I told the police it was an accident. I told Lucia and Fabio and Santi it was an accident. I will tell everyone it was an accident for as long as it takes me to build something large enough to destroy the people who did this.
I am twenty-four. I have time.
My hands are not shaking. My vision is not blurring. I am reading the words on the screen with the same focused precision I brought to every data extraction I have ever run. Because if I stop reading with my brain and start reading with my chest, I will not be able to finish.
I scroll.
The entries span twenty years. Thousands of words. Dominic’s handwriting translated to digital, his voice preserved in the flat, controlled prose of a man who trusts keyboards more than people. I do not read every word. I scan. The way I scan code. Looking for the architecture. The load-bearing walls.
I find them.
Fabio and Santi. My older brothers. I have not seen them in five years. In Dominic’s journals they are not lieutenants. They are protected assets. Every assignment Dominic gave them was designed to look like responsibility while keeping them inside his protection radius. The dangerous jobs went to men Dominic could afford to lose. Fabio and Santi got the jobs that kept them close, kept them visible, kept them alive. He has been their shield for twenty years while letting them believe they were his soldiers.
Fabio questions everything. Santi stays quiet and watches. Dominic writes about them the way a father writes about sons he is raising inside a war zone. With the constant, grinding awareness that every decision he makes could be the one that gets them killed.
I scroll faster.
The arranged marriage. Calix Ferraro. The man Rafe put a blade through an hour ago in a Pine Valley street.
The arrangement was never real.
Dominic’s journal details the plan across six entries spanning eight months. Present Calix as Lucia’s husband-to-be. Give Calix enough access to become operationally vulnerable. Then eliminate him at a moment that would leave Lucia wealthy, untouchable, backed by the full weight of a Ferraro alliance with none of the danger. He specifically notes his insurance policy: a sniper trained on Ferraro from the moment the engagement was announced, ensuring the man would never live to see the wedding night. He was engineering a clean exit for me. A life outside the cartel with enough money and enough name recognition to be safe. He miscalculated one variable.
I ran before he could execute it.
I ran because I thought he was selling me. He was trying to free me.
The floor tilts. I grip the edge of the desk. Mia glances over. I shake my head. Keep reading.
The endgame. The final entries. Written in the last six months. Dominic was bankrupting the cartel deliberately. Not losing money. Moving it. Draining the operational accounts into clean, untraceable funds earmarked for his siblings. Building a financial sanctuary. Preparing to launch a unilateral, one-way assault on the Bellanti family with no cartel structure left behind to endanger anyone he loves.
A suicide mission.
He was going to destroy the people who killed our parents and he was going to do it alone and he was not planning to survive it. The clean accounts for Fabio and Santi and me were his version of a will. Everything he built, everything he controlled,everything the Costa name represents, was always a weapon. Never an empire. A weapon aimed at one family in Chicago, loaded over twenty years, and he was planning to fire it with himself as the ammunition.
I sit back in the chair. The screen glows. The cursor blinks.
Twenty years. He watched our parents die when he was barely old enough to drive and he has spent every day since building the instrument of their revenge. Every decision. Every alliance. Every calculated cruelty. The sidelining after my pregnancy. The bodyguards. The monitored phone. All of it was him trying to keep me out of the blast radius of a war I did not know existed.
He did not push me away because I failed him.
He pushed me away because he loved me and the closer I stood the more likely I was to die when the blast hit.
“Lucia.” Kaila’s voice. Tight. “The supply chain data. The breach to the Bellanti.”
I look at her.
“It is the Bellanti,” I say. The words come out flat. Distant. “The family Dominic has been building the cartel to destroy. They murdered our parents when I was seven.”
Kaila’s face goes white.
“The data we are sending them,” I say. “It is not dismantling a cartel. It is handing the people who killed my mother and father everything they need to kill my brother before he can kill them.”
The room stops.
“Abort,” I say. “Abort the transfer. Now.”
Kaila’s hands are already on the keyboard. She is typing. Fast. The abort command runs. The progress bar does not stop.