Page 131

She changes the display.

Italian infrastructure appears beside the Colombian transactions. Then Irish. Bratva. Greek. Five separate streams. Five empires. The room finally goes quiet.

"That's what I've been trying to tell you," Elena says. "The network doesn't belong to one family. It feeds from all of them. Whoever created OB6 didn't penetrate one empire. They penetrated the Crown."

Lorenzo approaches the screen and studies the Italian structures. His face darkens when Elena enlarges one company.

"I know that business."

"Your organization has used it for legitimate shipping settlements for fourteen years."

"Who had access?"

"Your people would know better than I do. But the transfers are authentic."

Volkov folds his arms. "Which is precisely the problem."

Santiago looks at him. "What does that mean?"

"It means whoever built this understood every one of our systems."

"Or someone in this room gave them access."

There it is. The first direct accusation. Nobody moves.

Volkov turns slowly toward Santiago. "You want to say something?"

"I just did."

Lorenzo steps between them again. "Enough."

"No," Santiago says. "We're all thinking it."

"I wasn’t," Declan says quietly.

Everyone looks at him.

Santiago gives a humorless laugh. "Then you're the only one."

Declan leans back in his chair. "If one of us wanted to destroy the Crown, stealing money from his own organization for twenty years would be an unnecessarily elaborate way to do it."

"Unless he wanted everyone else weakened too," Volkov says.

Declan's eyes shift toward him. "So now you're entertaining the possibility?"

"I'm entertaining everything."

"Including me?"

Volkov doesn't answer. He doesn't need to. Declan's expression hardens. I look around the table and finally understand how beautifully this has been designed.

Five families created the Crown because history taught us what happened when power existed without restraint. We built rules, shared infrastructure, and financial relationships strong enough to make war between two families costly for all five. Leadership rotated. Information moved. Businesses became interconnected. We called it stability. Someone else may have seen infrastructure.

"What about you?" Santiago asks Lorenzo. "Italian companies appear in the transfers."

"So do Colombian ones."

"And Greek."