Chapter 3 STEPHANO
The next day…
The bag swings like a pendulum I keep trying to break.
Leather. Sweat. Bone-deep rhythm. Everything narrows until the world is just my fists and the chain in the ceiling begging for mercy.
I hit harder than I need to because slowing down would mean thinking, and thinking has been a liability lately.
My phone starts buzzing on the desk. I ignore it.
Too much shit has been happening too fast lately, and I’m trying to clear my head enough to think through the clusterfuck.
The Venezuelans keep testing our borders, Don Edoardo’s playing God while pretending not to, and Raf’s an enigma.
I still don't know if he's a friend or an enemy.
On top of that, he's cleaning up messes we’re not supposed to know about.
Marcello's upcoming Vegas wedding is supposed to be a celebration, but it feels more like a ceasefire with good champagne.
Yeah, I have enough rage bottled up in me to take it out on the bag. No wonder I've been sleeping like shit.
Leandro—Dre—Serra, the only man I know who can make a computer look scared, looks up from the computer screen he's been staring at. "Boss." There’s something in his voice—tight, cautious—that gets through the noise. "You need to see this."
I drive a final combination into the bag, feel it jump, then still.
I strip the wraps off my hands and cross the room.
Once, it would’ve been Raffael sitting there.
Now I trust no one but my second-in-command.
Dre is all edges and economy, sleeves shoved to his elbows, jaw scar tugging when he concentrates. No banter. Just war.
"Ping again," I tell him. We've been trying for days to get through the Venezuelan firewall.
He does. Three seconds of access, then Caracas boots us like a bad habit. The console spits an obscene little message in Spanish and kills the tunnel.
"Fourth boot in an hour," Dre mutters.
"They’re learning," I say. "Run the Spain mirror."
For nine-point-two seconds, we’re inside. Routing tables. Hashed credentials. Until… Dre whistles under it. "That’s not cartel-grade. That’s… us."
I see it too. The tag flashes like a fingerprint you don’t forget: CONTI_SYS_4.2.
"Not a copy," I exclaim. "Motherfuckers! That's ours."
"So somebody took your kernel, Frankensteined it, and now they’re locking us out with our own software." Dre swivels to look at the man zip-tied to the chair in the corner. Gino doesn’t look up. The server lights wash his face in sickly blues and reds.
Two years. For two years, this man has worked for me—since I was twenty-four, since the family’s cyber operations stopped being an afterthought and I turned it into a weapon, leaving fraud to dear old dad.
People learned that if they wanted money to move, records to vanish, or systems to break, they came to me.
I crouch until I’m in his line of sight.
"The lockout that bounced us three nights ago was my algorithm," I tell him calmly. "Different coat of paint. Same bones. It needs a seed it can only generate if it’s seen my key material." I tilt my head. "So. You fed them my keys. Or the ghost who replaced you did."
His throat bobs.
"Who recruited you?"
"I—I can’t—"
The wire-cutter knife I picked up kisses the soft place under his jaw. Not a cut. A promise. "Yes, you can."
Gino isn't a made man. He might work for the cartel, but in reality, he's only a computer hack. He breaks fast. "Don Aurelio. El León Valverde."
The name lands heavy, like a door slamming shut. Don Aurelio is the head of the Venezuelan cartel. He's also behind the killing of our bookkeeper for reasons we have yet to figure out.
Gino swallows and keeps talking, words spilling now that the dam’s gone. "I don’t have master access. Nobody does. We’re compartmentalized—Cells. No names. No hierarchy you can map. You only ever see your slice."
Cells. Of course. That’s how you survive infiltration. That’s how you rot a house from the inside without anyone noticing until the beams start to fail.
"And the handoffs?" I ask.
Gino licks his lips. "Churches. Hymns."
That pulls my focus sharp.
"Bulletins," he rushes on. "They're on the Sunday schedules.
Hymn numbers, verse counts, attendance tallies.
They look harmless. You hide instructions in the order of songs, payments in the gaps.
Sundays, they post. On Wednesdays, they pull.
Nobody audits God." It’s elegant. Disgusting.
Old-fashioned enough to work. "I only have my ventana," he continues, desperate to stay useful.
"An admin window they use to maintain traffic masks. Looks like ad tech. It isn’t. "
Dre’s fingers are flying. "Show me."
Gino nods frantically. "If you spoof my device signature and ride my IP pool, you get a thirty-second session before their heuristics wake up. That’s all you’ll get. No retries."
"Thirty seconds," Dre murmurs, already cloning. "Plenty if we don’t blink."
