Chapter Fourteen
Taddeo
Taddeo slept for less than two hours and woke before dawn with Isolde’s words still lodged somewhere beneath his ribs.
He had spent most of his adult life acquiring things through systems he understood: loyalty, obligation, money, authority, fear, debt, the promise of protection, or the recognition that refusing a Bellandi order usually created more problems than obeying it.
Northglass itself had been built around the same logic, with gates, cameras, locks, armed men, and procedures intended to reduce uncertainty until the only outcomes left were the ones Taddeo had already accepted.
Isolde had given him something the night before precisely because none of those systems could produce it.
He could compel her presence in his house, control whether the gate opened, decide which vehicle took her into Crownport, and put enough guards around her to make privacy feel theoretical, but he could not force the choice she had made in his sitting room without destroying the very thing that made it matter.
He understood the distinction too well to dismiss it as sex.
That was what made it inconvenient.
By seven-thirty he had given up on sleep completely and settled at the smaller breakfast table with coffee, an encrypted tablet, and three preliminary reports from the museum attack.
Marco’s incident summary had already identified two dead attackers, one wounded man in Bellandi custody, and a probable fourth who escaped through the service perimeter when the power failure took several exterior cameras offline.
The museum badge recovered from the man Taddeo killed had been professionally produced using a current template but outdated internal department information, which suggested research rather than insider access.
More troubling was the route itself. Too few people had known exactly when Isolde would return to the museum, where they would enter, and which section of the building she intended to use.
Someone had either penetrated the Bellandi planning chain or received the information from a person already inside it.
Taddeo read the same paragraph twice before noticing he was listening for footsteps in the corridor.
When they came, he set the tablet down harder than necessary.
Isolde entered the kitchen wearing her own jeans and a dark sweater Elettra had recovered from her apartment.
Her hair was still damp from a shower, twisted loosely away from her face, and she looked tired enough that the first thing Taddeo felt was concern, followed immediately by the considerably less useful memory of that hair spread beneath his hand a few hours earlier.
She caught him looking before he could redirect his attention.
“You’re doing it again,” she said, crossing toward the coffee.
Taddeo picked up the report. “Doing what?”
“Looking at me like you’re trying to decide whether I’m injured, angry, or about to cause you trouble.” Isolde poured coffee and added milk before glancing toward him. “For future efficiency, assume at least two.”
“That narrows very little.”
“I didn’t say I was trying to help.”
She sat opposite him.
The arrangement should have felt awkward after the night before. Instead, what unsettled Taddeo was how quickly it did not. Isolde stole the untouched piece of toast from the edge of his plate without asking, pulled the museum incident report closer, and frowned at the first page.
“You’ve been working since when?”
“Early.”
“That is not a time.”
“Before six.”
“You slept for approximately forty minutes.”
“More than that.”
She looked at him over the report. “Was that meant to reassure me?”
“No.”
“Good. It failed.”
Taddeo watched her read.
A faint flush appeared along the top of her cheek when she reached the point where the report described him physically shielding her behind the conservation table. She turned the page almost immediately.
He should have ignored it.
He didn’t.
“You’re blushing.”
Her eyes lifted slowly. “I’m going to give you one opportunity to become interested in literally anything else.”
“I was only making an observation.”
“You’ve had enough observations about me for one morning.”
Taddeo leaned back with his coffee. “That sounds arbitrary.”
“It is. I’m exercising authority.”
The word landed between them with enough deliberate irony that his amusement faded.
Isolde saw it happen.
She set the report down. “That wasn’t meant to start an argument.”
“I know.”
Her eyebrow rose.
Taddeo caught himself. “I heard you.”
A small smile tugged at her mouth. “Much better.”
The exchange would have been easy to prolong, and that alone was reason enough not to. Taddeo glanced toward the clock.
“Orsino will be here in twenty minutes. The technician arrives with him.”
Isolde’s expression changed immediately. “For the drive?”
“Yes.”
“I’m there.”
“No.”
The answer came too automatically.
Her face hardened.
Taddeo exhaled through his nose. “Not because I’m withholding it from you.”
