"Don Sorrentino."
I stop.
"If it's him," Enzo says. "If the priest is the source. What then?"
I don't answer. I walk down the stairs, past the armed men, through the side entrance, into the alley where my car is parked in the dark.
I sit in the driver's seat. Don't start the engine.
Father Domenico Ferraro. Parroco of Santa Maria della Sanità. Valentina's uncle. The man who raised her after her parents were murdered. The man who held her when she was ten years old, wrapped in his coat, covered in her parents' blood.
The man who absolved me of sins I carry like stones in my pockets.
The man who might be the reason the Ferrantes have been dismantling my empire piece by piece for years.
I try to construct a version of this that makes sense without Domenico being the source. Another priest. A deacon with access. A maintenance worker who planted listening devices. Anything. Any explanation that doesn't require the uncle of the woman I love to be the man who has been selling my family's secrets to our enemies.
Every construction collapses. The courier's information is too specific. The confessional angle is too precise. The drop point in Forcella, the typed summaries of confessions, the years of operation. The trap I set in Chapter 16 narrowed the leak to a specific channel. A channel that runs through the church.
I start the engine. Drive home. The sky is lightening in the east, the predawn grey that makes Naples look like a city carved from ash. The bay is flat. Vesuvius is a silhouette. The city is still sleeping.
The penthouse. The elevator. The marble floors. The windows facing east, where the sunrise is beginning to stain the horizon.
I pour whiskey. Drink it. Pour another. Don't drink it. I stand at the window holding the glass, watching the light change.
Valentina is asleep in her apartment in the Sanità. Three blocks from the church. Three blocks from the man who raised her. She trusts him the way I trusted my father. Completely. Without inspection. The kind of trust that isn't chosen. The kind that's inherited, built into the foundation, load-bearing.
If Domenico is the leak, I will have to act. I must protect the family, the organization, the empire and not allow a source of intelligence hemorrhage to operate because the source happens to be loved by a woman I’m is falling in love with.
But if I act against Domenico, I destroy Valentina's world.
I can't tell her. Not yet. Not until I'm certain. Not until the chain is mapped, the evidence is solid, the case is airtight. She deserves certainty, not suspicion. She deserves proof she can hold in her hands and examine the way she examines everything. With precision. With patience. With the meticulous attention of a woman whose composure I have admired since the first time I watched her pour wine.
The sunrise reaches the penthouse windows. Orange light on the marble. On my hands. On the whiskey in the glass I haven't touched.
The priest who absolved me is the man destroying me.
The woman I love calls that man family.
I drink the whiskey. Set the glass down. Go to shower.
The water is hot. I stand under it until the room fills with steam. Until the mirror fogs. Until the only thing visibleis the shape of a man standing in a white cloud, trying to calculate the cost of a truth he hasn't finished uncovering.
Enzo will do the work. Enzo will map the chain. The evidence will come or it won't.
If it comes, everything changes.
I dress. Make coffee. The moka pot rattles on the stove. My mother's pot. The only inheritance I kept.
I drink the coffee standing at the counter. Alone. The penthouse quiet around me. The bay golden with morning light.
I don't call Valentina.
Not today.
Chapter 28
The Calm Before