“I’ve seen that language before,” Nico says. “Special arrangement. It’s what they write when the collateral isn’t currency.”
“I know what it means.”
“The timeline fits. Six weeks before the girl disappeared. The Benedettis cleared his debt and six weeks later they collected.”
I set the paper down. Steady. My pulse is flat.
Paolo Ferraro. Isabella’s stepfather. The name she’s mentioned twice, always with a shrug. A gambler. Backgroundnoise in the story she tells about Sofia. He sold her. To clear a debt he ran up at a card table.
Cazzo.
“Who else has seen this?”
“Just me.”
“Keep it that way.”
Nico nods. He knows when to exit a room. One of his better qualities.
The door closes behind him and I’m alone with the paper and the one truth that will rewrite everything she’s built.
I fold the printout. Put it in my pocket.
The walk down the hallway. The woman sitting at her desk working and muttering at her screen the way she does when the data is close. Hunting through trafficking networks and criminal databases and dark web forums. Searching outward. Searching the digital underworld where Ghost lives.
She never searched inward.
Never ran her own family. Because why would she. A stepfather with a gambling problem is a character flaw, not a lead. Not someone you run through a trafficking database.
Her blind spot is her family. She was so focused on blaming herself for leaving that she never considered who was responsible for the sale of her sister.
I stand in the garage. The printout against my chest. My pulse unchanged. I pressed my forehead against hers in that office. Her palm over my heart. Stood in a doorway and said her name because it was the only word worth saying.
And now I have to walk down a hallway and hand her a truth that will gut her.
Damn it.
I leave the garage.
She’s at the desk. Typing. Talking to herself the way she does when the data is within reach but not resolved.
“The third shell feeds into a trust in Wilmington, which feeds into—” Her fingers stop. Resume. “No. That trail is dead. Back to Delaware.”
I close the door behind me. Eyes on the screen. Normal. She stopped tracking my entrances weeks ago. I’m part of the room now.
I sit across from her. My chair. The same distance I’ve kept since the beginning. She’s still typing. Nail of her thumb between her teeth. Hair piled on top of her head with a pen stuck through it.
The coffee I brought her this morning untouched and cold beside the keyboard.
“The Wilmington trust doesn’t connect.” She’s talking to the screen, not me. “But if I pull the ownership records from Delaware?—”
I reach across the desk. Close her laptop. Slow. Gentle.
Her fingers hover where the keys were. She looks at my hand on her laptop. Then at my face. Her fingers fall still.
The typing stops. Because I don’t do gentle. Not without reason. She knows that. The woman who notices everything about me. Lorenzo being careful with her laptop is a signal and she knows it.
“What happened?”
