LOGINFerro exhaled slowly, and when he spoke again, the stillness in his posture was gone, now replaced by the slump of a man setting down a weight he'd carried further than he'd meant to."It's been years. Eight years, to be precise." he said. "That's how long this one in particular has been building, long before your father died, Signor De Luca. Long before the tunnels or any of the things you've spent this last year trying to survive." He glanced up. "You've been fighting the end of something that started while you were still learning how to run a boardroom."Lorenzo felt the words settle into him slowly, the way cold water found every gap in a coat.. "I've gotten to know about all of that already. What I want to you do, is explain how you are connected to any of it.""It started small. A shipping contract redirected here. A logistics fee that didn't quite match the invoice there. Nothing that would ever trip an internal audit on its own. Every year, another piece and another executive
The room smelled like concrete and cold metal, the usual scent that comes with a space that hold people that didn't want to be held. A single bulb hung overhead, throwing everything else into a hard, unflattering light that left no shadows for a man to hide behind, not even his own expression. The prisoner looked up when the door opened, the faint smirk of amusement still plastered on his face even though it had begun to thin out a little bit. Marco dragged a chair towards him, scraping it loudly across the concrete floor and came to sit down in front of him, they were so close that their knees nearly touched. Lorenzo remained standing near the door with his arms folded as the silence stretched. That was the one thing he had learnt from Dante; to stay silent in situations like this because silence has its way of unsettling men who expected to be questioned. "So do you have a name?" Marco asked. "Well… I have quite a number of them." The captive responded with a satisfied smirk.
Marco was the first to move, he pulled up a second monitor, cross-referencing the timeline Sofia had built weeks earlier; the resignations, the forged signature, the pattern of infiltration stretching back two years before Dante had even died. "If he's a handler," Marco said, "that means he doesn't just watch. He reports back to someone and he's carrying information right now. Names. Locations and whatever intelligence he's gathered on this house since the day he first showed up at that fence line." "Which means he's worth more to us than any of the men in Sofia's files," Lorenzo said slowly, his voice cutting straight through the air in the room. "The traitor inside the company. Moretti. Ricci and whoever else. We've been chasing paperwork and forged signatures for weeks. While this man has actually stood in a room with them." Marco's mouth curved into a smile either, the same expression Lorenzo remembered from years ago, the look he always wore right when his plan started coming t
They dragged him through the vineyard rows with his hands bound behind him and mud smeared up one side of his jaw where Lorenzo had put him down, and not once through the entire walk did the man stop wearing that same faint, satisfied expression, like a guest arriving fashionably late to a party he'd already decided he was going to enjoy and it unsettled Lorenzo.Marco walked half a step behind the prisoner the entire way, close enough to grab him if he tried anything funny but just far enough to study him without it being too obvious. Lorenzo caught the exact moment his old friend's expression shifted, Marco's jaw had tightened in a way that had nothing to do with anger."Do you know him?" Lorenzo asked quietly, falling into step beside him."No." Marco's eyes never left the back of the man's head. "But I know what he is.""What do you mean?""Take a good look at his hands." Marco nodded toward the prisoner's bound wrists, where the man's fingers hung loose, unbothered, there was not
By nine that evening the property had gone completely dark. Marco had ordered half the perimeter lights killed, leaving only the essential ones that were burning near the house itself, turning the eastern treeline into a wall of shadows. To anyone watching from a distance, it would look like carelessness, like a family that was finally letting its guard down after a long week of tightened security.Lorenzo stayed crouched in the brush forty meters from where the figure had stood twice now, his earpiece silent and the radio traffic minimal by design. Then, Marco's voice came through low and even."Team two in position on the access road. There's nothing yet.""Copy."The wait stretched past twenty minutes and just long enough that Lorenzo's knee began to ache against the cold ground and he'd began running through the possibility that tonight would be the night the pattern finally broke and that whoever this was had sensed the shift in the house and simply stayed back home.He used the
The salute replayed in Lorenzo’s mind, long after the screen had gone blank. He sat with it all through that night and never stopped turning it over in his head, to him, a mock salute wasn't fear, it was contempt. Early the next morning, Lorenzo was in the security office before Marco arrived, he'd showered, dressed, and eaten nothing, and when Marco walked in still rubbing sleep from one eye, he stopped in the doorway when he saw him. "You're up early." "I'm done watching a screen wait for him to show up again," Lorenzo said. "So we're going to go find him instead." "You want to hunt him." Marco's eyes shut open as the exhaustion faded away. "Exactly, I'm done being the one standing behind glass." Marco stared at him for a long moment, like he used to do during the earlier years when Lorenzo would come to him with plans that were crazy enough to get them both killed. "Finally," he said, satisfaction settling on his face. They spent the entire morning by the map table. Marco
The sound hit Isabella like a physical blow; everything stopped, not the gunfire or movement or even the chaos tearing through the corridor. Just her. And her body locked in place, her breath catching painfully in her throat as her mind struggled to process what she had just heard. That voice…
The sound of that voice didn’t just fill the corridor, it settled deep into Lorenzo’s bones.Familiar.Too familiar.The man began to take slow, controlled steps forward towards Lorenzo. The dim light caught the side of his face first, displaying his sharp jaw, composed expression and eyes that hel
The cry didn’t stop; instead, it echoed through the corridor; thin, frightened, unmistakably real and it didn’t come from the child in Isabella’s arms. Almost immediately, everything snapped into place. Lorenzo didn’t hesitate. “Stay behind me,” he said, his voice coming low but carrying somethi
Sofia's revelation sent chills through everybody's spine, except Marco, of course because what Sofia had just said wasn't just dangerous, it was final. “…you might not come back at all.” The words hung in the air like a sentence already passed. Lorenzo, himself didn't argue because he felt it; t







