For three days, the war room was our world. We barely talked about anything other than the case, surviving on coffee and sandwiches delivered by a nervous-looking Elara. The setting was tense and professional, yet a rhythm formed between us. His strategic thinking matched my detail-oriented approach well. I would uncover a digital clue, and he would immediately know which of his contacts could follow it.
His tech team hit a dead end with Valerius's central hard drive. The drive had military-grade encryption that was nearly impossible to crack.
"They say it could take weeks or even months," he said, frustration clear as he paced the room.
"Let me try," I said, pulling the drive toward me.
He looked doubtful but nodded. I connected the drive to my laptop and started working. Hours passed. Dante sat at the other end of the table, focused on his laptop, but I sensed his attention on me. The sound of my keys tapping was the only noise in the room. I wasn't just using standard decryption software; I was searching for the human aspect, the flaw in the programmer's logic. Late on the third day, I found it—a subtle backdoor hidden in a recursive loop.
"I'm in," I whispered, feeling a rush of triumph.
Dante was at my shoulder in an instant, his presence both familiar and distracting. The drive's contents appeared on my screen: shell corporations, offshore accounts, and blackmail material. It showed the entire structure of a criminal empire.
"Search for all outgoing payments linked to shell accounts," he instructed, his voice a low rumble next to my ear.
I typed the command. A list of transactions appeared, a digital flow of dirty money. I scrolled through, scanning the dates. Then, I saw it. One line of code that chilled me. It was a transfer for a huge amount, made nineteen years ago, on the exact date of his parents' murder. The recipient was an untraceable account, but beside the transaction was a single, cryptic note—"Payment E. Honorarium."
"Dante," I said, barely above a whisper.
He leaned closer, his eyes following my finger as I pointed to the screen. I felt him freeze beside me. He didn't breathe. He didn't move. It felt like his entire being had turned to ice.
"E," he repeated, the letter sounding empty in the silence.
My mind raced. E for Enforcer? E for any number of things. But I could see the terrible conclusion his mind reached. The one person whose name started with E who had been part of his family for as long as he could remember. The woman who brought them meals, who held Aria when she came home, who was like a grandmother to them both.
He straightened suddenly, his face pale and haunted. "It's a coincidence," he said, his voice tight with denial. "It means nothing."
But we both knew that was a lie. In the dangerous world of the Moretti family, there were no coincidences. He moved to the window and stared out at the city, but I knew he wasn't really seeing it. He was seeing a ghost. And the single, terrifying letter suggested that the enemy wasn't just at the gates—they might have been inside the house all along.