All Chapters of THE DON'S DAUGHTER: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Elise's POVMonday morning Marco came in with his folder and his coffee and his thirty years of practiced calm and I smiled at him across the war room table and asked how his weekend was.He said quiet. Just how he liked it.I said good. Me too.We ran the briefing.The false route I had fed him last week had moved — Nico confirmed it Sunday night, two Greco vehicles repositioned toward the border checkpoint we had invented, sitting there waiting for a shipment that would never come. The men inside those vehicles were patient but patience has limits and when the shipment didn't materialize by Tuesday they would report back to someone and that someone would report to someone else and eventually the information would trace back to its source.Marco had maybe seventy-two hours before the Grecos started asking uncomfortable questions about the quality of his intelligence.I did not tell him that.I asked about the eastern port operations and he gave me an update that was seventy percent a

Elise's POVRafael called my father on a Wednesday.I was in the study when it happened — sitting across from my father reviewing the allied family responses to last week's dinner, tracking which relationships had warmed and which were still waiting to see which way things settled. My father's phone lit up on the desk between us and we both saw the name at the same time.My father looked at me.I nodded once.He answered and put it on speaker without changing his expression."Victor." My uncle's voice. I had not heard it in eleven years — since the night he left and my father spent a week not sleeping and never explained why to a twelve-year-old girl who kept finding him in rooms he wasn't supposed to be in at three in the morning. The voice was older now. Rougher around the edges. But the particular rhythm of it, the way he weighted certain words, was identical.My father's jaw tightened. Just slightly. Just enough for me to see."Rafael," he said."I heard about Elise." A pause. "I

Elise's POVThat night I went to the garden again.Not for strategy this time. Not to think anything through. Just because the house felt full in a way it hadn't before Rafael arrived — full of something unresolved, something that moved through the corridors and sat in the corners of rooms and would not settle.I sat on my mother's bench and I let myself be tired.Really tired. Not the surface tired of too little sleep but the underneath kind — the kind that comes from holding everything in place for weeks without letting any of it show a crack. I was good at not showing cracks. I had learned it young and practiced it long and the skill was so embedded now that sometimes I couldn't find the crack myself until I was sitting alone in a cold garden at ten o'clock at night and it just appeared, all at once, unavoidable.My uncle had been in my father's house for six hours.Six hours and already I could feel the shape of how it was going to cost my father. Not the information — that was us

Elise's POVWe were in the war room by seven going through Rafael's contacts when Nico said the wrong thing.It wasn't malicious. I don't think he even knew he'd said it until he saw my face. That's the thing about the wrong things — they come out in the middle of ordinary sentences, no warning, just suddenly there.We were cross-referencing a name Rafael had given us the night before — a man in the north who had been handling transfers between the Greco and Albero networks for three years. I was writing and Nico was reading the corresponding file and he said, without looking up, "He was useful to Adrian too, apparently. There's a connection through the Reeds company — looks like a contractor, early on. Before Jade.""Meaning what?" I asked."Meaning Adrian may have had existing ties to the Greco network before Jade arrived." He turned a page. "Which means the marriage wasn't just about placing Jade near you — it may have been about the Reeds business connection too. Two operations ru

Elise's POVCain called on a Sunday evening while I was in the middle of an argument with my father.Not a loud argument. We didn't do loud. It was the worse kind — controlled, precise, both of us choosing words carefully because we both knew how to use them and there was enough history in that room to make careless language dangerous.It had started over Rafael.My father wanted to move faster. He had spent two days debriefing Rafael and he wanted to act on the information now — close the eastern network, pull the thread on the contractor in the north, move before the Grecos noticed the silence from Enzo's end and started asking questions. I understood the impulse. What I didn't agree with was the timing."We move now and we get half of it," I said. "We wait another week and we get all of it.""A week is too long," my father said. "Savio is handling Enzo but he is not a man who moves slowly. When Enzo falls the ripple will reach—""I know what the ripple will reach. I've mapped it."