Hitting her in real time. I watch it land. Watch the assumptions rewrite themselves behind her eyes. Everything reordered. Every late night spent hunting ghosts in the digital dark while the answer sat at a dinner table she’d already left.
“I could have found this.” Her voice cracks. Not grief. Fury at herself. “Year one. Month one. If I’d run his name instead of spending six months building a cover identity. If I’d looked at the person in front of me instead of hunting the world for strangers. I could have?—”
“You couldn’t have known.”
“Don’t.“ She spins on me. ”Don’t tell me that. Don’t give me the speech about blind spots and family and how nobody suspects the people closest to them. I am the person who sees what other people can’t find. That is what Ido.And I missed it. Because I was too busy hating myself to look at the man who deserved it.“
I hold still. Let her rage. It’s not for me to fix or soften or redirect. It’s hers. She’s earned the right to go off for as long as she wants.
She presses her palms to her face. The sound that comes out is not a sob. Not tears. A sound from a place deeper than grief.
I cross the room. I don’t reach for her. Instead I do the thing my body has never done in this office, in any room, in any year of my life. I sit down. On the floor. Back against the desk. Beside her chair, not in front of it.
She looks down at me. Red-eyed. Hollowed out. Confused.
I don’t explain. I don’t have the words for what I’m doing. I just stay. Not fixing it. Not pulling her toward me. Just here. Below her. Where she can look down at me for once.
She stares at me for three seconds. Then she drops down and sits beside me on the floor. Her shoulder against mine. Her back against the desk.
She fights it. One second. Her body rigid against my side. Fists pressed against her own thighs. The resistance of a woman who has held herself together alone and doesn’t know how to let go.
Then she stops. Her face presses into my shoulder. Then my chest. Her fists uncurl against my shirt.
She’s not crying. She’s trembling. A force that rattles through my own ribs. Her fingers grip my shirt. The trembling sharpens. Not grief. Recalculation.
I hold her. My chin above her head. My hand on the back of her skull. My other arm tight around her back.
“I’m going to handle it.” Low. Into her hair. Not asking permission.
She pulls back. Looks up at me. Destroyed. Red. Wet at the edges. But her eyes are clear. Hard. The hacker and the woman and the sister all occupy the same gaze.
“Find Sofia first.” A beat. Her jaw sets. “Then handle him.”
A command. From her. To me. Not a request. Not a negotiation. A directive forged from blood money and a sister she hasn’t stopped searching for since the day she disappeared.
I nod. Once.
She holds my gaze for three more seconds. Measuring. Making sure I heard it the way she meant it.
Then she turns. Crosses the room. Sits down. Opens the laptop I closed.
She’s shaking. But the keystrokes are precise. The same fingers that gripped my shirt are tearing through databases at a speed I can’t track. Running Paolo’s name through every system she has access to. Building the full picture she missed. Financial records. Phone logs. Travel history. Every digital footprint a man with a gambling problem leaves when he thinks nobody is watching.
Ghost is online. Sharpening the data. Turning the fury into queries and the blind spot into a search pattern that will leave no corner of Paolo Ferraro’s life unexamined.
I watch her for a beat. The tremor in her fingers that doesn’t slow the typing. The set of her jaw. The absence of humor sitting in the room like a held breath. No sarcasm. No running commentary. No jokes about the absurdity of her life or the irony of the situation or the man standing behind her chair.
When Isabella doesn’t joke, the silence has teeth.
I pull my phone from my pocket. Open a text to Dante.
Find Paolo Ferraro.
I send it. Put the phone away.
Behind me, her typing doesn’t stop.
She works for three hours. The rage fuels her first, then a colder precision takes over. Systematic. Every keystroke a scalpel. Paolo’s financial records. Phone logs. Travel patterns. Years of digital footprints she’d never traced, laid out across the screen in rows and rows of damning data.
