Chapter Thirty Two
Mario
Victoria finally sleeps just before midnight.
It does not come easily.
She fights it for almost an hour, tucked into the bed in the guest suite with the fire still low in the hearth and my hand wrapped around hers.
Every time her eyes close, her fingers tighten.
Every sound beyond the room makes her body tense.
Every few minutes, she opens her eyes and looks at me as if checking whether I am still there.
I stay.
There is nowhere else I would be.
When her breathing finally evens out and her hand loosens in mine, I sit there a little longer. Long enough to be certain she is under.
I watch her face in the soft light. The shadows under her eyes. The crease still faint between her brows. The bruise beginning to show on her upper arm where that man put his hand on her.
A damn shame he died before I could remove his hand personally.
I bend and press my mouth to Victoria’s knuckles before I ease my hand free. She stirs, but does not wake.
Rocco is outside the door. There's no one I'd rather have out there than my own personal bodyguard and head of security.
“No one disturbs her or enters,” I say. “She wakes, I know immediately.
He nods once. “Capito.”
I move down the corridor, then descend the stairs.
The house is quieter now, though not sleeping. It will not sleep tonight.
The war room should be my office.
Instead, it is my kitchen.
Matteo and Ricardo sit at the long table, each with a laptop open in front of him. A third laptop sits shut to the side.
Victoria’s.
For a moment, my gaze stays on it.
Her key had been in her purse exactly where she said it was.
She had looked so fragile and stubborn when she said it, insisting on the basic legality of entering her apartment while sitting in my house after someone tried to take her.
That thought should not amuse me. It does anyway.
Only for a second.
Then I remember why the laptop is here.
Matteo looks up first.
Ricardo does not, his fingers still moving over the keyboard, jacket off, sleeves rolled up.
“Have you found these articles Victoria was talking about?” I ask.
“No,” Matteo says.
I stop beside the table. “No?”
“No biography. No profile by Cindy Sullivan. No local article about you and Hawthorne with that byline. Nothing in the public web, nothing cached under that name, nothing that fits the description she gave. No other articles as well. Not English or Italian.”
Ricardo’s mouth tightens, but he keeps working.
My eyes move to Victoria’s laptop.
“But?” I ask.
Matteo leans back slightly. His face is calm, but there is something sharp in his eyes.
“But I found something more interesting.”
Ricardo finally looks up, his expression harder than usual.
“Dimmi.”
“It seems her laptop has been scrubbed,” Matteo says.
I feel everything in me harden.
“Da chi?”
“Bellandi,” Ricardo says.
My gaze cuts to him.
He closes his laptop halfway, not fully. “The signature is familiar enough.”
“How do you know it has been scrubbed?”
Matteo turns his laptop slightly, but I keep my eyes on him, not on the screen.
“They are not as good as they think they are,” he says. “They cleaned what they wanted gone, but they left marks all over the system. Deleted browser entries. Altered cache. Missing email threads with residue still in local storage. Remote access logs they tried to bury instead of erase properly.”
My hands curl once at my sides.
“They were in her email and browser?”
“Yes.”
Matteo hesitates for a fraction of a second, which is enough to put my back up.
“What else?”
His eyes meet mine. “Her webcam.”
The anger inside me turns to ice.
“Say again,” I say carefully.
“They had access to her webcam,” Matteo says. “At least intermittently. I do not know for how long yet. Or what they saw.”
My jaw locks so hard it aches.
Victoria in her apartment.
Victoria alone.
Victoria sick, frightened, researching my wife, taking pregnancy tests, thinking herself unseen.
Watched.
The anger that rises in me is too cold to burn.
“I checked her phone too,” Ricardo says, gesturing to the phone sitting face down on the table.
I turn to him.
“Same?”
“Some access. Less extensive. Enough to pull messages, browser activity, location patterns.”
“And now?”
“I've secured it,” he says. “It's safe. We haven't finished with her laptop yet, so that stays off for now.”
“Did they get into our system?”
“No,” Ricardo says immediately. “Our security is too tight, and she had no administrative route into anything sensitive from that machine. Her work portal is clean. No evidence of intrusion through her credentials.”
“What about her firm?”
“Checking now. But Conti systems are untouched.”
Matteo adds, “Victoria had no reason to secure her personal devices against this level of intrusion. She is an attorney, not an intelligence analyst.”
No, she is an attorney who got too close to me.
That is why this happened.
That is why someone aimed their own fear at her and lured her out into the open.
“We’ve been able to recover a lot of what they scrubbed,” Matteo says. “Fragments mostly. Enough to build a timeline. We are trying to restore her internet history now and find whatever articles were planted.”
“You confirmed?” I ask.
Matteo gives one small nod. “Not definitively, but it looks like it. You called that one, Papà.”
Ricardo’s gaze is steady on mine.
“There is something else.”
His tone straightens my spine.
“What?”
He glances at Matteo.
Matteo’s mouth tightens.
I look between them. “Dimmi!” I order.
Ricardo closes his laptop the rest of the way.
“There was an internet search.”
One of Victoria's private internet searches. That my son and brother saw. What could it possibly have been to put this look on their faces?
I wait.
The pause lasts so long, I almost snap at them again.
“About pregnancy,” Ricardo finally says.
No one moves. No one breathes.
For one long moment, there is nothing in the room but that word.
Pregnancy.
My son’s eyes shift to me.
My brother’s expression changes as he begins to understand.
I hold their gazes, one after the other.
“Yes,” I say.
Matteo stills.
Ricardo exhales through his nose.
Again, the kitchen is completely silent.
Then Ricardo leans back in his chair, his face shifting from calculation to something much more human.
“Mario.”
Matteo is still looking at me. The color has drained from his face a little, but his eyes are bright in a way that makes my chest tighten.
“You’re sure?” he asks.
“She hasn't been to a doctor yet, but yes.”
Very quietly, he says, “Papà.”
It is not an accusation, as I had feared.
It is wonder.
And fear.
And the beginning of something none of us has had time to understand.
Ricardo scrubs a hand over his mouth and looks down at the table.
“Cristo,” he mutters. “A baby.”
I do not answer.
Because if I try to speak too quickly, I do not know what will come out.
Matteo looks toward the stairs, toward the floor above us where Victoria is sleeping.
“Is she all right?”
“Yes.”
“And the baby?”
That word in my son’s mouth does something to me I am not prepared for.
The meaning means more. He is concerned with the baby. Not the search or the leverage or the threat.
Just the baby and the woman carrying it.
I draw a breath. “The doctor says everything is fine, as far as he can tell.”
Matteo looks at me again, and there is something almost helpless in his expression.
“I have a brother or sister upstairs,” he says quietly, almost contemplatively.
The words hit me harder than any bullet ever could.
Maybe because the idea of another child in this family died ten years ago, and it’s a door we never thought would open again.
“Yes,” I say again.
Everyone sits in silence for another moment.
At least until my next words.
“And if you're right, then Bellandi threatened my child.”
Matteo’s face goes cold in a way I rarely see on him.
“They used it against her,” he says tightly.
“Yes. It's how they got her to leave the park with them.”
Ricardo’s eyes lift to mine.
“You want us to send a message?” he asks.
I think of Victoria apologizing into my shirt. Of the way they made her doubt me, made her afraid to come to me. Watched her in her own home and manipulated her.
“No,” I say coldly. “No messages. No warnings. No negotiations. Bellandi put a gun on what is mine.”
My voice drops.
“Now they pay.”