Gino leans forward despite the knife. "Once you’re in, don’t touch anything labeled financial. That trips the watcher. You’re looking for Libro—that’s what they call the ledger. It hides behind a legal portal. Fake PDF. Wrong hash. Ends in seven-A-one-C."
I straighten, decision made. "We don’t copy. We don’t write. We read and walk."
Dre nods once. "In and out. Ghost touch."
He spins the laptop toward me. The mask is already building: Gino’s MAC address, browser fingerprint, packet cadence. A perfect skin.
"Window opens when you say," Dre tells me.
I look back at Gino, whose entire world now hangs on the next breath I take.
"You just bought yourself time," I say coldly. "Don’t make me regret it."
Then I turn to the screen.
"Open me to Caracas."
Dre’s fingers are already moving when Gino gives us the window, CALAF_13, Libro, the bogus PDF. Thirty seconds. No more.
The index peels open. Twenty-seven.
At first, it looks like noise. Dates. Amounts. Short codes that don’t quite resolve into account numbers or case files. Payment routes hop countries the way amateurs never would, clean, deliberate, buried under shell layers meant to bore auditors to death.
Twenty-one.
I spot the pattern before the name. Rome. New York. Caracas. Always in that order. Services rendered. Services returned. The kind of symmetry that only exists when two men think they’re smarter than everyone else.
Fifteen.
And then I see it.
My father’s name.
GUSTAVE.CONTI → AURELIO.VALVERDE
AMT: 250,000 USD
NOTE: SERV/ROMA—"SCOUR"
REF: NICHOLAS/G–GW-11
The world tilts.
Corrects.
Nico.
My brother, who has been missing for three years. He vanished so completely that I broke airports, trains, and manifests trying to find him. My father declared him dead, but I never did.
Now his name is a reference code in a ledger tied to El León. His and our fathers. It doesn't make any sense.
I don’t breathe until Dre boots us out.
"What the fuck does that mean?" he asks.
"I don’t know," I say, and for the first time, it’s the truth. "But it’s not an accident."
I look back at the bag still swaying faintly on its chain, trying to wrap my head around what I just saw. Why would my father send money to Caracas, and what does Nico have to do with it?
My phone buzzes again, and again I ignore it, but Dre doesn't. He reaches for it, listens, then lifts a hand—you need to take this—but I keep staring at Gino, trying to solve a puzzle for which I don't have all the pieces yet.
And in my bones, I have this premonition that a storm is coming.
I walk over to the bag. The world seemed complicated just a few minutes ago.
A few minutes more and it's turned into a hurricane.
"Boss…" Dre's voice has that edge like he’s not sure if he should be amused or terrified. "You didn’t tell me."
"Tell you what?" I slam an elbow, and the bag jumps.
"That you got married."
I stop.
"Say that again."
He doesn’t smile. Doesn’t blink. Just holds the phone out like it might detonate. "I have a Doctor Morales on the phone; she's from St. Raphael’s Medical Center. She says your wife has been shot."
I narrow my eyes. If this is a joke, it's a bad one. I glare at Dre, but he shakes his head. Whatever the joke is, he's not in on it. I take the phone without looking away from Dre’s confused face.
"Conti."
"Mr. Conti? This is Dr. Morales. Your wife has been brought to the emergency department."
My wife? The words would be disturbing… if I had a wife.
As it is, I don't, nor do I have a fiancée or even a girlfriend. I don’t tell her that, though.
I don’t say you’ve got the wrong guy. In my line of work, it doesn’t pay to believe in wrong numbers or confused identities.
If someone’s pretending to be my wife, I want to know who, why, and what the fuck she thinks she's doing. "How is she?"
"She's alive," she assures me, "she just got out of surgery.
I'm so sorry to tell you this, but she was shot.
Twice. One shot was a graze to the shoulder, the other to her flank.
She is stable for now. Before she lost consciousness, she said your name, gave us this number, and told me to tell you one word.
" Paper rustles. "She said to tell you… temporale. "
Everything in me goes still. Temporale—thunderstorm.
My brother Nico and I used that word to warn each other of an impending storm, meaning our parents—mainly our dad, mom had mentally checked out a lot by that time—had found out about something one of us had done.
Ice floods my veins like it always does when I think of Nico.
His trail has been dead for three years, and now twice within the span of an hour, his name pops up. That's not a coincidence.
Across from me, Dre repeats the word under his breath like he’s testing a new caliber. "Temporale?"
Not even he knows about it. It was a word only Nico and I used—our secret code.
My jaw ticks. "Keep her under my name. No visitors. I’m on my way."