Olivia
The chill from Dom's visit lingers in my apartment long after he's gone. His face when he told me to back off wasn't the calculated charm I've grown accustomed to.
It was raw fury.
He really thinks I’m a part of Rocco’s abduction. Or that someone I work with has set me up to look guilty.
What if he's right? Everything he said makes sense, if he’s right.
I know I didn’t kidnap Rocco.
And I know my car was in for servicing because I was off. Did someone take my car? How did Dom even figure out it was my car?
My training tells me Dom is manipulating me. Playing me. Using our connection to protect his criminal enterprise. Yet something else is at play.
He wasn’t just irritated like he’s been in the past. He was angry. Murderously so.
Most people would tremble at having a mafia don storm into their home and issue threats. But what struck me wasn't fear.
It was the fierce protectiveness in Dom's eyes.
The genuine belief that I or someone in the FBI is behind Rocco’s kidnapping.
I should be offended by his accusation. Instead, I'm troubled by how plausible it sounds.
Haven’t I been having similar thoughts?
I grab my secure notebook and start mapping connections. Dom accused my supervisor; the same man who’s caused me doubts lately.
I note Blackwood's unusual interest in La Corona.
His specific targeting of those who are most vulnerable in the family, women.
The informants who end up dead.
The operations that somehow never yield arrests but always increase tensions between families.
If I'm right about this, I'm not just risking my career. I'm risking everything. Including my life, as Dom insinuated.
I stop writing and press my fingers against my eyes.
What kind of FBI agent trusts a mafia don over her own supervisor?
What kind of professional sleeps with her target?
What kind of woman finds herself respecting, maybe even admiring, a man who lives outside the law?
The kind who recognizes truth when she hears it, regardless of its source.
I stare at my scattered notes until the words blur together. My father's badge sits on my bookshelf, normally a talisman that settles me.
Dad always said the badge meant something, that we stood for justice, not just law. What would he think of me now?
I find it hard to believe my boss is at the center of this, and yet when I consider others in my office, none have the authority to make information go missing or to order reports not be made. None have been investigating La Corona as long as him.
My questioning of him and those I work with feels like betrayal. These are my colleagues. My people. The agency I've dedicated my life to.
Yet I can't shake the evidence.
I open my laptop and look up files on Blackwood's past operations. His success rate is impressive, except with La Corona.
Has his failure there led him to more drastic and questionable strategies?
My stomach knots as I remember Blackwood's face when he talked to me about looking into Rocco's case.
Not surprise or interest but annoyance.
Like I was veering off-script.
"Focus on Vitale," he'd said. "The rest is a distraction."
I close my eyes, leaning back against the couch. If I'm wrong, I'm betraying everything I stand for. If I'm right...
God, if I'm right, then I've been unwittingly complicit in something terrible.
I think of Dom's eyes when he spoke of family.
The fierce protection.
The unwavering loyalty.
Qualities I once thought incompatible with his criminal lifestyle, yet now find myself envying compared to the cold calculation I sense from Blackwood.
Whatever path I choose, there's no going back.
Either I've fallen for a criminal's manipulation, or I've discovered corruption in the very institution I've sworn to uphold.
Both possibilities terrify me. Both could lead to my own death.
The next day, I arrive at work early, before anyone else can disturb me. I open a fresh notebook rather than my computer.
This time I’m going to track the case as Dom has outlined it.
I draw a timeline of my investigation into the Vitale family, marking each search warrant, each surveillance operation, each informant approach.
We were never successful, but maybe we weren’t meant to be.
Maybe the purpose was to harass them without catching them.
What if these weren't failed attempts to gather evidence? What if they were successful attempts to sow discord?
I look at the greater La Corona investigation and how each FBI action created ripples within La Corona.
Isabella told the Calabresi family was behind her mother’s murder. Informant Ernie dying by drug overdose, a method Don Ferraza was known to use to kill.
Gabriella Monti made to believe Marco Calabresi was trying to overtake her father’s business.
Rocco’s kidnapping. I recall Dom talking about one of his men’s murder…who was that?
Gio…Gio somebody.
Dom questioned if I’d killed him.
I flip to a new page, sketching the power structure of La Corona as I understand it.
Four families maintaining peace through mutual respect and cooperation.
