18. Gianna
GIANNA
D ante hasn’t looked me in the eye since the morning the docks burned.
He has kissed me.
He has fucked me.
He has held the girls and poured coffee and run his thumb across my lower back in the kitchen like nothing is coming undone.
But I know what silence tastes like when it is meant to keep me out.
I know the way a man disappears without leaving the room.
And Dante is disappearing.
Not loudly.
Not obviously.
Not in the way most men unravel.
But I feel the hollow growing behind every word he doesn’t say.
I feel it in the way his jaw tenses when I ask if he’s coming to bed, in the way his hands linger a second too long on the security briefings and not long enough on me.
He thinks he’s protecting me by shutting me out. He doesn’t understand that distance is its own kind of wound.
The girls chatter through breakfast like the world is intact, their little voices bouncing off the tiled walls of the solarium.
Arietta is practicing her numbers on the linen napkins again, smearing jam across her food, while Alessia invents a kingdom in the syrup on her plate.
I nod at the right moments.
Smile.
Pretend.
And all the while, my mind is counting seconds, listening for footsteps, for the next thing that will crack the illusion of peace.
My mind is on all these things when Valentina summons me to Luca’s office in the western wing.
There’s only one reason the don and his wife would call me into a room together without warning.
Something has shifted.
And they don’t want it leaking into the walls before they know what to do with it.
The hall outside Luca’s study is cold.
Not in temperature, but in tone.
The butler opens the door with his usual composure, not a hair out of place, but something unsettles me.
There’s a stillness in the way he avoids eye contact.
It isn’t him—it’s the moment.
Valentina is already seated when I enter, her blouse cream-colored and immaculate, not a strand of hair out of place.
She looks like marble and silk and memory, but there’s something else in her today—an edge beneath the calm.
Her eyes flick to mine, then to the chair opposite her.
Luca stands near the window, arms folded, his watch catching the pale midday light like a warning.
Neither of them offers me a greeting.
I sit.
The butler closes the door behind me with careful quiet, and for a long moment, no one speaks.
Luca stands behind the desk, his arms crossed, eyes unreadable.
Valentina sits across from me, a folder at her side and tension in her shoulders she’s trying to mask behind grace.
Then she reaches into the folder and slides a document across the table toward me.
It’s printed on heavy stock—the kind used for internal ledgers, the kind not meant to leave this room.
I recognize the formatting before I even read the contents.
Salvatore-Rossi joint routing.
Old trade paths.
The kind we mothballed after the alliance was strained.
The kind that predates my exile.
Valentina speaks quietly.
"We decrypted another layer this morning. It was embedded inside the legacy backups—hidden under corrupted checksum strings. Someone didn’t want it found."
Luca doesn’t say a word, but I feel his presence behind me like pressure against the back of my skull.
I lower my eyes to the page.
My fingers curl around the edge of the table as I read.
Transfer Request #89372-K
Authorized: Secondary Override Clearance – ROSSI
Subrouting Path: Coastal Entry, masked under maritime logistics
Flagged Content: Munitions, coded as Agricultural Equipment
Timestamp: Six weeks ago
Signed by: Initials R.R.
Access String: 12-GRID-ORION-NOVA
My stomach drops before my mind can catch it.
Not at the initials.
Not at the rerouted cargo.
But at the string.
That exact string.
Twelve-Grid-Orion-Nova.
It wasn’t a default.
It wasn’t generated by the system.
It was something Rafa and I made up as children.
Orion for the constellation we used to count on the roof of the estate.
Nova for the fireworks that lit the southern shore the night Papa shut the docks and let us watch in silence, just the two of us.
It was never recorded.
Never written.
A secret only we shared.
The world blurs for a second. I blink, force myself to re-read it. But it’s still there.
Valentina watches me.
Not accusing.
Not confirming.
Just...witnessing.
"This shouldn’t exist," I say, voice low. "That clearance was terminated years ago."
"It wasn’t reactivated," Luca replies.
He moves from behind the desk and sets another page beside the first. "It was copied. Pulled from an archived shell database we found under the Rossi system. One of the few you had access to before you left."
I meet his gaze.
He’s not challenging me, not exactly.
But the timing.
The setup.
It’s deliberate.
"I didn’t—" I start, but stop.
The protest feels limp in my mouth.
Valentina pushes forward a new sheet.
This one shows the routing paths.
Naples.
The southern coast.
Then inland—two hours outside Nuova Speranza.
