A flashing red light beats like a heart in that silent room, an artificial pulse from a man now purported to be a ghost. He stood behind her, a wall of heat and coiled tension. "Open it," he ordered, his voice like steel scraped against stone. "And trace him." Serena's fingers moved on their own, trained her through where her composure was going to crock. The execution of the trace protocol splitting her screen into a dizzying map of the world as the program began to unravel Vecchio's digital path. "He's good," she said, her voice a clipped, professional monotone that belied the frantic pounding in her chest. "Bouncing the signal through a phantom network based in Eastern Europe, then rerouting through a dead-drop server in Macau. He isn't hiding; he's showing off. The trace is active but it will be slow."

"I don't care how slow it is," Damiano growled. "I want to know where he is. Now, open the message." With one final keystroke, she stripped away the encryption from the container. It wasn't a short letter or a list of demands but something much more elegant and far more cruel. A single image file loaded onto the screen, followed by one line of text. The image came into focus with nauseating clarity. The shot was informal, sun-drenched, and feature-aged Damiano, still in what appeared to be early twenties, stood in a beautiful, bougainvillea-lined terrace screaming of the Amalfi Coast while a younger version of himself flung an arm casually over another young man's shoulders, who, smiling wide and proud at the camera. Serena's breath hitched in her throat, a choked, painful gasp. The other man was her brother. Marco didn't just look like an associate but rather a friend, and most certainly a brother.

Then there was the line of text below the shattering image, which was aimed by Vecchio straight like a poisoned dart inside the fragile alliance they had in the room. Weak as you are for strays, did you tell this one how the last one died? The world tilted off its axis. Serena stared at the screen, a ghost of her smiling brother alongside the man she had begun, for a few insane hours, to trust. The fine, horrifying truth she had uncovered in the REGICIDE file—that Marco was expendable collateral—now a lie, or worse but an incomplete version of a far more personal betrayal. This picture, this message, suggested an entangled history beyond her reckoning. An implication of a relationship Damiano had deliberately hidden from her, painstakingly. Why? Had Marco always been working for Damiano? Is the file on REGICIDE some made-up thing? Is Vecchio telling the truth? The well-crafted reality she had just rebuilt shattered into a million pieces, weaving her adrift in a sea of newer, much worse questions.

The silence in that formidable room was only broken by the crackle of fire. The ghost up in that screen is a reflection of something that condemns both of them: Serena. Damiano felt this stillness now, for behind her, no more was the stillness of his order, just the frozen quiet of one who has just received the mortal blow. Vecchio had reached into his unknown bolthole, detonating a bomb inside the Moretti estate, and the shrapnel was aimed very directly at the bond joining Damiano and Serena. She wrenched her gaze away from the monitor, away from the image of her brother's smiling face, and turned slowly in her chair to Damiano. His face was pale and drawn in a mask of fury, but beneath it, in the depths of his silver eyes, she saw it for the first time. Not just rage, not just betrayal, but something much deeper and undeniable: sadness. He had been hiding this all along. He had known the whole time. The frangible trust and the common cause, the devil's mercy, all curdled into ash in her mouth. Her voice, when she found it, was shaking barely above a whisper, filled with all the weight of a thousand fresh accusations: "Who was my brother to you?"