“That sounded exactly like you withholding it from me.”
“The first pass may contain account credentials, active access keys, names of people we don’t know are compromised, or code that needs to be opened in isolation. I want one technician, Orsino, and me in the secure room until we know what the device contains.”
“You promised I would be present when we reviewed what matters.”
“You will be.”
“That sounds suspiciously like a summary after the fact.”
“It isn’t.” Taddeo set the coffee down. “If we find material involving Corwin, the museum, the theft, or why anyone came after you, I bring it to you. You get the files themselves where possible, not my version of them.”
Isolde studied him for several seconds. “And if you find something you think will hurt me?”
He knew what she was actually asking.
“Then you still get it.”
The tension in her shoulders eased by a degree. “All right.”
Taddeo almost told her she didn’t have to sound surprised.
He decided he valued the morning more than the argument.
Orsino arrived at eight-fifteen with a Bellandi systems technician whose name was Daniel Serrano and whose expression suggested he had already been warned that the fewer questions he asked about the origin of the drive, the better his day would go.
Taddeo moved them into the secure communications room adjoining his office, where no network connection existed unless manually enabled and every machine could be physically isolated.
The original storage device remained inside the protective sleeve Isolde had removed from the Harbor Pilot, Corwin’s handwritten 0617 still visible across the wrapping.
Serrano examined the device without touching it immediately. “You said it may have been modified?”
“The physical casing looked normal,” Taddeo said. “Assume nothing about the contents.”
“That is generally how I keep getting invited to unpleasant places.”
Orsino lowered himself into the chair beside him. “Consider Northglass one of the more attractive unpleasant places.”
Serrano glanced toward the windowless walls. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Taddeo did not.
The first encryption layer took forty-three minutes.
The second took almost an hour.
Corwin had organized the archive with the same discipline visible in his professional work, but paranoia had shaped the structure.
Financial exports sat separately from personal annotations.
Image files of historical property records linked to spreadsheets through neutral identifiers rather than names.
Copies of account histories had been stripped of network paths.
Several folders carried verification hashes so changes could be detected later, and one directory appeared designed solely to document when Corwin acquired each piece of evidence and what source he believed produced it.
By the time Serrano opened the first complete ledger, Taddeo understood why Corwin had hidden the device inside an object only Isolde was likely to dismantle.
This was not a collection of stolen Bellandi records.
It was an investigation.
Columns of payments stretched across the monitor in amounts small enough to disappear inside normal Bellandi operations: thirty-seven thousand through a consulting contract, ninety-two through maintenance, sixty-eight through freight adjustment, one hundred and fourteen buried inside development expenses.
Other diversions moved through insurance reserves, municipal subcontractors, property-management companies, and vendors that performed enough legitimate work to make every false charge look ordinary in isolation.
Orsino leaned closer. “Run the marked total.”
Serrano selected the entries Corwin had categorized as confirmed or probable diversion.
The figure appeared at the bottom.
24,817,460.
For several seconds, nobody spoke.
Orsino removed his glasses and cleaned them slowly. “Twenty-four point eight before the eight-four.”
“Approximately,” Serrano said. “He marked some as probable rather than confirmed.”
Taddeo read the number again.
Twenty-four million dollars did not vanish accidentally from Bellandi interests.
More importantly, it had not vanished in one dramatic theft that would have triggered alarms. Somebody had been building a second financial system beneath the legitimate and illegitimate businesses Cesare already controlled, drawing small amounts from enough places that losses became operational noise.
“Open his annotations,” Taddeo said.
Serrano did.
Corwin’s notes appeared in clipped fragments beside individual transactions.
Duplicate vendor authorization.
Historical parcel valuation inconsistent with current ledger basis.
Approver changed after reconciliation.
Source document likely altered; original required.
Payment chain predates consultant access.
That final note appeared repeatedly.
Orsino read it twice. “He was proving the money was already moving before he got there.”
“Yes.”
“So whatever else he did, he didn’t create this.”
“No.”
Taddeo’s eyes moved down the screen.
Corwin had found the larger theft.