Chapter 11
ISABELLA
The office smells like him. That’s the first problem.
I got here before dawn. Before the hallway lights clicked on.
Before anyone in this house was conscious enough to witness me claiming territory like a feral cat backed into a corner.
I brought my laptop, my charger, a coffee I made in the dark.
Claimed my side of the desk. Opened the Benedetti files. Put my hair up.
I open a second browser tab.
The data from last night’s run is promising.
Three shell companies routing money through a Metairie laundromat.
Either the most clichéd money-laundering operation in Louisiana history or a legitimate business that cleans a suspicious number of linens.
I pull financial records and the patterns start to emerge.
Incoming transfers. Monthly. Irregular amounts but consistent timing.
Whoever is paying the Benedettis does it on a schedule, and the payments started four years ago.
Before Sofia.
My hands won’t stay still. I press them flat on the desk. Sofia flashes behind my eyelids. Fifteen. Grinning with hair in her face, holding up a crab she caught at the lake, refusing to put it down even after it pinched her. The photo is pinned above my monitor here now. Same smile. Different wall.
I push her back. Today I am a machine that parses data and drinks cold caffeine.
My eyes drift to the other chair. His chair. Leather, worn on the left armrest where his hand rests when he reads. The same hand that—
“Stop it,” I tell the screen.
It does not respond. It’s displaying a pivot table and has no opinion about my deteriorating grip on rational thought.
I pull up the Metairie transfers and start cross-referencing.
He arrives before I finish my second cup. No knock. The door opens and he fills the frame the way he fills every room. Not with noise. With the absence of it. He’s carrying two mugs. Sets one on my side of the desk without a word. Made the way I take it. Without being told.
I did not tell him how I take my coffee.
“Morning.” Eyes on the screen. Breezy. A woman who is not logging the fact that he’s wearing a dark henley with the sleeves shoved to his elbows. His forearms are doing things to my concentration that should require a safety briefing.
He sits. Opens a file. The silence stretches.
“The Metairie transfers are interesting,” I say. Because the silence is filling up with thoughts I refuse to examine. I have words and I intend to use every last one. “Monthly payments to a shell company called Crescent Holdings. Started about four years ago. Amounts vary. Schedule doesn’t.”
“Protection money.”
“Could be. But the source accounts are scattered. Seven banks. All out of state.”
He turns a page. “Run the beneficiaries.”
“Running.” I take a sip. Perfect. My sternum does a thing I’m not going to investigate. “I’m also pulling property records for the warehouse district. If the Benedettis are operating out of—”
“I’ll get you the addresses.”
“I have most of them.”
“You have the ones on paper.” He looks at me for the first time since he sat down. Those flat black eyes giving nothing away. “I have the ones that aren’t.”
His expression doesn’t change. But something in his face shifts in a way that might, under laboratory conditions with instruments sensitive enough, register as a precursor to an actual human expression.
We work. My keyboard clicking. His pages rustling.
I reach for the property map at the same time he does. Our fingers brush. The knuckle of my index finger against the side of his thumb.
I freeze. He freezes.
Two seconds. Three. Every nerve in my hand on fire. His skin is warm and scarred and not moving.
I grab the map. “Personal space. It’s a concept. You might look into it.”
That flicker. Never becomes a smile but gets near enough I can clock it from three feet away. His chin dips toward the page.
My fingers are tingling. I put them in my lap where they can’t create any more incidents.
“The warehouse on Tchoupitoulas.” I need to talk. “Cross-references with two of the shell companies. That’s either a coincidence or—”
“Not a coincidence.”
“Let me finish my sentences.”
“Finish them faster.”
He’s reading. Eyes on the page. But I’d bet my entire Benedetti dataset he’s doing this on purpose. The monosyllables. The flat delivery. Daring me to keep going so he can cut every sentence in half.
“The property records show the building changed hands three times in two years. Each time to a different LLC registered out of state. That’s not real estate. That’s a paper trail built to look like a maze.”
“Can you trace it?”
“I hacked your family’s entire security network from a studio apartment with a fire escape that was actively rusting off the building.” I sip the coffee. “So. Yes.”
He watches me. His head tilts. One degree. The way it does when I do something he didn’t expect.
“Do it.”
“Started an hour ago.”
His gaze breaks first. I count that as a win.
The picture starts to build slowly. Three warehouses connected through the network. Weekly shipments logged as commercial freight. The manifests look clean but the routing patterns don’t hold. Too many transfers for legitimate cargo.
“These shipping routes don’t add up.” I lean toward his side of the desk, pointing at the monitor. “Moving commercial goods from Houston to New Orleans, you don’t route through three transfer facilities. Unless you’re not moving goods.”
He leans in. The sandalwood hits me. His arm an inch from mine.
