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Chapter thirty-five
publish date:
2026-04-20 19:45:50
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Redacted Desires Chapter Thirty-Eight
CassiusThe number and conversation still played in my mindMax had been working on it since six in the morning — not digitally; the digital trace had produced nothing within the first twenty minutes, which meant the number had been built specifically to produce nothing, the clean that required intention and resources. He had gone sideways instead, into the distortion technology used on the voice.“It’s not consumer,” he said, when I called him at eight. “The algorithm is specific — a hardware processor, not software. There are maybe forty of these units in active use in the city. Twelve are owned by federal agencies. Fourteen by private security firms. The rest are in the hands of people who don’t register them.”“Can you narrow the remaining fourteen?”“I’ve been trying.” A pause. “Cassius. The unregistered units — there’s no direct trail. I can eliminate some based on operational profile, but what I’m left with is still eight to ten possible sources.”“All of them are capable of kn
Redacted Desires Chapter thirty-seven
Sienna’s POVThe floor had a different quality on Thursday.Not dramatically different — the same desks, the same screens, the same ambient hum of a department doing its work. But something had shifted in the social atmosphere, the way things shifted when a floor had processed something and arrived at a collective position without anyone calling a meeting about it. People looked up when I passed. Not obviously — just that half-second longer, the particular attention of colleagues who knew something had happened to someone they worked alongside and had decided to be respectful about not knowing exactly what.Respectful, and curious.Curiosity was harder to manage.I had been back for three days. I had performed fine for all three of them. I had answered emails and attended the Henderson meeting and produced the Q3 variance analysis and eaten lunch at my desk and done every single ordinary professional thing available to me — and I had still spent forty percent of my cognitive bandwidth
Redacted Desires Chapter thirty-six
I didn’t sleep that night. I couldn’t. I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop open, Dante’s name on the screen, the city outside doing its early morning business. I turned it over, the way you turned something over when every angle produced a different answer, and none of them were ones you could live with comfortably.Dante Moretti. Sole director. The holding company was incorporated eighteen months ago. Fourteen months after the funeral.The funeral had been private. Small. The way our family did everything that mattered — contained, controlled, no excess of anything including grief. I had stood at the graveside and looked at the ground and felt something that hadn’t resolved itself into any of the categories available for it and had been living with that unresolved thing ever since.A dead man didn’t incorporate a holding company.Which meant either someone had used Dante’s name and identity deliberately — to build a structure designed to be found or to be traced back, a messag
Redacted Desires Chapter thirty-five
Sienna’s POVAfter a few days at home, I decided to go back to work.Sadie had argued against it at seven in the morning with the focused patience of someone who had run the same argument three times and was not going to stop running it simply because it hadn’t worked yet. I listened to all of it. Then I put on my coat, picked up my bag, and went anyway, because sitting in the apartment with the specific quality of silence that followed something terrible was worse than moving through it, and moving had always been the only thing I knew how to do when everything else failed. I instead urged her to take good care of Sam when he was up. The subway was the subway. People with their phones and their coffee and their Monday morning faces, entirely unaware that the woman standing at the far end of the car had spent part of the previous night tied up in a building on the south waterfront. That was the thing about the city — it didn’t adjust for you. It simply continued, and you either moved
Redacted Desires Chapter thirty-four
Cassius’ POVThe first signal came at seven in the morning.Not a call. A car — one of the Moretti gate guards reported it at six forty, a vehicle that had been parked on the access road to the estate since before five, engine off, no plates visible from the gate camera. By the time two of Raphael’s men reached the road, it was gone. But it had been there long enough and the being-there was the message—everyone who needed to understand that understood it within the hour.I was already dressed when the call came through. Bates — the new guard, the one who replaced Marco, young and precise in the way of someone who had learned that brevity was its own form of respect — gave me the details in four sentences and told me Raphael wanted me at the estate by nine.I told him I’d be there.In the car, I called Max.“The vehicle,” I said.“I heard.” He was outside somewhere — the particular quality of his silence when there was open air around it. “They’re not trying to hide that they’re watchi
Redacted Desires Chapter thirty-three
Sienna’s POVI was home by two in the morning.Cassius’s man drove me — one of the quiet ones, the kind who understood that silence wasn’t absence but a kind of permission — and walked me to the building entrance. He waited until I was inside before he turned away, like he’d been instructed to make sure I made it back into something that resembled safety.I took the elevator alone.There was a mirror on the far wall. I didn’t look at my face. I looked at my wrists.The marks were still there. Faint, but deliberate. Not accidents. Not something you could explain away if anyone asked the wrong question. I rotated them slightly, like the angle might change what had happened. It didn’t.I thought about nothing in particular, which was the mind’s way of refusing to choose which part of the night deserved to be faced first.The doors opened.The apartment was dark. I didn’t turn on the lights. It felt wrong to make anything brighter than it already was, like I’d be lying to the space itself
Redacted Desires Chapter Fourteen
Verizon industries — 8:00 a.mI was still in my office when the full picture arrived.Not from any news source. Not from my father. Mathilda broke the news to me rather casually. “Everyone knows,” she said. “Your family. The Castellos reached out twenty minutes ago.”“How bad?”“Ten of your men ar
Redacted Desires Chapter Twelve
Max pulled up to the private terminal at six forty and didn’t cut the engine.“Three days,” he said. “In Italy.” He let that sit for a moment. “Some people spend their whole lives trying to arrange problems like this.”“Get to the point Max.”“The point is you’re going to spend three days eating we
Redacted Desires Chapter Nine
The phone rang at half past ten.I was sitting at the kitchen table with Elena’s notebook open in front of me — not reading, just having it around me made me feel her presence was around. The employment contract was still tucked away at the back where I’d found it. I hadn’t touched it again. I was
Redacted Desires Chapter Eight
CHAPTER 8The Vale residence disappeared in the rearview mirror at nine forty-seven.My father had insisted on sharing the car from the restaurant — not unusual, just the particular kind of insistence that didn’t leave room for an alternative. I dropped him off at the gate, with guards waiting for
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