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We moved into the adjacent war room. Ivan established the secure connection while Alessia remained beside me rather than taking a chair. The screen stayed black for several seconds before my uncle appeared from a room in Palermo, silver hair uncharacteristically disordered and the top button of his shirt open.

“You questioned the man?” he asked.

“Sergei did,” Alessia answered.

Matteo’s attention shifted to her. “What did he say?”

“That my father made me the key to his American empire without bothering to mention it.”

Matteo closed his eyes briefly, which was answer enough. “The trust was intended to protect you,” he said.

Alessia laughed once. “Of course it was.”

“After Bianca died, Raffaele wanted those assets beyond the reach of anyone who could force him to surrender them. You were the only person he trusted to inherit them.”

“He just didn’t value me enough to tell me they existed or warn me of the danger they put me in.” Alessia’s mouth pressed into a thin line, and she looked away.

Her words lodged beneath my ribs. After Mila was killed, I had been too consumed by grief to question what else he might have kept from me, but I knew that Yuri Volkov would never have allowed the Bellandis to pull me from that apartment, recover Mila’s body, and keep my name out of the police report without making them pay.

He was still keeping something from me though.

“Tell me. What happened after Mila?” I asked, my voice hoarse with emotion.

Matteo went still.

“What did Yuri do to the Bellandis after Raffaele pulled me out of that apartment?”

“Sergei—”

“What did he do?”

Matteo looked toward someone outside the frame. A moment later, Raffaele stepped into view.

Time had silvered more of his hair since the night he pressed a white handkerchief against my ear. Otherwise, he looked unchanged. Composed elegance built around secrets he believed he had carried for everyone else’s benefit.

He took the chair beside his brother.

“Yuri burned two of our warehouses in Brooklyn,” Matteo said. “A foreman died in the first fire. The second was empty. Three customs contacts disappeared. One of our drivers was shot while his wife sat beside him.”

Alessia’s gaze darted from the screen to me, but I didn’t look away.

“Why did no one tell me?” I asked.

“Because you were grieving,” Raffaele answered. “Because you would have taken your brothers into Brighton Beach and started a war before Mila went cold.”

“I had a right to know.”

“You did, but we could absorb the losses,” Matteo said. “We didn’t want you to get caught up in a war you weren’t prepared for back then.”

“I kept something else from you that night,” Raffaele said, looking at me. He suddenly looked older beneath the screen’s harsh light.

Matteo reached out of frame and returned with a narrow black ledger wrapped in clear protective material.

“The book from the Bellandi street team,” Matteo explained. “Every vehicle that crossed our territory. Every plate. Every name our men collected from the apartment, the morgue, and the police contacts Yuri used afterward.”

“Why was it never entered into your system?” Ivan asked.

“Because systems can be hacked,” Raffaele replied. “The ledger stayed in a vault beneath my home.”