“Now the room has your voice in it.” His arms close around me, careful and absolute. “I’m never getting the silence back. I’ve checked. It’s gone.”
“Good,” I say, into his skin. “I’m very thorough.”
Slowly, Alessio pulls back, kissing my forehead, my nose, my lips.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say, a shaky laugh escaping. “You’re a hell of a surgeon, Costa. I can’t tell if you just patched me up or took me apart.”
“A bit of both,” he says.
He helps me up, hands steady. He finds my clothes, helping me dress with a quiet, domestic care. We don’t speak, moving in the shared space of the aftermath.
I walk back to the monitors. The files don’t have the same shape in my head now. Vane is not a nightmare in the margins anymore. He is a man with systems we can cut.
Then the decryption finishes its last pass, and a pattern surfaces in the routing I hadn’t been able to see before.
“Alessio,” I say, voice sharp.
He’s there in a heartbeat. “What is it?”
“The heartbeat pattern I flagged earlier has an origin now. With the node cracked, the trail led straight back to the house. First hop is the chapel guest network.”
“The chapel.” Something in his shoulders comes down half an inch, and I understand it without being told. He wants it to be the priest. Father Domenico, the compound priest, the one outsider with a routine no one questions—a sin the family could cut out without bleeding. “Domenico walks that wing every morning. Vincenzo has been watching the chapel route.”
“That’s what the routing wants you to think.” My fingers keep moving, and I hate every keystroke. “The chapel node is a relay, not a source. Whoever built this bounced through the one network nobody would ever audit. The origin terminal is deeper in the house.” I scan the code. “I thought the active feed was recent. But the infrastructure isn’t.”
I point to the timestamps. My blood turns to ice. Years scroll back. 2015. 2010.
I stop at the very beginning of the log.
“Two weeks before the massacre,” I say, voice trembling. “Two weeks before Carlo was lured to the warehouse. Someone inside this house was talking to Vane’s network before your father was killed.”
The silence is absolute. Alessio leans in, face pale.
“That’s impossible,” he breathes. “The only people with access to that terminal back then were family. And Turi.”
He stops. The name hangs in the air like a poisoned thing.
“Turi raised us,” Alessio says, voice flat. “He was my father’s best friend. He wouldn’t.”
“The data doesn’t lie, Alessio,” I say. “This terminal… where is it located?”
He doesn’t answer for a long time. He just stares at the proof of a betrayal that goes deeper than anyone imagined.
“It’s in the library,” he finally says. “The one place in this house where no one ever questions who is sitting there. He’s the only one who uses that desk, Amara. The only one.”
He looks at me, and the cracks appear. I see the twenty-year-old who lost everything and never got to put it down.
“We find out for sure,” I say, voice firm. “We don’t guess. We get the proof. And if it’s him… we deal with it. Together.”
He nods, jaw tightening. The steel is back.
“Together,” he agrees.
He reaches out and shuts the laptop.
“Tonight, we preserve the proof and lock the access,” he says. “Tomorrow, we confront the man who raised us.”
