“Fair enough.” He straightens his cuffs. “Though I suspect the mouth is there. Just saving it.”
“It’s a byproduct of the restraints. They kill my charm.”
“Mm.” His eyes crinkle. Amused. “The panic room. Walk me through it. The biometric lock alone should have held you for a week.”
“Trade secret.”
“Everything is a trade secret until the negotiation starts.” He settles. Patient. Certain. “And we are negotiating, Isabella. You just don’t know the terms yet.”
My name. Not Ghost. Isabella. He has both. He’s reading me. The way I read data. Looking for the patterns underneath. I keep my expression flat.
He’s tracked Ghost to me. My forum presence. My history. Watching longer than I thought.
“Your tech team.” The sentence pushes past my teeth like gravel. “They’re the ones who looped the Santoro security feed.”
Flavio’s eyebrows rise. “Among other things. We’ve been hunting Ghost for over a year, you know. You were very good. Nearly invisible.” He tilts his head. “But then your queries started coming from inside the Santoro compound. That narrowed things considerably. My people tracked your digital footprint weeks ago. We’ve had eyes on their communications, their movements, their security protocols.” He brushes aninvisible speck from his sleeve. “Your friend Marco is talented. Mine are better.”
“The panic room was all you. Impressive.” He adjusts his cuff. “But the rest? The skeleton crew that didn’t hear a motorcycle start in the garage. The clear road to our coordinates.” His smile sharpens. “My people looped those feeds hours before you touched the terminal. You thought you were escaping. You were being delivered.”
The pieces of the puzzle rearrange. The mole hunt. Lorenzo and Dante tearing their own organization apart, looking for a leak. The paranoia. The suspicion eating through every layer of trust. Weeks of it.
There was never a mole. The Benedettis had their own surveillance operation. Sophisticated enough to breach Marco’s systems, loop feeds without detection, track Ghost to a physical address. Not pulling intel from inside the Santoro family. Pulling it from outside. Better resources. Better infrastructure. No traitor inside. The investigation into the mole was a ghost hunt.
“You let them tear each other apart looking for a leak that didn’t exist.” Flat. Professional. Ghost, not Isabella. “That’s elegant.”
“Coming from you, I’ll take that as a compliment.” Flavio tilts his head. “You sound like you appreciate the craft.”
“I appreciate good code. Yours or anyone’s.”
“Then you’ll appreciate what comes next.” He uncrosses his legs. Leans forward. The casual performance drops a degree, and underneath it, a sharper edge. “I know about the algorithm you built. The one that maps movement patterns from shipping manifests and port records. My people tried to reverse-engineer it. Couldn’t.”
My stomach tightens. He’s been inside my work. Not just my identity. My actual code.
“You want the algorithm.”
“I want the person who built it.” He holds my gaze. “Algorithms can be copied. Minds can’t.”
He recrosses his legs. Settles deeper into the chair like we’re old friends catching up. “Do you know why I went after the Santoros?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Salvatore Santoro. A man who started as an enforcer. Muscle. And somehow he built a dynasty and convinced every family in New Orleans that trafficking was off limits.” He brushes his knee. “One man’s morality, imposed on an entire city. Billions in revenue, gone, because Salvatore had a conscience and enough guns to enforce it.”
He says it the way someone complains about a parking ticket. “I turned Romano. Thirty-two years of loyal service to your Santoros, and all it took was the right offer at the right time.” A flicker of satisfaction. “He poisoned Salvatore for me. Slowly. Let the old man think his body was failing. And when that wasn’t enough, he went after the heir too.”
“But the son survived,” I say. Flat.
“The son survived.” Flavio’s mouth flattens. A crack in the performance. “And the enforcer held the family together with blood and silence. Lorenzo. Your Lorenzo.” The tension drops from his face. The mask slides back. “Which brings us to you.”
I log the details. If I survive this, Lorenzo needs all of it.
“And,” Flavio continues, settling back, “I have some information you might find interesting. About your sister.”
Sofia. The name hits like a fist. My expression gives. Just for a second. But he sees it.
“If you’ve hurt her?—”
“Please.” He waves a hand. “She’s an investment. I protect my investments.”
The casualness of it. Like Sofia is a stock portfolio.
“She’s alive. Healthy enough.” Healthy enough. Two words that contain every horror I couldn’t stop. “And she surfaces,”he says, watching me. “The girl who’d do anything for her baby sister. Let’s talk about what ‘anything’ might include.”
