The Dead Girl's Initials

Hana

Dead people created terrible accounting problems.

They stopped signing checks, collecting salaries, or paying taxes. Their passwords expired. Their names stayed behind on property records and beneficiary forms, where a patient investigator could find them. A person who wanted to hide a living woman inside a dead one's paperwork had to keep making choices, and every choice left a number.

“Was Sofia's body recovered?” I asked.

Luca remained near the windows. “The warehouse fire left bone fragments. Dental records matched.”

“Did you see the report?”

“I saw what my uncle gave us.”

Kenji retrieved a chair from the undamaged side of the table and set it behind me. This time I used it. The relief from touching them had lasted, though my skin remained too tight for my body.

“Tell me about the route,” I said.

Luca looked toward the dead attacker. “Now?”

“Especially now. Someone paid men through the same charity to take me alive or kill anyone who interfered. I don't believe in coincidence when the invoices share a letterhead.”

He came back to the laptop. Sofia had been twenty-two, an omega registered under De Santis protection, which turned the family's home into a gilded jurisdiction. She volunteered at a Santa Lucia clinic in Brooklyn. Officially, she translated for Italian patients. Unofficially, she helped women disappear before pack contracts became cages.

“She asked me for a car the night she vanished,” Luca said. “I gave her one and didn't ask where she was going. I thought I was proving I trusted her.”

No one offered him comfort. Kenji understood that some regrets became insults when another person tried to make them smaller.

“What did the car's records show?” I asked.

“It entered a Santa Lucia garage near Red Hook. The building burned before dawn.”

“And the driver?”

“Sofia drove herself.”

I opened a secure window on the laptop. “I need the charity's archive, including deleted grants and route authorizations.”

Luca removed his signet ring. A narrow line of light appeared inside the band when he pressed it against the computer's biometric strip.

“Subtle,” I said.

“My family believes subtlety is anything smaller than a cathedral.”

His credentials opened the public ledger and three private divisions. A fourth remained hidden behind a blank section of code. I found it because blank spaces cost money, too. The charity had paid monthly hosting fees for a database that claimed to contain no records.

Kenji leaned over my shoulder. “Can you open it without alerting Raffaele?”

“No.”

Luca's expression hardened.

“I can make the alert report a routine tax query from the state,” I added. “That will buy us time until he calls the deputy commissioner he owns.”

“How much time?”

“Depends how late the commissioner stayed at the summit.”

I sent the query.

The hidden division called itself Mercy Transit. There were no passenger names. Each person became a shipment code with a clinic of origin, safe destination, medical requirement, and sponsor key. Most records were fourteen to eighteen years old. The routes stopped six months after Sofia's supposed death.

Not every account stayed dead. Seven destination keys had reactivated during the past year, each attached to refrigeration charges disguised as vaccine transport. Three crossed Sato docks. Four used De Santis warehouses. The newest carried the same medical classification as my false container: endocrine stabilization, twelve living units.

Living units. Someone had taught the ledger to call people cargo, then claimed charity on the taxes.

“She built this,” Luca said.

“Or used it.” I opened the code definitions. “SDS appears in the sponsor field.”

His hand landed on the back of my chair. “Those were her initials.”

“They could also stand for secure document service, same-day shelter, or someone's idea of camouflage.”

“Sofia hated her middle name. She used all three initials only when she wanted our father to know she was angry.”

“What was it?” Kenji asked.

“Domenica.”

“A respectable name.”

“She was named after a grandmother who bit a priest.”

I examined the Mercy Transit authorizations. The SDS key had sponsored nine omegas and four children before the warehouse fire. Three destinations matched properties that later entered Council custody. Two refugees disappeared from the records. One name had been restored years later under a beta designation.

I knew how much work that transformation required.

“Sofia wasn't only moving people,” I said. “She was changing their classifications.”

Luca bent closer. Coffee and cold air wrapped around me, answering the heat that had begun to climb again. His breath touched the loose hair beside my ear. One turn of my head would bring our mouths within an inch. My wolf surged toward the possibility, and his hand tightened on the chair as if he felt it.

“Can you tell where she sent them?” he asked, his voice lower now.

“Not yet. The destination keys use a separate cipher.”

Kenji placed Aiko's broken vial beside the laptop. The crescent stamped into its cap reflected the screen.

The symbol matched a mark in the Mercy Transit medical column.

I enlarged the earliest record. A crescent identified the clinician who prepared suppressant packs for travel. The name was absent, but the billing address belonged to the building where Aiko kept her clinic now.

“Aiko inherited Sofia's medical channel,” I said.

“Or stole it,” Kenji said.

“She would've been in medical school when these records began. Someone handed it to her later.”

I searched the current container number against the old database. No result. Then I removed the new port prefix and reversed the final digits, following the pattern Sofia had used to mask destination codes.

The record opened.

The nonexistent container wasn't new. Its identifier had first appeared fourteen years ago, assigned to a Mercy Transit run scheduled after the warehouse fire. Refrigeration. Medical escort. Twelve passengers. Sponsor authorization SDS.

Luca read the date twice.

The cargo had left New York eleven days after Sofia De Santis's funeral.