Falco
Dante
Andrea joins us around six in the evening.
We gather around the table with Mara and Stephen.
“I’ve got news,” he announces. “Yasin managed to trace Cain on the dark web.”
For a few seconds, nobody speaks.
Andrea slides several sheets across the table toward us. Messages. Wire transfers. And right in the middle of it all—a photo of Valeria.
Fuck.
Something dark twists inside me.
“Where did this come from?” Valeria asks in a pale voice.
“Archives from an extremely secure underground platform.”
His finger stops on one line.
“Right here—you’ve got the transaction amount. Five hundred thousand euros.”
Something explodes violently inside me.
They valued my wife’s life at five hundred thousand euros.
A dark rage floods through me.
I want to kill someone.
A hand gently closes around mine.
I briefly shut my eyes. Slowly, my muscles begin to relax.
When I open them again, Valeria is looking at me with softness and concern.
Someone ordered her death… and she’s still worried about me.
I squeeze her hand back.
Our eyes remain locked for several seconds.
Without a word, I press a kiss to her fingertips before forcing myself to focus on the documents again.
Mara scans through them quickly.
“The exchanges line up almost perfectly with the gala.”
Then she hands us several more pages.
I immediately recognize the codename used by the intermediary. But the name that truly catches my attention is the other one.
Falco.
The client.
Andrea speaks again.
“We managed to trace this ’Falco,’ who clearly isn’t a professional. And guess what…”
“Gaspard,” Valeria answers immediately.
“That’s right.”
Mara keeps analyzing the exchanges.
“All the clues point to him. Someone who knows Valeria, but isn’t part of her inner circle.”
I narrow my eyes while rereading certain messages.
“And Falco told the hitman which entrance to use. He even specified that a woman would open the door for him.”
We all understand immediately.
“Bianca,” Stephen mutters.
A heavy silence fills the room.
“But how do we prove all of this?” Mara finally asks.
Andrea pulls one last document from his folder.
“The shell company that paid the intermediary belongs to a holding company controlled by Peltier.”
Mara studies the papers carefully.
“Can we prove the holding company actually belongs to him?” I ask.
“My teams are working on it.”
I stand abruptly. The chair scrapes loudly against the floor.
Out of the corner of my eye, I notice Mara and Stephen watching me carefully.
“So Peltier funds this, organizes it, and orchestrates everything on Wald’s behalf.”
“We have a very strong body of evidence,” Andrea confirms.
Stephen finally speaks up.
“So if Peltier goes down too… we get Wald?”
“That’s what we’re hoping,” Andrea replies. “In this kind of world, people start talking the moment they feel the ground slipping beneath their feet.”
Beside me, Valeria closes her eyes for a few seconds.
I don’t need to ask what she’s seeing again.
I see it too.
The hands of her attacker.
Bianca standing there without intervening.
I clench my jaw so hard it starts to ache.
This time, Mara is the one who lightens the atmosphere slightly.
“So… who’s volunteering to tell Matthieu what we just discovered? And more importantly, explain how we discovered it?”
Needless to say, the speakerphone conversation with Inspector Sanders is tense.
“Damn it!” he barks. “If you were detected before the extraction was complete, everything could disappear within the hour.”
Then he abruptly hangs up.
He calls us back two hours later.
“It’s fine. We recovered everything we needed. But don’t ever pull this kind of stunt again.”
Despite his gruff tone, I’m grateful he kept us informed.
But he isn’t finished.
“There’s something else you need to know. And there’s no good way to say this. We found Cain. He’s been dead for over three weeks. Officially, an overdose.”
No one around the table buys that for a second.
“Right after Valeria came back,” I say immediately. “Definitely not a coincidence.”
“No,” the inspector admits. “Wald cleans up his tracks. Stay alert.”
Then he hangs up.
Mara, Stephen, and Andrea leave shortly afterward.
Once they’re gone, I turn toward Valeria.
“I want us to double your security.”
She cups my face in her hands before pressing a tender kiss to my lips. My arms immediately tighten around her.
“Fine… as long as you agree to the same thing for yourself.”
I answer by kissing her again.
I know Valeria has every reason to worry.
Wald could come after me too. Now that he has a formula he believes is viable, I’ve become his next potential target. In his eyes, I’m the one who could bring the treatment to market before he does.
Let him try.
But the days go by, and aside from the news about Cain’s disappearance, Wald doesn’t make a move.
No unusual financial activity.
No transfers.
No suspicious movement.
Even Henri is starting to doubt.
“Maybe he changed his mind,” he says. “Or maybe he figured out what we were trying to do.”
I hope not.
A man as powerful as him will only fall once his empire is on its knees.
Because even if we manage to prove his involvement in the attempt on Valeria’s life, as long as he still has money, he remains dangerous.
The waiting is wearing me down.
But I don’t have a choice.
For now, he’s the one in control.