Chapter 18: The Serpent Inside the Walls

VITTORIA'S POV

I stood in the middle of the bedroom with the phone pressed against my ear and Alberto's words sitting in my chest like a blade that had gone in cleanly and was waiting to be pulled out.

Ric.

The man who had met me on the terrace in the dark and told me the truth always finds its way out in this family. The man who had looked at me with something close to compassion and said he had no interest in destroying what he saw growing between Marcello and me before it had the chance to become something real.

That man had been feeding Seymour information the entire time.

"Are you sure?" I asked Alberto. My voice came out steadier than I deserved.

"The source is solid," he said. "I would not call you with this otherwise."

"Who is the source?"

A pause. "Someone inside Seymour's operation who has been looking for a way out for a long time. They came to me because they knew I was connected to you." Another pause. "Vittoria, Ric has been working with Seymour for months. Whatever his reasons are, he has been the leak inside that building, and Envo just took the fall for it."

I pressed my free hand flat against the wall beside me and looked at the bedroom door.

Envo was dead in the basement.

Dead for something Ric had done.

And Ric was somewhere in this penthouse right now, moving through its rooms with the easy familiarity of family, sitting at its table, drinking from its glasses, watching me with those patient, measured eyes and calculating exactly how useful I was going to be to the man who wanted to tear this building apart from the outside.

"Alberto, do not call me again tonight," I said quietly. "Not for any reason. Keep your phone on and stay exactly where you are."

"Vittoria"

"I mean it. Stay still." I ended the call.

I stood for another moment, organising what I knew into the order it needed to be in before I walked out of that room. Then I crossed to the door and went to find Marcello.

He was in the study with two of his men, a map spread across the desk, the conversation stopping the moment I knocked and pushed the door open. He looked up, and something in my face must have communicated the weight of what I was carrying because he straightened immediately.

"Leave us," he said to the men.

They filed out and closed the door, and I crossed the room, stopped in front of the desk, and looked at him directly.

"I need to tell you something, and I need you to hear all of it before you react," I said.

His eyes sharpened. "Go ahead."

"Envo was not the leak."

The room went very still.

Marcello looked at me without blinking. His hands were flat on the desk on either side of the map, and I watched his fingers press slightly harder into the surface as the sentence landed.

"Say that again," he said quietly.

"Envo was not feeding Seymour information about this building. Someone else was. Someone who has been doing it for months and allowed Envo to carry the consequence of it tonight." I held his gaze. "It was Ric."

The silence that followed was the worst kind. Not empty. Full. Packed with something that had no clean outlet and was building pressure behind Marcello's eyes in a way that I watched with genuine fear, even though it was not directed at me.

He straightened up from the desk slowly.

He walked to the window.

He stood there with his back to me and said nothing for a long time, and I stood where I was and let the silence do what it needed to do because there was nothing I could say that would make this smaller than it was.

Ric was not just an ally turned enemy. He was family. The uncle who had sat at that table and watched Marcello build something back from the damage my father's betrayal had caused, who had apparently spent that entire time quietly handing pieces of it to the man who wanted to finish the demolition.

"Your source," Marcello said finally, his back still to me.

"Alberto. Someone inside Seymour's operation approached him."

"Why would someone inside Seymour's operation approach your brother?"

"Because they wanted a way out, and Alberto was connected to me, and I am connected to you." I paused. "It is a long chain, but it is solid."

He turned around. His face had done something I had not seen it do before. The control was still there, it was always there, but underneath it, something had cracked along a line that had been under pressure for longer than tonight.

"How long has Alberto known?" he asked.

"He called me twenty minutes ago. He found out tonight."

Marcello nodded slowly. Then he crossed the room to the desk, picked up his phone, and made a call that was answered in two rings.

"Find Ric," he said into it. "Quietly. Bring him to me." He ended the call and set the phone down.

He looked at me across the desk.

"You could have kept this to yourself," he said.

"No," I said simply. "I could not."

Something moved through his expression. Deep and quick, like something surfacing and then going back under before it fully broke the surface.

"An innocent man died tonight because of information I acted on," he said. The words were quiet and entirely without self-pity, and that made them harder to hear than if they had contained either of those things.

"You did not know," I said.

"I should have." He pressed two fingers against the bridge of his nose briefly. "I should have dug further before I acted. I was angry, and I was certain, and I did not dig further." He dropped his hand. "That is not a mistake I make."

"Everyone makes it once," I said.

He looked at me. "Not with someone's life."

I did not have an answer for that because he was right, and offering comfort around a truth like that would have been an insult to the truth.

We stood in the quiet of the study and let it sit between us.

"Marcello," I said his name for the first time without thinking about it first, without calculating how it would land, and the ease of it surprised us both slightly. "What Ric did is not a reflection of what you have built here. One person's betrayal does not undo nine years of everything else."

He looked at me for a long, steady moment.

"You sound like my mother," he said.

"Your mother is a very intelligent woman," I replied.

The ghost of something crossed his face. Not the almost smile. Something quieter and more private than that.

A knock at the study door broke the moment cleanly.

"Come in," Marcello said, and his voice had shifted back into the register it used for business.

The door opened, and one of his men stepped inside.

"We cannot find Ric, sir," he said. "His room is cleared out. The car is gone from the garage." He paused. "He left sometime in the last two hours."

Marcello absorbed this without any visible movement.

"He knew," I said quietly. "He knew that Envo would not stay silent under pressure and that the trail would eventually reach him."

"So he ran," Marcello said.

"He ran," I confirmed.

Marcello looked at his man in the doorway. "Find him. Take whatever you need." The man nodded and left.

Marcello stood behind the desk in the quiet that followed and looked at the map still spread across its surface, at whatever plan had been laid out on it before I walked in and changed everything about the evening.

"Go to bed," he said without looking up. "It is late, and tomorrow will be longer than today."

I moved towards the door.

"Vittoria."

I stopped and turned.

He was still looking at the map. "Thank you," he said. Just that. Quiet and direct, with nothing decorative around it.

I left the study,d walked to the bedroom, got into bed, lay in the dark and waited for him to come to bed, and he did not come.

At two in the morning, the study light was still visible under the door at the end of the corridor.

I stared at the ceiling and thought about a man sitting alone with a map and the knowledge that the person he had trusted closest had been the one dismantling everything furthest from view.

I knew what that felt like.

I had lived inside that feeling for three days before I walked into a small room and said my real name out loud.

I got up, went to the kitchen, made two cups of coffee and carried them to the study door.

I knocked once.

"Come in," he said.

I pushed the door open, crossed to the desk, and set one cup down in front of him without a word.

He looked at the cup. Then up at me.

I went back to the door.

"Vittoria." His voice stopped me again.

I turned around.

He looked at me across the room with an expression that had no performance in it anywhere, no control, no assessment, just the unguarded face of a man who had not expected the small kindness of a cup of coffee at two in the morning and did not quite know what to do with it.

"Stay," he said quietly.

It was one word.

But the way he said it made it the heaviest word I had heard in a very long time.