“Or you’re moving goods that need documentation at every stop,” he says.
I swallow. “Documentation. Or inspection points paid to look the other way.”
“Which brings us to the real question.” I pull back. His tone has shifted. Not investigation-mode anymore. Colder. The voice he uses when someone is about to become a problem. “The raid failed. The Benedettis cleared out before we got within a mile. Someone knew we were coming.”
“You think there’s a leak.”
“I know there’s a leak. The question is who.” He counts them off. Dante. Himself. Marco on comms. Carlo and Tomás on teams. Enzo on procurement, Vic on routes. “Seven people had access.”
I cross-reference each against the organizational structure I memorized during my first week here. “Who’s the eighth?”
“Rosa. She knew the timing. Not the details.”
“Rosa is not your mole.”
“Everyone stays on the list. That’s how it works.”
Granite. I search his expression for subtext, for some indication that he is hinting at more than just operational protocol.
Except he wasn’t locked in last night. I was there. I saw what he looked like with his forehead pressed to mine and his fingers tracing my body.
I grab my laptop. “I’ll dig into Carlo and Tomás. Money, phones, anything off pattern in the last six months.” My voice is too fast. “If someone leaked the location, there’s a trail. There’s always a trail.”
“Isabella.”
My name in his mouth. Three syllables. Not the clipped command voice he uses with everyone else. A different register, rougher at the edges, and my argument dies somewhere between my brain and my tongue.
“What?”
He’s looking at me. Not at the file. Not at the wall. At me.
“You were in the shower for forty-five minutes last night and then you didn’t leave your room.”
I stare at him. “How do you know that?”
His attention drops to the page. “I know where everyone is in this house. Always.”
“That’s surveillance.”
“That’s my job.”
“Your job is monitoring my shower schedule?”
“My job is making sure you’re alive.”
I pull my laptop up higher and pretend my cheeks aren’t burning.
The door opens. Nico doesn’t knock. He leans in the frame holding a tray like he’s been sent on a mission he didn’t volunteer for. Garlic. Butter. Fresh bread. My stomach, that shameless traitor, growls loud enough to echo off the bookshelves.
“Rosa says eat.” He sets the tray between our files. “Her words were longer than that but I’m not repeating them.”
“We’re in the middle of—”
“She also said if you don’t eat, she’s sending Gia. And Gia lectures.” He looks at Lorenzo. “Both of you.”
Lorenzo takes a piece of bread. Sets it in front of me without a word.
Nico glances between us. At the distance we’re keeping. At the coffee Lorenzo brought me and the hoodie I’m now clocking belongs to a member of this family. His eyebrows lift a fraction.
“What?” I say.
“Nothing.” He backs out of the doorway. “Enjoy lunch.”
The door closes. I stare at the bread. He doesn’t touch the rest until I pick mine up.
I eat. He eats. The bread is criminal. Rosa could topple a government with these ingredients.
“This should be illegal,” I say.
“She’s been making it sixty years.”
“Sixty years and nobody’s weaponized it. Missed opportunity.”
His jaw does that thing. The one I’m not supposed to notice.
He stands. Takes a call from Dante in the hallway. Low Italian I can’t follow. I finish eating. Lick butter off my thumb. Pull up the financial records on Carlo and Tomás while I wait.
He comes back. Sits down. Picks up the file. And his chair is closer.
The picture sharpens over the afternoon. I build a timeline: money from seven sources, laundered through Crescent Holdings, distributed to four locations. The shipping manifests are the thread. Whatever the Benedettis are moving goes through the Tchoupitoulas warehouse.
One anomaly. A separate stream of money running through the same network. Smaller amounts. Weekly. It reads like gambling, not cargo. I flag it and move on. The trafficking network is the priority.
The air conditioning kicks on and I shiver. My shoulders tighten against the cold but my fingers keep moving because the data doesn’t care about my thermoregulation.
Movement. He stands. Crosses behind my chair. Fabric settles over my shoulders. Heavy. Warm. Smelling like sandalwood and gun oil and him.
His jacket. Draped without a word. Without being asked.
I don’t look up. My typing pauses for half a beat, then resumes. The jacket swallows me. I pull it tighter without acknowledging it or him.
He sits back down.
I’m reaching for my mug when he reaches for the same one. His fingers close over mine on the ceramic.
Neither of us lets go. Not after two seconds. Not after five. His warmth bleeding through to my knuckles. His thumb shifts. A fraction. Against the back of my hand.
My chin lifts. His gaze locked where our skin meets.
His phone buzzes against the wood. Dante. He pulls away. Reads the message. Goes flat.
He stands. Grabs his jacket. Through the door. No goodbye.
I sit with both hands around the mug and the shape of where he was.