Victoria alone.
Victoria sick, frightened, researching my wife, taking pregnancy tests, thinking herself unseen.
Watched.
The anger that rises in me is too cold to burn.
“I checked her phone too,” Ricardo says, gesturing to the phone sitting face down on the table.
I turn to him.
“Same?”
“Some access. Less extensive. Enough to pull messages, browser activity, location patterns.”
“And now?”
“I've secured it,” he says. “It's safe. We haven't finished with her laptop yet, so that stays off for now.”
“Did they get into our system?”
“No,” Ricardo says immediately. “Our security is too tight, and she had no administrative route into anything sensitive from that machine. Her work portal is clean. No evidence of intrusion through her credentials.”
“What about her firm?”
“Checking now. But Conti systems are untouched.”
Matteo adds, “Victoria had no reason to secure her personal devices against this level of intrusion. She is an attorney, not an intelligence analyst.”
No, she is an attorney who got too close to me.
That is why this happened.
That is why someone aimed their own fear at her and lured her out into the open.
“We’ve been able to recover a lot of what they scrubbed,” Matteo says. “Fragments mostly. Enough to build a timeline. We are trying to restore her internet history now and find whatever articles were planted.”
“You confirmed?” I ask.
Matteo gives one small nod. “Not definitively, but it looks like it. You called that one, Papà.”
Ricardo’s gaze is steady on mine.
“There is something else.”
His tone straightens my spine.
“What?”
He glances at Matteo.
Matteo’s mouth tightens.
I look between them. “Dimmi!” I order.
Ricardo closes his laptop the rest of the way.
“There was an internet search.”
