CHAPTER 10
Alessio did not ask Sofia whether she wanted to come to Crown House.
He told himself that was because the bullet changed the terms.
The lie lasted until she looked at him across the cathedral parking lot and said, "Do not call an order protection merely because you are frightened."
Rain ran from the edge of the black umbrella over his shoulder. Behind him, Marco's men stripped the Bellandi sedan apart while Commission observers documented every surface. Roman stood six feet away with murder in his eyes and one hand clenched at his side.
"Someone penetrated a secured funeral perimeter," Alessio said. "You are coming to Crown House until we know how."
"She is coming home with me," Roman said.
"Your vehicle was compromised."
"On your ground."
"Which is why my house is now the harder target."
Roman stepped closer.
Sofia moved between them with the weary authority of a woman already regretting every future family dinner. "I will go to Crown House for forty-eight hours. Voluntarily. My staff knows where I am. My communications remain mine. Roman receives the security report."
"Agreed," Alessio said.
Roman stared at her. "Sofia."
"If someone wants the ceasefire broken, the safest place for me is where my death cannot be blamed on either family's absence."
"Or the most convenient place for them to keep you."
"Then you may call me every hour and ask whether I have been put in a decorative cage."
"Every thirty minutes."
"That was not a negotiation."
"Neither is this."
She kissed her brother's cheek and entered Alessio's armored SUV before either man could renew the argument.
Alessio joined her in the rear cabin. Luca took the front passenger seat. Marco followed in the security vehicle. The convoy climbed from Saint Aurelio toward The Crown, leaving the cathedral bells and wet stone behind.
For the first mile, Sofia said nothing.
She sat beside the window with the redwell folder on her lap. Her dark hair had loosened in the rain, one strand resting against her cheek. Alessio had touched her hand in the sacristy and could still feel the pressure of her palm over his scar.
He had accepted comfort from the daughter of the family accused of killing his father.
The fact should have felt like betrayal.
Instead, the withdrawal of her hand had felt like loss.
Luca turned halfway in his seat. "Roman's calling."
Sofia's phone vibrated at the same moment.
She answered. "I remain uncaged."
A pause.
"No, I have not been drugged."
Another pause.
"Luca can hear you."
Luca faced forward again. "Tell him his voice is irritating even through encrypted glass."
"He heard you."
"Good."
Sofia ended the call and looked at Alessio. "Your brother has the diplomatic instincts of an impact weapon."
"That is why Caterina handles diplomacy."
"And why is Luca here?"
"Because he would follow the convoy if I left him behind."
From the front, Luca said, "Correct."
Crown House appeared above the harbor as the rain thinned.
The estate combined an older stone residence with modern wings of glass and dark steel, all behind garden walls high enough to discourage curiosity and low enough not to resemble a prison from the road.
Cameras tracked the vehicles through the gates. Hydraulic barriers rose behind them.
Sofia studied everything.
Not nervously. Professionally.
She counted guards, exits, camera angles, and the delay between the first gate closing and the second opening. Alessio recognized the habit because he did the same in every unfamiliar building.
"The east wall has a blind approach from the old gardens," she said.
Luca turned again. "It does not."
"The cypress canopy blocks the upper camera for six seconds when the wind moves west."
Luca looked at Alessio.
"Have Marco verify it," Alessio said.
Sofia's brows lifted slightly.
"You expected me to defend the wall?" he asked.
"I expected one of you to explain why I was wrong."
"If you are wrong, the camera feed will explain it."
"And if I am right?"
"Marco fixes it."
Something in her expression changed. Approval, perhaps, though Sofia seemed constitutionally opposed to providing it without cross-examination.
Inside, Crown House was quiet in the way only heavily protected homes could be quiet.
Staff moved through wide halls without visible haste.
The formal rooms held old paintings, pale stone, and furniture selected to survive both state dinners and armed lockdowns.
Beyond the central staircase, the private chapel doors remained closed.
Vittorio's presence occupied the house more completely in death.
Caterina met them in the main hall.
"The east guest suite is prepared," she said. "Your clothing will arrive from Bellandi Villa within the hour. I had the adjacent sitting room converted for your staff."
Sofia's shoulders stiffened. "Converted into what?"
"An office."
Caterina led them through a private corridor.
The room beyond the guest suite doors contained a large desk, two secure terminals, a separate document safe, shelves, a private conference table, and a communications console still being tested by a technician.
No bars. No guard chair outside the bedroom. No wardrobe filled by strangers.
An office.
On the desk lay new stationery embossed only with SOFIA BELLANDI, not Nerovelli.
She looked at Alessio. "When did you arrange this?"
"On the drive from Breakwater."
"Before the bullet."
"Yes."
"You assumed I would live here before the final agreement was signed."
"The ceasefire requires shared residence."
"You assumed I would need an office."
"You made it clear you would not stop working."
Her gaze moved across the room. "Most men hear that and provide a desk in the bedroom."
"Most men are not marrying you."
Silence followed.
Luca looked toward the ceiling as though asking their dead mother for patience. Caterina appeared interested in a painting she had seen every day for years.
Sofia set the redwell folder on the desk. "We should compare the amendment with the local Dock Nine cache before anyone can alter either."
Alessio dismissed everyone except Matteo, who joined them ten minutes later with an encrypted copy of the recovered gate records. Marco sent the restored camera timestamps and vehicle intake data. The technician left. The office door closed.
For the next three hours, grief became evidence.
Sofia arranged the records by sequence rather than source. She placed the Bellandi amendment beside the Dock Nine entry and asked questions no one else had asked.
"What vessel carried the declared art shipment?"
Matteo opened the customs attachment. "The Orsino. Berth Six, South Reach."
"Arrival?"
"Friday at twenty-one forty."
"Departure?"
"Sunday at one forty-seven in the morning."
Sofia tapped the amendment. "This was entered at two thirteen."
"After departure," Alessio said.
"Twenty-six minutes after. But it claims the cargo remained under vessel-linked customs control when it was redirected.
Once the Orsino cleared the berth and its departure packet closed, no amendment could move a case from its manifest into a new bonded lane.
It would require a post-departure correction, a new chain-of-custody declaration, and customs acknowledgment. None exists."
Matteo leaned closer. "Could the case have been unloaded before departure?"
"Yes, but then it would have a warehouse intake scan. It has none."
"Could that scan be deleted?"
"Not from every system. Bellandi storage, Port Authority weight record, customs seal registry, and the vessel's discharge tally would all have separate entries. Whoever forged this copied the legal appearance of a transfer without understanding the physical chronology."
Alessio looked at the two documents.
The gate record said a Bellandi art shipment entered Dock Nine.
The amendment said the shipment had been lawfully redirected.
Sofia had just demonstrated that the shipment described by the amendment could not have existed in that sequence.
"So the rifle case was placed in a shipment after the documents were built," he said.
"Or there was never a genuine shipment at all. Only a Bellandi truck carrying a case and enough authentic codes to make everyone supply the missing reality."
Alessio felt the first clean fracture in the accusation against her family.
Not innocence. Not yet.
Manufacture.
Sofia turned the amendment so its timestamp faced him.
"Your evidence is lying," she said. "And it is lying in a way designed to make you kill my brother before either of us checks the clock."