Chapter 12 A Notary’s Confession, Half-True #5
The notary tried to nod, but his head rolled sideways. His gaze found Enzo’s, then Valentina’s, and in it Enzo saw a plea for mercy that wasn’t for himself. It was for the people left standing.
“Chain-of-custody binder,” the notary choked, and the words came out in fragments. “Signatures… not - ”
His body jerked once, a violent spasm that made Enzo instinctively pull back. The notary’s breath hitched and then dropped into a shallow, failing rhythm.
The wounded attacker made a strangled sound from the wall. “He was supposed to hold… he was supposed to - ”
Enzo turned his head enough to see him. The attacker’s face was slick with sweat, his eyes bright with panic now that the notary had become useless.
Enzo didn’t let the attacker speak into the void. “Who poisoned him?”
The attacker’s throat bobbed. “The man in the corridor - ”
Valentina straightened abruptly, her gaze snapping toward the consultation room entrance as if she could see through walls. “Vito said - ”
Enzo stood, pushing the attacker back harder, pistol still in his hand. “Not Vito. Vito is useful. This is lethal.”
The notary’s eyes fluttered. He seemed to be fighting to stay conscious long enough to finish the sentence he’d started.
Valentina knelt beside him. Her hand hovered over the notary’s face, not touching yet, like she was afraid her skin would wipe away whatever last piece of truth he could offer.
“Tell me his liaison name,” Valentina whispered. “Tell me what you didn’t have time to say.”
The notary’s gaze fixed on her pocket, on the transfer authorization she’d stolen from the papers. He tried to speak again, but the poison had eaten most of his mouth.
Enzo leaned closer. “Giovanni. Look at me. What did they call it?”
The notary’s eyes tracked Enzo’s face, then flicked once toward the drawer stack. The gesture was small but deliberate. A direction. A hiding place.
Enzo’s brain raced. The consultation room had sealed drawers. Chain-of-custody binder had been used before. Tampering had happened there, too. The mastermind could have left a clue in the wrong place on purpose - to bait them into grabbing the wrong file, the wrong paper, the wrong link.
But Valentina wasn’t bait. Valentina was relentless.
She snatched open one of the sealed drawers with a quick movement that made Enzo’s hand twitch, ready to stop her - until he saw what she was reaching for.
Inside the drawer lay a thin folder banded with a strip of resin-seal wax.
Not the sealed pact. Not the transfer authorization.
Something else: a stamped cover sheet with a printed name and a reference code, the kind of thing notaries used to keep records of filings without revealing the underlying content.
Valentina’s breath escaped her in a shaky exhale. “This is a routing authorization.”
Enzo felt his jaw lock. “Read it.”
Her eyes scanned quickly, fingers steady despite the rage in her posture. “Donato Greco… liaison desk. Code - ”
The notary let out a final, broken sound, and his head tipped toward the floor. His eyes went unfocused. The scent of poison turned into something worse - defeated, final.
Valentina didn’t notice at first. She kept reading, kept absorbing, kept trying to extract life from ink.
Enzo grabbed her wrist gently but firmly. “Valentina.”
She looked at him then, and her expression was raw - not grief yet, not denial. It was the fury of someone who understood the trap too late.
“He’s dead,” she said, voice flat.
Enzo nodded once. “Yes.”
She stared at the routing authorization like it could still apologize. “And he didn’t just confess. He confirmed the mastermind’s method.”
Enzo’s grip tightened. “He confirmed lethal silencing.”
The wounded attacker on the floor let out a breath that sounded almost like a sob. “You’re too late,” he rasped. “He already sent it.”
Enzo turned the pistol on him again, not because he believed the man - because he needed the last thread pulled tight. “Sent what?”
The attacker’s eyes slid toward the consultation room window, toward the street beyond. “The transfer request. The political intermediary. The filing clerk - ”
Valentina stood too fast, her knees creaking. She grabbed Enzo’s arm, pulling him toward the window as if she could see the filing clerk from here.
“Who is the mastermind?” she demanded.
The attacker’s smile was bitter. “You already know the shape. You just don’t have the name.”
Enzo didn’t like that. He didn’t like that the man had enough control left to tease. It meant the mastermind had rehearsed this scene, measured the timing, built in redundancies.
Outside, the notary office hallway erupted - footsteps, shouting, the unmistakable sound of men moving with purpose. Someone was sealing doors, moving bodies into place, responding to the gunshot and the notary’s collapse.
Enzo’s mind mapped the room instantly. Two doors. One window with a view of a narrow alley. A locked consultation compartment. A dead notary on the floor. A wounded attacker bleeding out with a story he hadn’t finished.
And Valentina holding the routing authorization - paper that connected Greco’s liaison to