Page 77 of Daddies of the Underworld

Her arms went back around her waist, and she rocked onto her heels. “You mentioned a bit ago that you were going through old records to try and figure out who was behind everything. You all said you believed I was set up, but you never found evidence. I want to help look. I know my brother. I know you’re still after him for this. And I’ll admit, it is suspicious. He’s my brother and I want to believe that he told me the truth. I want to see everything you have.”

“Nina,” Matteo started.

She stared toward the front door, her jaw set. “No, Matteo. You promised I would be part of everything this time. I am not going upstairs to stare at Sofia while you decide which pieces of my life I’m allowed to protect. I know my brother. I can see things you wouldn’t, because we’re looking at him from different angles. He said someone forced him. I still believe that.” A deep breath lifted her shoulders. “I need to believe that, even if it makes me naive.”

Her shoulder brushed mine when I turned the laptop toward her. “Here’s everything I have.” I had an entire folder for Marco’s communications during his time in the villa, among other things. I’d kept every scrap of conversation, every schedule. Every single piece of information that I thought might be helpful, even if it seemed ridiculous. Nina had a point. She might see things we’d never considered.

Matteo and Luca headed into another room under the pretense of taking care of some business back in Italy.

Nina scrolled through the communications, then began opening the other folders one by one. She stopped halfway through the one with all the old schedules and narrowed her eyes. “This is wrong.”

“Which part?” Any other time, I might be distracted by how close she stood, how the scent of her shampoo reminded me of nighttime in the villa. But we had too much at stake to let anything interfere.

“This says I switched to the evening service in the east dining room.” She tapped the entry hard enough the laptop shifted. “I didn’t. Alessia tried to switch with me because she wanted to sneak out with Nico from the kitchens. Mrs. Capaldi caught them arguing and made Alessia work her own shift. I did storage inventory.”

How was this relevant? The question lingered in the back of my mind, but then again, I’d been the one to keep the schedules. “Your signature is on the paperwork for the swap.”

She zoomed in on the signature line. “That’s not my signature. It’s close, but not mine. I dot my I’s differently. Most people never notice. Which means we need to look at every piece of information that has my signature on it. If they did it for something this basic, it might have been a test to see if you’d catch it.”

That…was actually a very good point. I’d designed the computer system to track signatures and ID badges that were scanned to keep track of guests and employees. It was supposed to monitor signatures and check for anomalies, alerting me if a signature didn’t match or if anyone attempted to use a badge outside their clearance zone.

We spent the next hour building a list of evidence that seemed solid five years ago but that Nina now challenged.

Her locker access showed an entry during a time she had been serving a private lunch with twelve witnesses–before we’d pulled her off duty and moved her to our private quarters.

When I opened the financial records we’d pulled on Marco, she gulped an audible breath. Money had been broken apart and moved through shell accounts, then pulled back together around Marco’s name in ways that looked damning.

“Marco hated banks.” Nina tapped her finger against her lips. “From the time he was old enough to have an account, he only had one that he used, and then only when absolutely necessary. Marco and I grew up with almost nothing. He couldn’t bear the idea of turning his money over to an institution. He only ever left enough in his account to keep it active. If a place required him to use a debit card, he’d go somewhere else. That’s why none of this makes sense.”

“It’s difficult to move this amount of cash. He would’ve had no choice.”

She nodded. “Yes, but he’d have taken as much as he could in cash first. Marco is very much interested in instant gratification. If I offered him ten thousand dollars in cash or two million in a bank account, he’d take the cash and bolt. Cash in hand wins every time.” Another tap of her finger to her lips, then she swiped back to the communications. “There’s something here I’m missing. Where’s that email he received? The one about planting?”

I found and opened it, then leaned back to let her read it again.

Her shoulders rounded, her eyes flicking back and forth as she read. “Marco and I didn’t spend much time together the last few years, so there’s a chance he learned about gardening, but even then, this doesn’t make sense. It talks about planting wisteria on the terrace, and what happens when too much weight is put on a balcony.” Stopping, she sucked in a ragged breath. “Dante, I think this is code. The private room you put me in…the balcony was covered in wisteria. Too much weight on a balcony means it would collapse. What if…what if they were threatening me?”

“You’re either making wild leaps in logic or you’re the most brilliant person I’ve ever met.” I stood and kissed her. “I’m going with the latter. Matteo and Luca need to see this.”

27

MATTEO

Dante walked into the dining room with Nina beside him and murder in his eyes.

Luca trailed off mid-sentence, which was enough of a statement that the air in the room stilled. He’d been talking nonstop for the last hour because silence made him itchy. Sitting with one ankle hooked over the opposite knee, he clicked the pen he’d been holding twice, then set it down. “What did you find?”

Dante set the laptop down and turned it toward us. The hard lines of his face stood out in stark relief, the scar in his eyebrow white in the sliver of moonlight cutting in from the lamp beside me.

Nina wrapped one hand around the laptop, drew in a steadying breath, then angled the screen so the light didn’t reflect. “I believe Marco was being threatened.” She explained about the wisteria on her balcony. “We found three more emails that mention the wisteria. One mentions me specifically, and how dangerous it would be if the balcony collapsed. It would all be fine if Marco was a gardener, but he’s not. And he wasn’t in the villa in that capacity to have done anything about it. If this was a legitimate problem, he would have mentioned it to me.”

I stepped closer and read the emails as she scrolled through them. Five years, and the message had been sitting inside our own files the whole time. “Why did we dismiss this?”

Dante’s jaw popped with the force of his teeth grinding together. “It was in his junk folder. I tracked the sender, but it went to a generic gardening site. I assumed–wrongly–that he’d taken up a new hobby.”

I pulled out the chair beside me. “Sit down, Nina.” It was the best I could do under the circumstances. What I wanted to do was drag her into my arms and promise nothing would happen to her ever again. I wanted to whisk her over to Italy and ensconce her and Sofia in the most protected space available. That might work for a while, but this problem had to be dealt with once and for all.

She eyed me but sank into the chair, lacing her fingers together in her lap. Her eyes kept filling with tears, and she kept swallowing them down. She’d told us Marco was being forced.