“You stayed,” he says, his hand settling carefully at the back of my neck. It isn’t a request, but I hear the fear underneath it. “Until the war is over?”
"I stay," I whisper.
He leans down, his forehead resting against mine. We stand there with the drawer open between us, both of us pretending one folded shirt is not a vow.
But the peace is short-lived. The data doesn't lie, even if my pulse does. I can't ignore the numbers I saw last night.
"Alessio," I say, my voice turning serious as I pull back. "We need to talk about the traffic I found. The stuff that originated from inside the compound."
His expression instantly shifts. The man from moments ago vanishes, replaced by the steel-eyed keeper of secrets. "What did you find?"
"It’s not just recent," I say, my mind racing. “When you were with Dominic, I went deeper into the archive. There’s a pattern of outgoing signals that goes back years. Encrypted, almost invisible. But they don't look like an enemy attack. They repeat at regular intervals, low-volume packets, just enough to prove the line is alive.”
Alessio’s grip on my hand tightens. "A mole doesn't send a heartbeat, Amara. They send blueprints. They send schedules."
“Unless the person isn’t only feeding Vane,” I counter. “What if they’re also monitoring the damage and trying to control when it hits? Someone who has been keeping a tally of everything that happens in this house for a long, long time?"
"We need to find the physical line," I say. “If someone is sending data from inside these walls, there has to be a physical or privileged access point. We find the access, we narrow the man.”
Alessio looks toward the window, his gaze dark. “There are five people with the access, history, and proximity to make that possible. Five people I’ve trusted with my life.”
“Then we don’t start with the easiest suspect,” I say softly. “We start with the person no one wants to check.”
The silence follows, heavy with the realization that this house is still a battlefield. The war isn't just at the gates; it’s in the hallways, in the breakfast nook, in the very air we breathe.
Alessio turns back to me, his eyes burning with a renewed, feral intensity. “We find them, Amara. We find the financier, wefind the traitor, and we end this. For Curtis. For our father Carlo. For our mother Riza. For every name they buried.”
He leans in, his lips brushing mine like a vow neither of us knows how to say gently.
Morning afters used to mean leaving before anyone could ask me to stay.
But as I look at the man in front of me, the story is only just beginning. And this time, I’m not just a witness. I’m the one who can read the numbers.
The compound is quiet, but underneath the domesticity, the math is already moving.
"Let’s go to work," I say.
I don’t look at the duffel bag on the bed. I don’t look at the exit.
I look at Alessio—at a man carrying something so heavy I can almost hear the house creak under it—and I follow him down toward the basement war room, where twenty years of names are pinned around the mahogany tactical table.
One of those lines ends with Curtis’s name.
We’re following that one first.
8
ALESSIO
Ozone,burnt coffee, and the heavy metallic tang of old secrets—the war room greets me with all three being dragged into the light. It is the basement war room beneath the compound, a place where the sun never reaches and the only clock that matters is the one ticking down to the next hit.
The screens cast a bluish pallor over my brothers’ faces, making old grief look new again.
Amara stands to my left. She is a sharp, dark silhouette against the glow of the monitors. She doesn’t fidget. She doesn’t look for an exit. She stands with her shoulders squared, her chin level, a woman who has spent ten years learning how to occupy space in rooms that weren’t built for her.
My skin hums where the distance between us closes to a hair’s breadth. She chose to stand beside me, and that terrifies me more than the room. The thought is a low, vibrating chord in the base of my skull, a territorial roar that never quite silences. I brought her here, into the belly of the beast, and now I have to make sure the beast doesn’t swallow her whole.
Dominic sits at the head of the heavy oak table, his hands flat on the surface. He looks tired. The weight of the family, the weight of every life lost since our parents were slaughtered,sits on his shoulders like lead. He doesn’t look at the screens. He looks at me. He looks at Amara. His eyes are dark pits of calculation and protective rage.
