“This camera,” Matteo says, voice clipped, “went offline at 23:18. Twelve minutes before the breach. Not a power issue. Not a storm issue. Manual override.”
“And who can override?” Luca asks, already knowing. Already wanting it to be someone else.
Matteo doesn’t look at him. “You. Me. Head of security. Enzo.”
Silence drops. I can hear my own pulse in my ear. Lucia’s eyes flick to me. Not pity. Not fear. Something else. A grim kind of understanding.
Gianni shifts, restless. “Enzo said he was coordinating from the secure room.”
“He said,” Matteo repeats, like the words taste bad. He taps another key and brings up the secure room feed. Nothing. Black screen. No footage. No timestamp. No record of Enzo entering. No record of him leaving.
“He wasn’t there,” Matteo says quietly. “Or he wiped it.”
My hand tightens on the edge of the table. Not enough to crack it. But enough that the tendons stand out in my wrist.
Lucia’s voice cuts in, soft but sharp. “He offered to handle the internal investigation.”
Every head turns to her. She doesn’t flinch. She’s learning how to exist in rooms like this. Not by becoming one of us, but by refusing to be moved.
“Immediately,” she adds. “Before anyone even finished saying the word sabotage.”
I remember. Enzo, stepping forward like a benefactor. Like a man eager to clean up messes. It landed wrong then. It lands like a bullet now.
Matteo scrolls again. “We intercepted communications.”
He doesn’t say how. He doesn’t have to. In my world, you don’t apologize for being careful.
A series of coded messages appears on screen. Short bursts. Numbers. Names disguised. A pattern hidden under blandness.
Rossi contacts. Not direct, not obvious. Nothing that could be proven in court if this were a clean world.
But we don’t live in one.
We live in a world where patterns are proof.
“Timing matches,” Matteo says. “Messages sent within minutes of our patrol changes. Within minutes of staff rotations. Within minutes of you leaving the estate for the courthouse. The gala. The sit-down planning.” He looks at me carefully. Like he’s approaching a wound. “And the custody filing,” he adds.
My chest tightens. Matteo flips to a timeline pinned across the screen. Dates. Locations. Events that felt like coincidence when I lived them.
“They filed three weeks before Lucia returned,” he says. “Marco didn’t initiate it. He signed it. But the paperwork… drafted by someone with legal experience. Someone who knows court strategy. Someone who knew exactly how to trigger a summons without raising too much suspicion.”
My mouth tastes like metal.
“Enzo,” Gianni says finally, the name coming out like an accusation and a prayer. Like if he says it loud enough, it will stop being true.
Lucia’s gaze drops for a second. Then rises again. “At the gala,” she says, voice controlled. “He called children leverage. Like it was a joke.”
My jaw locks hard enough that my teeth ache.
Matteo’s eyes flick to me, then back to the screen. “We also pulled purchasing records. Small things. Supplies. Equipment. Items ordered through vendors Enzo uses for his personal accounts.” He pauses, then adds, “Some of it matches what the intruders used.”
The room shifts. Men who have known Enzo for decades suddenly look at the air as if it’s poisoned. One of the guards near the door mutters a curse. I keep my face blank. Inside, something is breaking. Thirty years of loyalty cracking under the weight of one undeniable fact: Enzo touched my son. He didn’t have to lay a hand on him. He didn’t have to step into Nico’s room with a knife.
He threatened him. He plotted around him. He aimed danger at him and called it strategy.
That is unforgivable.
I push back from the table. The scrape of my chair is controlled. Still, it cuts through the room like a warning shot.