My breath catches.
The logistics center flagged in red doesn't belong to us.
It doesn’t belong to anyone officially.
But someone’s using it now.
Valentina taps the corner of the sheet.
"We flagged it three days ago. Anonymous purchase trail, scrubbed digital footprint. No visible affiliations. But the movement data matched something we’ve started tracking in the city."
She turns the page.
Three letters marked in crisp, unforgiving red: ISN.
I frown. "What is that?"
Luca’s voice is quieter now.
"We’ve just started hearing the name in closed circles. It’s not a crew, not in the usual sense. More like a faction. No official structure. No clear leadership. Just...hits. Strategic, targeted, and unclaimed."
He pauses, then says the words like they taste foreign. " Il Sangue Nero. "
The Black Blood.
I sit in silence.
"They’ve taken docks. Quietly. Bought off inspectors. Swallowed up crews we thought had folded. No demands, no manifesto. Just erasures." Luca’s eyes meet mine. "And now, there are records connecting them to Rossi routes."
"How many transfers?"
My voice barely holds steady.
"Four. Two in the last three weeks. All routed through dormant Rossi infrastructure."
The weight of it settles on my spine, pressing low and slow.
Valentina flips one final page.
It’s a manifest fragment.
Illegible except for a footnote—an audit signature.
ARD-001.
Valentina watches my face.
"That audit tag—ARD-001—was from a classified customs run in Sicily. Six years ago. Only five men had direct access to the operation."
Luca nods.
"Dante recovered a fragment of the old packing cloth this morning. Same marker. Same network."
Valentina’s voice lowers.
"Your brother wasn’t officially part of that list. But he was involved in logistics prep. Quietly. Off the books. There’s no version of that audit trail he should have known."
Luca adds,
"Unless he was working with someone who did." A beat. "Or unless he’s the one who brought it back."
I can’t speak.
"We didn’t act on that alone," Valentina continues. "But when we matched his estate logs against floor surveillance, something broke."
I look up.
"His badge scans are clean. Perfect attendance. Strategy meetings. Review sessions." Her voice tightens. "But there’s no corresponding heat trace. No door scans. No gate entries. He was showing up in the logs. But he wasn’t here."
Luca steps forward.
"It was a cloned badge. Routed through a Rossi-controlled mirror server. Whoever spoofed it wanted us to believe he never left."
The words land like a body at my feet.
I reach for the folder again, fingers shaking now, and flip through the rest.
Pages and pages of ghost movements.
The same clearance string.
Minor edits to the contents.
Always routed through Rossi pipelines.
Always Rafa’s name beneath the surface.
A silence spreads, until I force my voice to work.
"Have you told Dante?"
Luca shakes his head.
"He’s with logistics, reviewing clearance records. I wanted to speak with you first."
The mercy of it cracks something small in me.
Valentina is watching me like a hawk.
"We don’t know what any of it means yet. But you needed to see it before it moves any further."
I nod once.
My voice doesn’t come.
Because I can feel it now—that fracture in the center of me, the one that started years ago but never broke the surface.
Valentina’s voice softens. "I know this is difficult. But you need to be honest with yourself about what this might mean."
I fold the folder shut.
My hands feel cold.
"He wouldn’t betray me," I whisper. "Not like this. Not Rafa."
The words hang there, brittle and hollow.
And I don’t believe them.
Because deep down, beneath the loyalty and the years and the blood we share, something in me has already started to fracture.
Because what if he would?
And what if I don’t see it until it’s too late?
I push back from the table and stand, the folder still in my hands.
I rise without a word, the chair sliding back with a muted scrape that seems too loud for a room like this.
I leave the folder on the table.
I don’t trust myself to hold it.
Not when my hands feel like they’ve turned to something brittle, something that might break if I let them curl too tightly around a truth I can’t outrun.
The corridor greets me like a tomb.
No voices, no footsteps, no sound but my own breath, shallow and sharp in my throat.
The air presses close, dense and unmoving, as if the walls themselves have thickened in anticipation.
I walk, but each step feels less like motion and more like surrender—like slipping further into something I won’t be able to climb back out of.
I want to deny it.
To claw my way back into belief.
But it keeps replaying in my mind: the access string, our string, etched into a trail of contraband and silence.
The badge logs Rafa was never present for.
The old audit mark—resurrected.
A ghost name tied to a handler who vanished, and the brother who might have helped him stay gone.