Chapter 13
ISABELLA
My hands won’t stop shaking. I’ve been at the keyboard for hours, chasing a thread through the Benedetti financial records that dissolves every time I get close.
The trail loops through shell companies and dead ends that circle back to nowhere.
The pattern is there. But every time I pull, the thread goes slack.
I’ve broken into systems that don’t officially exist, and a P.O. box in the Caymans is making me look like an amateur. Humbling.
“Anything?” Lorenzo’s voice from his side of the desk.
Our desk.
“Almost. Maybe.” I lean back and press my palms into my eyes. “The property records loop through a shell in Delaware, scatter through four corporate entities, and every time I trace one back, it dead-ends in a P.O. box in the Caymans that hasn’t been touched in six months.”
“So they’re hiding behind dead ends.”
“They’re hiding behind three of them.” I drop my hands. The cursor blinks at me. Mocking. “I’m close. The encryption signature matches what I found before the warehouse raid. Same routing pattern. But every time I follow it, the trail just. Stops.”
“Then they built the stop.”
“Obviously they built the stop. The question is whether they built it recently. Which means they know I’m looking. Or whether it’s been there for years and I’ve been walking into the same wall for months without realizing.”
I trail off because my fingers are doing that thing. The spasm that isn’t from caffeine. I switched to water an hour ago. My pulse was hammering and I couldn’t tell if it was the coffee or the fact that his chair is four inches closer than where it started.
“The only thread that’s actually moving is the gambling side.” I pull up the tab I’ve been running in the background. “The bookmaking operation I flagged. The debt settlements route through intermediaries. Not banks. People. Someone is brokering these payments in person.”
He freezes. Not his thinking stillness. Recognition.
“Magazine Street,” he says.
“What?”
“The bookmaker. Off Magazine. Marchetti. Runs a card game the Benedettis have used for years.” He’s looking at the screen now. Actually looking. “If your gambling money is routing through human intermediaries, that’s his operation.”
I stare at him. “You’ve known about this bookie and you didn’t think to mention it?”
“It’s a card game. Not a trafficking network.”
“Everything connects, Lorenzo. Everything.” I type the name. Marchetti. File it. “I’ll cross-reference his financials with the Benedetti side channel. If the money talks, I’ll hear it.”
“Hey.”
His hand is covering mine. Warm. Dry. His palm settling flat over my knuckles, pressing the tremor still. Holding me against the desk like this is normal. Like this is just what happens when my fingers betray me.
My heartbeat relocates to my throat.
“We’ll get her.” Low. Rough. Not a promise. The way he says handled when he comes back from meetings that involve men who stop smiling. A statement of intended outcome. Failure not on the list.
We. That word keeps getting bigger.
His thumb moves. One pass across my knuckle. Involuntary or deliberate, I can’t tell, and the not knowing is worse because my brain is running both scenarios at once and neither leads anywhere safely.
“If you’re going to hold my hand, you should at least buy me dinner first.”
He doesn’t pull away.
“Rosa’s pasta doesn’t count,” I add.
His mouth twitches. The ghost of a smile that never quite arrives. I’ve been cataloging these. Three in two weeks. Statistically significant.
“I’ll tell her you said that.”
“Don’t you dare. That woman controls the food supply. I’ve seen how she looks at people who disrespect the Sunday gravy.”
The twitch deepens. Almost. So close.
Then the warmth lifts. Back to his side of the desk. Back to the file he’s been pretending to read.
I stare at my knuckles. Still warm. The tremor is gone.
“The data will be there tomorrow,” he says.
“The data is there now. I just can’t reach it.“
“Then stop.”
“I don’t stop.”
“I know.” He closes the file. “That’s the problem.”
I open my mouth. Close it. Because he’s not wrong.
“Fine.” I save my work. Close the laptop. The screen goes dark and the room drops into silence. “But if I crack it in the middle of the night, you’re not allowed to complain about the noise.”
“I don’t sleep in the middle of the night.”
He’s already back to the file. Neither of us talks about why.
The compound breathes around me in the dark. I’ve been staring at this ceiling for hours, watching patterns form and dissolve in the shadows. The sheets are tangled at my feet. My brain won’t stop running the Benedetti encryption in the background like a process I can’t kill.
But that’s not what’s keeping me awake.
Sofia keeps swimming behind my eyelids. Not the data. Not the property transfers or the shell companies. Her face.
Be safe, Izzy. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.
That’s not a very high bar, Sof.
I know. That’s why I set it.
I throw off the covers. My feet hit the floor and I’m moving before the decision finishes forming. Kitchen. Water. A glass of cold to quiet the burn in my chest.
The hallway is dark. My feet know the route by now. Third floorboard creaks. The corner where moonlight cuts a line across the hardwood. Two weeks in this compound and my body has mapped the architecture without consulting my brain.
The kitchen is lit in silver. Moonlight pooling on tile, catching the edge of the stove, the curve of a tumbler on the drying rack. I fill a glass at the sink and drink half in one swallow.
Then footsteps.
I keep my back to the doorway. I know his walk. Deliberate. Every step placed like he’s marking exits even on the way to get water at midnight.
“Can’t sleep?”
“No.” I refill the glass. “You?”
“No.”
He moves into the kitchen. Neither of us reaches for the light switch. Darkness rewrites the rules. He leans against the counter across from me. Close enough to reach. Far enough to pretend we don’t want to.
“Tell me about her.”
I stop moving. Glass halfway to my mouth. “What?”
