The mole. The pings. The shadow in the house.
Vincenzo has a theory, and I let him keep it, because it’s wrong in a useful direction. The anonymous pings route through the chapel guest network, a low-priority node everyone treated as harmless because Father Domenico’s routines never changed.
And the only outsider who walks that wing daily is Father Domenico, the compound priest who crosses to Matteo’s bakery every morning at five fifty-five, regular as a church bell. Acollar with access, routine, and twenty years of this family’s confessions in his pocket.
It would be clean, if it were him. A stranger’s sin. Something we could cut out without bleeding.
I’ve run him six times in eleven years. Six times he’s come back exactly what he appears to be. I’ve never told Vincenzo everything, but I’ve let him watch the priest while I watch the house.
I pull up the data Amara found earlier—the internal traffic. It’s sophisticated. It’s been happening for years. Little bursts of data, tiny pings that look like background noise but carry a signature. It’s a “watcher” protocol. Someone has been monitoring the compound’s security grid, the communications, the movement of the vehicles.
And they’ve been doing it from a terminal that has access to the most sensitive areas of the house.
I look at the list of suspects. It’s short. It has to be someone with the clearance to move freely, someone no one would question. Someone who has been here from the beginning.
I see Turi’s name on the list. I want to strike it through. I want to erase it until the paper tears. Turi isn’t a suspect. He’s the foundation. He’s the one who stayed when the world burned. He’s the one who looked at eleven orphans and decided they were worth saving.
But the pings don’t lie. The pings are coming from the family wing near the library, close enough to Turi’s rooms to make my chest go tight.
My chest tightens. The trauma of the massacre isn’t just about the blood and the fire. It’s about the loss of safety. It’s about the realization that the world can turn on you in a heartbeat. I spent eleven years building these walls, turning this compound into a fortress, and now I’m realizing the enemy might have been inside the gates the whole time.
I look at Amara. She’s focused on the Gold Coast node, her brow furrowed in concentration. She doesn’t know the names on my list. She doesn’t know the history of the man she sat with at dinner, the man who told her stories about my mother.
If it’s him… if it’s Turi… the betrayal will be worse than the massacre itself. It will be the final death of our family.
“Alessio.”
I snap my head up. Amara is looking at me.
“I have the entry point for the Gold Coast server,” she says. “But I need a physical bridge. We have to be on-site to bypass the biometrics. If we try to do it remotely, we’ll trip the switch.”
“Once the bridge is in,” she adds, reading the question on my face, “the geography changes. Every command I send from your vault rides our own hardware straight into his rack. The node reads it as local traffic. As far as the dead-man’s switch is concerned, I’ll be standing in Vane’s server room for the rest of the war.”
I take a deep breath, forcing the thoughts of the mole into a dark corner of my mind. Focus. One task at a time.
“The Gold Coast residence is a fortress,” I say, my voice steadying. “Vane uses it as his primary data hub when he’s in the city. It’s guarded by high-end private security. Not Bellanti thugs. Professionals.”
“Then we go in as professionals,” Amara says.
I look at her, really look at her. She’s wearing a dark, functional tactical jacket I gave her. Her hair is pulled back, tight and neat. She looks like a warrior. My warrior.
“You stay in the car,” I say.
She scoffs, a dry, sharp sound. “Like hell I do. You need me to run the bridge. You can’t do it alone.”
“It’s too dangerous, Amara. If something happens to you?—”
“If something happens to me, the switch triggers and we all die anyway,” she interrupts, stepping into my space. She pokesa finger into my chest, right over my heart. “Stop trying to cage me, Alessio. You wanted a partner. This is what a partner looks like.”
I wrap my hand around her wrist, pulling her closer until her chest is pressed against mine. I can feel the rapid-fire beat of her heart, the heat of her skin. She isn’t afraid. She’s ready.
“You stay behind me,” I growl. “You don’t move unless I tell you. You don’t take risks.”
“I’ve been taking risks for ten years, Alessio. I’m still here.”
I lean down and press my mouth to hers, a hard, desperate kiss that tastes of caffeine and adrenaline. It’s a claim. It’s a prayer. I need her to understand that she is the only thing in this world I cannot lose.
She kisses me back with an equal ferocity, her hands tangling in my hair, pulling me closer. For a moment, the war room disappears. The dead-man’s-switch, the mole, the Bellantis—it all fades into the background. There is only her. The way she fits against me. The way she tastes.