Calabresi. Monti. Ferraza. And of course, Vitale.
They form La Corona, a council that's withstood decades of law enforcement pressure.
What if breaking their trust is the point? I write. What if the goal is for La Corona to implode on itself? But to what purpose? To make it easier to investigate and arrest them individually?
I force myself to consider motives. If someone wanted to destroy La Corona from within, creating suspicion between families would be more effective than arrests.
Let them destroy each other while law enforcement watches from a safe distance.
Clean. Efficient. Ruthless.
I close my eyes, remembering Dom's certainty when he accused the FBI of taking Rocco.
What better way to drive a wedge between families than targeting a child?
A child who straddled two families, the Vitales and Montis.
Two families at odds, one blaming the other of betrayal and murder.
The office begins to fill with morning arrivals. I shut my notebook, sliding it into my purse instead of leaving it in my desk.
"Morning, Ricci," Blackwood calls as he passes my desk. "Progress on Vitale?"
I force a smile. "Working some angles, sir."
For the first time in my career, I don't trust my own people.
I grab my purse and head out, deciding to figure out why Dom thinks my car was the one used to kidnap Rocco.
I slip into the motor pool office, and the clerk barely glances up when I explain I need to cross-reference vehicle usage for a case timeline.
"Knock yourself out," he says, granting me access to the database before returning to his bagel.
My fingers fly across the keyboard, pulling up fleet records from last December.
The Winter Festival where Rocco was taken fell on the 18th. I expand my search to the week before and after, scanning for patterns.
I see my car checked in and marked for service. There’s no record of it leaving again until I picked it up the day I got the call about Rocco.
No cars were checked out, but that doesn’t mean much.
Most agents keep their cars.
While not supposed to be used for personal reasons, we can commute with them.
“Is there a way to see GPS tracking?”
That earns a glance from the clerk. “Are you missing your car?”
My brain scrambles for a good reason to need GPS information. “I just want to verify I’ve got the places and times right on a report I’m writing. My boss is such a stickler for these things.”
He shrugs. “Give me the car info.”
I give him my vin number, license plate, and date of the Winter Festival, December last year.
“Sort of late on that report,” he says as he taps in the information into his computer.
“More like my boss thinks I missed something.”
“That car was being serviced.”
Just like I thought. “Oh…wait. I might have had a different car. Can you look up by address to see if a car was there?” I give him the address of the Winter Festival.
He taps at his keyboard again. “That car has been retired.”
“But it was used on that day? Can you tell me who checked it out?”
“I thought you did?” He looks at me now like I’m up to something.
“I…ah…”
He purses his lips. “An Agent Dan Smith checked it out.”
“Right. Thank you.”
Back at my desk, I do a search for Agent Dan Smith.
The only one I find is from the cyber crimes unit and who passed away this past January from cancer.
I sit back.
How did someone sick with cancer and dying in January, check out a car and kidnap a child in December?
Doing a deeper dive, I see Agent Smith had been on leave since September last year.
So he couldn’t have checked out the car.
I stare at my screen, feeling slightly nauseated. This is concrete evidence supporting Dom's accusation.
Bureau resources used in a child's abduction. A car checked out by an agent who wasn’t even working.
And somehow…my license plate, maybe, is linked to me.
If someone in the FBI orchestrated Rocco's kidnapping, what else have they done? What else have I unknowingly participated in?
I sit back as a cold clarity settles over me.
The distance between becoming a criminal and becoming corrupted in the name of justice is smaller than I ever imagined.
The path to hell truly is paved with good intentions.
Or perhaps intentions that only appeared good on the surface.
Someone in the Bureau crossed that line. And I'm going to find out who. But what if Blackwood is behind this?
What if he orchestrated Rocco's kidnapping, Mrs. Ferraza's murder, the deliberate sabotage of La Corona's peace, what am I supposed to do?
Go to Assistant Director Morris? The Office of Professional Responsibility? Internal Affairs?
"Hey, I think my boss might be conducting illegal operations against the mafia because my mafia boyfriend suggested it." Even in my head, it sounds absurd.
Even more puzzling is why my boss would cross this line. He’s a good agent. Is it just frustration over an inability to pin anything on La Corona? Or is there something more? Who is Victor Blackwood?