I press them flat against the desk for three seconds before I sit down. Controlled. The adrenaline does not care that the shooting stopped twenty minutes ago—it runs its full course regardless, and the course is not finished. My palms against the cold metal of the Vault desk are the first still thing I have touched since the bakery parking lot.
I make myself breathe. Four counts in. Four out. A trick Dominic’s head of security taught me when I was twelve years old, sitting in a car outside a warehouse while men I did not know did things I was not allowed to see. The breath does not solve anything. It reminds the body that the immediate threat has passed.
The immediate threat has passed.
Tyra is in the back room of the clubhouse with Savannah and the grey wolf. She is safe. She is baking imaginary cakes with a stuffed animal and three Old Ladies who would put a bullet in anyone who tried to open that door. I kissed her forehead tenminutes ago and she told me the grey wolf needs a nap and could I please stop squeezing so hard.
I stopped squeezing. I did not stop calculating.
The Vault is the Broken Halos’ secure digital operations room. Windowless. Soundproofed. Three terminals. Two women already working when I walk in.
Mia is at the primary terminal. Her fingers are moving across the keyboard with the systematic speed of a woman who has been inside financial systems since she was seventeen and has never once been caught. She cracked Dominic’s banking architecture two hours ago using the USB drive data as the key. The USB I grabbed from the cabin counter on our way out, tucked into my inside pocket while Nick was clearing the front door. Costa instinct. You do not leave your ammunition behind.
Mia has been draining Dominic’s operational funds. The transfers are running. The numbers on her screen have too many zeros to process without pausing, and Mia does not pause. She is moving the cartel’s liquid capital into a chain of accounts so layered that a forensic team would need six months to trace the first hop.
“Forty-seven million so far,” she says without looking up. “Another twelve in the secondary accounts. He kept his operational funds in three tiers.”
I sit down at the secondary terminal. Pull up the USB file tree. The architecture is familiar because I built the extraction protocol myself, in a compound bedroom, on a laptop I stole from Dominic’s library while he was in a meeting four floors below. Every directory is labeled in the coding shorthand I developed during the sidelined years when no one invited me tothe rooms where decisions happened. The years I taught myself encryption and network infiltration and the slow patient art of turning boredom and marginalization into a blade.
Kaila is at the third terminal. She is running the supply chain extraction. Vendor contacts. Shipping routes. Distribution networks. Operational vulnerabilities. She is packaging it for transfer.
“Where is it going?” I ask.
Kaila does not look up. “The Bellanti.”
The name lands in my chest.
“Dominic’s data flagged them as his primary rival,” Kaila says. “Chicago family. Old money. They have been trying to move on Costa territory for five years. If they get this data, they can dismantle the Costa supply chain in weeks.”
The Bellanti. Chicago. I file the name. It means nothing to me yet. In four minutes it will mean everything.
Kaila hits a wall.
“There is a buried partition,” she says. Her fingers stop. She leans back. “Separate from the operational data. Personal directory. Password-protected. Triple-encrypted. I cannot get through.”
I roll my chair to her terminal. Look at the encryption layers. Three tiers. Military-grade on the outer shell. Custom algorithm on the second. The third is Dominic’s personal cipher, the one he uses for things that are not business. Things that are his.
I know how he thinks. I have been inside his systems before. I built my escape plan from the architecture of his paranoia. Thefirst password is our mother’s maiden name spelled backward. The second is the street address of the house we grew up in before the compound. The third is a date.
I stare at the date field. A six-digit entry.
I type it. The date our parents died.
The partition opens.
Kaila looks at me. I do not look at her.
The files are not operational. They are not financial. They are not intelligence reports or shipment logs or the calculated infrastructure of a billion-dollar cartel.
They are journals.
Personal journals. Dating back twenty years. The earliest entry was written when Dominic was twenty-four years old.
The room gets very quiet. Or I stop hearing it. Same result.
I open the first entry. Dated three days after our parents died.
They were not in an accident. The Bellanti sent two men. I was in the car behind. I was on the phone with Mamá when the line went dead. I got to the intersection in time to see the second vehicle pull away. I memorized the plate. I will not write it here. I do not need to. I will never forget it.