12. Rocco #2
Lewis moves beside me. We work in silence for twenty minutes. Very sexy, if your hobbies include fraud and migraines.
The payment doesn’t come from Claudia. Of course not. She’s too careful to leave her name anywhere ugly.
The invoice goes from Neil Barker to Meridian Holdings. Meridian bills a Castellano-controlled shell. The shell routes through three internal approvals under discretionary family protection.
At first, it looks like mine. That makes me go very still.
Lewis catches it too. “Boss.”
“Keep reading.”
The approval code is old. Valid. High-level. Not mine.
There are only four people who can use it without triggering a second authorization. Me. Vittorio. Our dead consigliere, whose access should have been closed two years ago. And Sal Benatti, Vittorio’s accountant. The kind of man who remembers every debt and forgets every moral question.
Lewis taps the screen. “Benatti.”
“Yes.”
“Could be compromised. Or following orders.”
“Yes.”
The room tilts again. Not with surprise. With the horrible click of pieces fitting.
Rafe’s club. Claudia’s verifier. Vittorio’s accountant. Serena’s coat. Serena’s copied ring. Serena’s face hidden. Me, too proud and hurt to ask the right questions.
The lie didn’t need to be perfect. It only needed to know me. That’s the part I’ll never forgive myself for.
Whoever built this used my fear. The part of me the old guard drilled full of it—that softness makes a boss weak, that a wife loved too openly is just leverage waiting for the right hand to close around it. The first lesson of the chair, learned long before I ever sat in it.
They used my love for Serena against Serena.
I let them.
Lewis’s phone buzzes. He reads. “Our men have Neil. Alive. He says Nadia was paid in cash after an event at Eclipse. She left town the next morning. He can identify the courier.”
“Bring him here. Find Nadia first.”
Lewis nods. “And Serena?”
My body reacts to her name. Automatic now.
“What about her?”
“Do you tell her?”
I turn back to the tablet. Nadia’s face. The crescent tattoo.
Then I see Serena holding that ultrasound photo through a chained gap in the door.
This is what I want to do: go to her. Put every receipt in her hands. Say, You were right.
This is what I deserve to do: nothing until I have proof that my apology isn’t another burden she has to manage.
She said not enough. She was right. Again.
“Not yet,” I say.
Lewis nods once. “She deserves proof, not fragments.”
“She deserves a lot more than that.” The words come out before I can decide whether to say them.
I look at him. He holds it. “Careful.”
“No, boss. Not careful. I watched her walk out of this family with guards at her back because none of us stood in front of you and said you were wrong loudly enough.”
The study goes very still.
I could fire him. Old me might have. Today, I’m too tired to punish a man for telling me the truth late. I have enough late truth in this room.
“You did say it,” I say.
“Not loudly enough.”
For a second, we stand there with the dead body of everyone’s cowardice between us. Mine is the largest.
My phone buzzes again. Unknown number this time. Photo message.
I open it.
My breath stops.
Serena in the stairwell. Not tonight. Earlier. From above, through the old building’s interior window. She’s standing with the door open on the chain, one hand at her stomach, the other holding up the ultrasound photo.
Me on the other side of the door, leaning in. Exposed. Watched.
Another message follows.
Your wife has more visitors than you think.
Lewis is already moving. “Trace it.”
“Doing it.”
I stare at the photo. Not at myself. At Serena. At her face, guarded and hurting and still so fucking beautiful it makes my chest feel carved open.
Someone got close enough to shoot through Lucia’s building.
The jealousy vanishes. Fear takes its place. Clean and sharp.
“Move the outer perimeter wider,” I say.
Lewis looks at me. “Outer only?”
I want men inside the building now. On every landing. At Lucia’s door.
I hear her voice. Love did not save me from you.
No. Fear doesn’t get to wear love’s coat again.
“Outer only,” I say. “No one touches the building unless there’s an immediate threat.”
“If there is?”
“Then they get Lucia out first.”
“Lucia?”
“Serena won’t leave without her.”
Lewis nods. There. One thing learned. Late. Still learned.
“And Matteo?” he asks.
The blade.
Because if I say leave him, I can let a rival or a Castellano traitor remove the man who stood in my place, and the worst part of me would sleep easier. The part that cost me my wife.
I hate him. I need him alive. Both things are true.
“Matteo too,” I say.
Lewis’s shoulders ease. Barely. “Yes, boss.”
My phone buzzes before he can move. One of our internal trackers. A flag on Vittorio’s private car.
He told the household he was in London last Thursday. The night before the videos arrived.
The tracker says otherwise. He was at a private members’ club in Mayfair at 11:46 p.m.
So was Claudia. Same entrance. Same eight-minute window.
My uncle. Claudia. Together. The night before the videos landed in my hand.
Family. The one debt Castellanos are never supposed to call in against each other.
I read the timestamp again. It holds.
Lewis reads it over my shoulder and says nothing. He doesn’t need to.
The cold comes for me. For once it’s not mine. It belongs to blood, and to what comes next.