Page 83 of The Beast Who Begged Me

Neither seems especially promising, but I keep going, pulling the photos over, waiting for the sentence to start making sense.

But it doesn’t.

It’s not even a sentence, just a string of words with no apparent connection to one another.

I speak four languages and read six. Six fucking languages, including Greek and Latin. And my grandfather still managed to leave me something completely incomprehensible. It feels personal, although I’m aware that’s unreasonable.

Nonno Lou never thought about anyone except himself.

But next to me, Dami goes still. I notice because he’s been shifting his weight, trying to see around my head, and suddenly he stops moving.

“You and Benedetti should go enjoy the afternoon,” he says, looking up at Sammy. “Get out of the house for a bit. Ask Vito to take you.”

Sammy stares at him. “Together?”

“Don’t make me fucking repeat myself.” Dami straightens, gestures at the door. “Go on. Get outta here.”

He knows. Whatever these words mean, Dami understands them, and he wants Sammy out of the room before he tells me.

“Sammy,” Dami says, as he reaches the door. “Before you go, you delete all those photographs from the camera and your computer. You hear me?”

“I already did, after I printed them.” Sammy glances at me. “And nobody else has seen them.”

“Thank you,” I say again. “I owe you big time.”

Sammy leaves before Dami can change his mind about the outing. I wait until the door closes. Then I turn in my chair to face him.

“A seed phrase.” He looks down at the photographs. “Recovery words for a crypto wallet. In the right order, they’ll let you get back into it.”

“A seed phrase,” I repeat.

“Yeah. I’ve seen these before. Had to make a few fuckers hand them over.”

For a moment, I just stare at him. Then I look at the ring, sitting innocently on its own enlarged image. “So it’s…money?”

“Big money, I’m guessing.” He moves one photograph closer to the next, following the engraving around. “Enough that someone was willing to track down every Clemenza heir to get to it.” His voice has gone flat, and I look at the ring again.

All those murders. All those lives, all that blood…

For money.

“If it had been hate—love—jealousy, even, I could understand it,” I say. “But money?” I look up at Dami and give a wry smile. “Wow. Listen to me, the guy who sold himself at auction.”

“That was different,” Dami says at once.

Was it? I understand desperation. Maybe that’s what this person is facing, too. But my mind moves on, already teasing out the implication. “They knew,” I say. “Whoever’s behind this knew what was in the ring.”

Dami nods, watching my face. I pick up the ring and turn it between my fingers, running my thumb over the snake’s head.

“Which means they knew him. My grandfather. They were close enough to him to know something he never told me.” I look around the study, at the doors through which Nonno Lou received his visitors, the chairs where people sat while he decided whether they would succeed or fail in life. “This comes back to my family, Dami.”

I always thought it felt personal. I guess I was right.

I set the ring down again and pull the prints into a neat row. “So how do we get into this wallet? There’s no account number.”

“It’s not a bank account. Normally, those words are all you need.” He pulls the last photograph toward him. “But look at the end.”

I lean over the print. Beyond the last word, separated from it by a little space, are two tiny numbers and a line. “Twenty-five,” I read. “What does it mean?”