My jaw tightens until my teeth ache. I look at her brother’s face. I’ve had that photo for years. I knew his name before I knew hers. I knew the clothes he was wearing when the Bellanti hitman caught up with him. It was in the file the police pretended to lose. I knew the exact dollar amount Alvarado Vane authorized for the contract.
“Eleven years,” I say, the words dragging out of my throat like shards of glass. “I’ve been the vault. Dominic leads. Matteo holds the line beside him. Enzo turns money and law into weapons. Vincenzo finds what no one else can. But I remember.I’m the one who kept the files when the police ‘lost’ them. I’m the one who tracked the bank accounts Vane used to scrub the blood off his hands.”
“You did it alone,” she says. It isn’t a question. It’s an observation that feels like she’s peeling back my skin to see the nerves underneath.
“I had to. You don’t tell the people you love the monster is still breathing until you know killing him won’t burn the house down.”
I move past her, my arm brushing hers. The contact sends a jolt of pure, unadulterated electricity through my marrow. I go to the main terminal and tap a key. The screens flicker, scrolling through thousands of lines of encrypted data—the digital half of the Vane ledger, the archive I’ve been trying to crack for eleven years.
“I have the transactions,” I say, staring at the scrolling code. “I have the dates. I have the shell companies. But Vane… he’s a ghost. He uses a rolling encryption key based on something physical. Something I haven’t been able to find. Without that key, this is just a list of numbers. Not evidence. Not leverage. Not enough to kill him without triggering the switch.”
Amara steps up beside me. She doesn’t wait for permission. She leans into my space, her scent—rain and something sharp, like citrus—filling my lungs. She looks at the screen, her eyes moving with a terrifying, beautiful speed.
“It’s not just an encryption key,” she murmurs. She reaches out, her fingers hovering over the keyboard. She looks at me, waiting.
“Do it,” I say.
She types. Not words—routing numbers, shipment dates, the port codes from Curtis’s cipher. “Vane didn’t just move money. He moved people. Curtis found the pattern at Halloran Freight. The money wasn’t the goal. It was the fuel. Herealized the money wasn’t the goal—it was the fuel. Vane isn’t just a financier, Alessio. He’s an architect. He builds the shell companies, routes, bribe channels, and dead-man’s-switch architecture that let the Bellantis exist outside the reach of law or rival families.”
She hits enter. The screen freezes for a heartbeat. One folder opens. Not all of it. Not even close. But enough green cuts through the red to make my heart stop.
I stare at the screen, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. Eleven years of brick walls, and she has found the first seam.
“How?” I breathe.
“Curtis left me a gift,” she says, her voice thick with old grief. “He knew they were coming for him. He sent me a book. A stupid, old paperback thriller. I thought it was just a present. But the first letter of every chapter… it was a sequence. I ran those letters against port codes, shell names, routing numbers, shipment dates. Nothing held until your ledger gave me the missing side of the sequence.”
I turn to her, the sheer weight of what we’ve just done crashing down on me. The hunt isn’t two separate paths anymore. It’s one. And it leads straight to the man who ruined both our lives.
She’s looking up at me, her face pale, her eyes shimmering with a mix of triumph and terror. “We have a way in,” she whispers.
“Not yet,” I say. I reach out, and this time, I don’t stop. I cup her face in my hands. Her skin is soft, so much softer than anything I deserve to touch. My thumbs trace the line of her cheekbones.
She’s so small in my grip, so fragile, yet she’s the most powerful thing I’ve ever encountered. “But we’re going to burnthe world he built. Not to make you stay. Because Curtis deserves the truth.”
The wordstayhangs in the air between us, heavy and loaded. I see the flash of panic in her eyes—the runner’s instinct. She doesn’t know how to be still. She doesn’t know how to belong.
“Alessio,” she breathes, her hands coming up to rest on my forearms. Her grip is tight, her nails digging into my skin through my shirt. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep. This isn’t a fairy tale. We’re in a basement surrounded by ghosts.”
“I don’t give a damn about fairy tales,” I growl, leaning down until our foreheads touch. I can feel her breath on my lips. It’s erratic, hot. “I care that you’re the first person outside this family who understands what this has cost.”
The silence in the room is deafening. The only sound is the whir of the servers and the roar of my own blood in my ears. I want to kiss her. I want to pull her close until, for one second, neither of us is looking for an exit.
I’m vibrating with the need to pull her closer, to feel the full length of her body against mine. My hands slide down to her neck, my pulse thrumming against hers. The need to protect her has settled in my bones, and that is dangerous enough.
She tilts her head back, her lips parting. I can see the indecision in her eyes, the war between her fear and her desire. I’m winning. I can feel it.
I lean in, my lips a fraction of an inch from hers?—
A sharp, rhythmic chirping breaks the spell.
I stiffen, my hands dropping from her face as I spin toward the main console. It’s a high-priority alert. One of the digital tripwires I set years ago on a specific offshore account—one Vane only touches when he’s preparing to move money, identity, or location.
“What is it?” Amara asks, her voice breathless, her hand clutching the edge of the desk to steady herself.
I watch the data stream across the screen. A geolocation tag pops up. A ping from a secure server in the South Loop. It’s a pittance of a transfer, something that would look like a rounding error to anyone else, but the IP address is one I’ve been hunting for four years.
“A node,” I say, my voice tight with adrenaline. “He just accessed a localized server from the South Loop. The Wabash corridor.”
