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“Fabio’s grid is rebuilt. Zina’s feeding you everything through paper. Liana’s got the financial layers open.”

“I know.”

“And when you’re done —“

His voice cracks.

The fracture is small. A hairline break running through the center of a word he hasn’t reached yet. I watch it happen — watch my brother, the man who charmed rooms and broke men and held this family together with his bare hands since the day they buried our father — come apart at the seams over a single syllable he can’t get out.

His eyes are wet. He doesn’t wipe them.

From the bedroom — Nova. A low sound. Not pain. Effort. The controlled exhale of a woman whose body is doing the most important work it has ever done and whose mind is still managing the process like she manages everything. Precisely. Completely. On her own terms.

Romeo’s chin lifts. His throat works.

“— you come meet your niece.”

Niece.

Nobody knows the sex. Nova refused to find out — told the doctor she wanted the baby to introduce itself, and the way she said it left no room for argument because nothing Nova Reyes says ever leaves room for argument. The ultrasound tech looked at Romeo. Romeo looked at Nova. Nova looked at the ceiling and said, The baby will tell us when it’s ready.

But Romeo says, niece.

He says it the way Nova knows things — in the body, before the mind confirms. The way she knew Tomás needed new shoes before she looked at the soles. The way she knew Romeo was falling apart before he did. Gut-level certainty that bypasses logic and lands in the chest like a fist.

My brother’s voice breaks on a word that means the future arrived, and he’s choosing to meet it in a delivery room instead of a war room, and I stand at his counter, holding the weight of everything he’s walking away from.

His green eyes hold mine for two seconds. The longest two seconds of my life.

Then he turns. Walks down the hall. The door closes behind him — soft, final, the sound of a man choosing his wife over his father’s ghost.

The hallway holds the echo.

I stand at the counter. Alone. Eighteen years old. Two empires. A seventy-two-hour clock. The operational assault waiting for my signal. And the echo of my brother’s broken voice saying niece like a prayer he didn’t know he was making.

The marble is cold under my palms.

I get to work.

The War Room That Is a Kitchen

Liana is already at the counter when I turn around.

Her laptop is open. Screens running. The Exclusion frequency is doing what it does — stripping layers, reading what was deliberately hidden, finding the architecture underneath the architecture. She doesn’t ask what Romeo said. She heard it. The whole penthouse heard it — the walls in this place carry sound like water carries current, and my brother’s voice cracking on niece traveled through every room.

She looks at me. Brown eyes. Steady.

“Node 7’s financial shell is fourteen layers deep,” she says. “I’ve cracked nine.”

That’s her version of I’m here. Let’s go.

“Show me.”

She angles the laptop. Her fingers move across the keyboard and the data spills open — Giovanni’s posthumous financial architecture, the succession protocol’s monetary backbone, every shell company and trust and offshore routing mechanism my dead father built to ensure that whoever inherited this empire would have to earn it by dismantling it first.

Fabio materializes at the far end of the counter. Three screens. His fingers move with the precision of a man who’s run Rivas security since before I was born—since before Romeo’s voice dropped, since before Santino’s first scar, since before Dante existed as anything other than a contingency Giovanni hadn’t yet activated.

“Grid’s rebuilt,” Fabio says. “Perimeter’s airtight. Nobody gets within six blocks of this building without me knowing their blood type.”