"Over me."
"Yes."
The certainty in his voice makes the breath stall in my throat. He isn't trying to charm me. He isn't making romantic declarations. He is laying out a tactical defense strategy with me at the epicenter of the objective.
"What about the ghost?" I ask softly.
The question changes the atmosphere in the car. The air goes brittle and cold. The muscle in his jaw locks again. His grip on my thigh tightens, borderline painful, but I do not flinch away.
"The access nodes require physical proximity to the compound mainframes." I continue, keeping my voice analytical, focusing on the data instead of the emotional devastation it represents. "The timestamp anomalies stretchback two decades. It isn't an external hack. The firewall breaches were initiated from inside the house."
Vincenzo remains silent.
"You know what the data points to," I state. It isn't a question. I saw the look on his face in the vault when he tore the cable out of the wall. The sudden, catastrophic internal shift. The realization that the foundation of his world was built on quicksand.
"The data is encrypted." He says finally, his voice rough, dragging against his vocal cords like sandpaper.
"I can crack the rest of the ledger." I offer. "I can pull the definitive IP logs. I can give you the exact terminal where the drops originated. I can hand you the proof."
He hits the brakes as we navigate a sharp curve. The tires hiss against the wet pavement.
"No."
The word is sharp. A command. A steel door slamming shut in my face.
"Vincenzo—"
"You do not touch that data again," he orders, dropping into a lethal, terrifying register. He turns his head, locking his eyes onto mine. "You do not speak of the access nodes. You do not mention the timestamps to my brothers, to anyone. Do you understand me?"
"You're going to protect whoever did this?" I ask, genuine shock threading through my words.
"I am going to verify the system failure myself." He replies, his gaze snapping back to the road. "If I bring an accusation of this magnitude to Dominic without physical proof, it will tear the family apart. It will ignite a civil war inside our own walls before the Bellantis even fire a shot."
He is protecting the infrastructure. He is shielding the family from its own fault line. But beneath the cold logic, beneath thetactical calculation, I hear the agonizing grief of the eighteen-year-old boy.
The boy who sat in the hallway for six hours while the blood of his parents went cold across the city. The boy who cannot stomach the mathematical certainty that someone inside his own walls handed them over to the wolves. If I am reading him right, he has trusted no one since Carlo was murdered.
He needs time. He needs to process the catastrophic input in his closed-loop system.
"Okay," I say quietly. I turn my palm over, lacing my fingers through his on my thigh. "I won't say a word. What I saw stays buried."
He releases a ragged exhale through his nose. The rigid tension in his shoulders drops by a fraction of an inch. He squeezes my hand, accepting the loyalty I am freely handing him.
The stolen car exits the arterial road, turning onto a winding, tree-lined street in the North Side. The grand, historic mansions of Chicago's elite slide past the rain-streaked windows, hidden behind wrought-iron fences and towering hedge lines.
That digital footprint I read in the vault mapped two decades of war. A relentless, bloody back-and-forth between two entrenched syndicates. Tonight, I stood at the epicenter of their financial network and ripped the plug out of the wall. By destroying the Underground bank vault servers, Vincenzo neutralized billions of dollars of enemy assets. We just escalated a cold war into a blazing inferno.
Then the car slows.
Up ahead, rising out of the freezing rain like a fortress from a forgotten century, is the Costa compound.
Towering twelve-foot limestone walls surround the perimeter. Iron gates, thick and impenetrable, block the main driveway. High-definition surveillance cameras track ourapproach, the small red recording lights blinking rhythmically in the dark.
This is the belly of the beast. The epicenter of the violence. The place where the truth still hides, somewhere behind those walls, breathing the same air as the men it betrayed.
Vincenzo brings the car to a halt in front of the reinforced gates.
He does not turn off the engine. He sits in the driver's seat, the windshield wipers thumping a steady, hypnotic beat against the glass. He looks at the iron gates, then he turns his head and looks at me.
