turns the screen toward me. Folders. Dozens of them. Organized by date, by location, by operation. Years of work, laid out in neat digital rows.
“Start with locations,” I say.
A map fills the screen. New Orleans and the surrounding parishes, pinned and color-coded. Her finger taps a cluster near the port. “Flavio’s main compound. Former warehouse, converted five years ago.” She pulls up a second file. “I hacked the utility company. Power consumption spikes on the fifteenth and thirtieth of every month. Shipment days.”
Her fingers move across the keyboard in bursts. Three seconds of fury, two seconds of reading, then fury again. She’s forgotten I’m here.
I cross-reference her locations with what we already know. Nico’s intel. Marco’s street whispers. It matches. All of it.
“What else?”
She works for the next two hours. I watch. I tell myself I’m supervising. Monitoring her access. Ensuring she’s not sending anything out.
She has a rhythm when she works. Her fingers dance across the keys in patterns I don’t understand. She types in questions in a language I don’t speak, and it gives her answers, pulls up data, unlocks secrets.
Nonna Rosa brings coffee an hour in. Pauses in the doorway when she sees the setup. Her eyes move from Isabella at my desk to me by the window, and she pauses a moment too long. She’s never seen anyone else in this room. I don’t ever allow it.
She sets a pot on the sideboard without comment, but her gaze lingers on me.
Isabella pours herself a cup without breaking stride. Black, two sugars. She stirs it while she works, takes a sip, and her eyes close for half a second. A tiny sound of relief in the back of her throat, so small I shouldn’t have been able to hear it.
Black, two sugars. I won’t forget.
The afternoon light shifts through the windows, warm rectangles moving across the floor. My office smells like old leather and chicory and, underneath it all, her.