“Sofia.” Quiet. Like the name is careful in his mouth. “Tell me about her.”
Nobody asks me that.
“What do you want to know?”
“Anything.”
I set the glass down. My fingers have gone still on the glass, but not because of the data this time.
“She burns brownies.” It escapes me rough. Present tense. Because I can’t make her past tense. Won’t. “Every single time. She sets the timer and then she hears a song she wants to play, or she spots a video of a dog wearing boots, and she just. Disappears. Into the phone.”
“Then what?”
“Then the smoke alarm goes off. And she’s standing in the kitchen with chocolate on her chin, laughing. Like it’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened.” My mouth pulls into a shape that’s not quite a smile. “She never once made a batch that wasn’t black on the bottom.”
“Not once?”
“Not once. And she never stopped trying. That’s the thing about Sof. She’ll fail at the same recipe forty times and still preheat the oven.”
I lean against the counter. The cold tile presses through my shirt.
“She steals my fries. Orders her own. Always. Then eats half of mine. And when I call her out, she gives me these big innocent eyes.” I widen mine in demonstration. “‘What fries?’ she says. While she’s chewing. While the evidence is in her mouth.”
A sound leaves me. Not quite a laugh. “I started ordering extra. Never told her why. She thinks she’s getting away with it.”
“She sounds like Marco.”
I blink. “What?”
“My brother. Takes food off your plate and acts offended when you notice.”
A laugh punches out of me. Unexpected. Real. “Must be a youngest sibling thing.”
“Must be.”
The silence settles. Not the heavy kind. The kind that makes space for the next words.
“Her laugh is too loud. Always has been. She never learned to control it, never figured out how to take up less space. She just exists at full volume.”
My face is wet. No idea when that started. Not sobbing. Not breaking down. Overflow. Like the words carry more than a voice can hold and the excess has to find another way out.
“She crawled into my bed until she was fourteen. Nightmares.” I press the rim against my forehead. The cold anchors me. “She’d show up at my door and I’d scoot over without a word. I never asked what the dreams were about.”
“Did they stop?”
“I left for college before I found out.”
That hangs between us.
“She wanted to be a marine biologist. Octopuses.” I drag my wrist across my cheek. “Told me everything about them. Three hearts. Color-changing skin. They can unscrew jar lids from the inside.”
A wet laugh that I don’t try to stop. “She was fifteen and she knew more about cephalopods than most grad students and she burned brownies every single time and she was loud and she stole my fries and she was fifteen.”
“Fifteen.”
“Fifteen.”
The kitchen absorbs that.
“You didn’t break anything.” His voice is closer. When I look up, he’s crossed the kitchen. Standing in front of me, near enough that the moonlight catches the hard lines of his jaw and the tension locked in his shoulders. “You didn’t cause this. They did.”
“I left her in that house.”
“You were eighteen. You left a bad situation. That’s surviving.”
“She wasn’t surviving.”
“Because of the people who took her. Not because of you.” His jaw is set.
There’s heat behind his eyes that isn’t anger.
Isn’t pity. There’s no category for the way he’s looking at me, and I’m a person who categorizes everything.
“You’ve been fighting for her every day since.
Every single day. Alone.” His voice is dropping, getting rougher, like the words cost him and he’s paying anyway.
“You built an entire ghost to hunt ghosts. You’re not the reason she’s gone, Isabella. You’re the reason she’s coming home.”
My chest loosens. I breathe.
I press my palms flat on the counter. The tile bites through the cotton. My face is a disaster and I don’t care, because I just stood in a dark kitchen and bled in front of a man who doesn’t bleed in front of anyone.
“I’m not usually like this.” I gesture at my face. At the tears. The wreckage. “This isn’t my thing. I have a reputation. Ghost. Very intimidating digital specter.”
“Terrifying.”
“Shut up.” But the word is soft. I sniff. Wipe my eyes one more time. “Okay. I just dumped years of classified sibling intel on you in a moonlit kitchen. That’s. A lot.” I straighten up. “You don’t get that for free, Lorenzo.”
His hand is in his pocket. The one I’ve watched him reach for when he thinks nobody is paying attention. When he’s thinking. When the silence gets too loud.
“That thing you keep touching.” My voice is hoarse.
“Rosa told me it was your mother’s.” He goes still.
“I’ve been talking for an hour. You goin’ to give me anything back?
” I cross my arms. My voice going flat because my guts are on the floor and his aren’t and I can’t leave this so unbalanced.
“Or do you just collect other people’s damage? ”
He doesn’t shut down. Doesn’t walk away.
His hand comes out of his pocket. In the moonlight, I see what he’s holding. A rosary. Old. Worn to silk by years of touch, catching the moonlight. The chain loops through his fingers with practiced ease, a shape his hands know every millimeter of, the same way mine know a keyboard.
“She made me promise to keep it.” His voice is rough. Not his commanding voice. Not the enforcer’s flat precision. A different register. Pulled from a depth he doesn’t let anyone hear.
I reach out. Stop. My fingers hovering an inch away. I wait.
His thumb runs over the worn surface. Once. Twice. A rhythm that’s been happening for years, in pockets and dark rooms and places I’ll never see.
“My mother.” Two words. Carrying eleven years.
I leave it untouched. Hold back the push. Swallow the nervous chatter, the joke that would give us both an exit. I stand within reach of his warmth.
The space between my hand and the beads. His hand and the loss they carry.
Neither of us moves.