Chapter 14 - The Man Who Was Supposed to Be Dead
Valentina took the ledger from Nico without looking away from Adrian.
“Explain.”
Adrian’s face tightened.
“Not here.”
“That answer stopped working eight years ago.”
Marco laughed from between two guards.
Adrian ignored him.
“Domenico asked me to keep Garden Seven alive if anything happened to him.”
“You funded it.”
“Yes.”
“Through what?”
“Moretti fronts.”
“Why hide that from me?”
“Because one of the rules was that you could not know the archive still existed until it surfaced on its own.”
Valentina looked at Nico.
Nico nodded slowly.
“Your father built it that way.”
Valentina wanted to believe neither man.
Marco watched her wanting it.
That was what angered her most.
Tomas carried in a laptop.
“We traced Adrian’s transfers.”
Adrian did not flinch.
“They match Garden Seven maintenance accounts.”
Marco’s smile faded a fraction.
“Also,” Tomas continued, “the transfers stop six months ago.”
“Why?” Valentina asked.
Adrian’s jaw tightened.
“Because somebody changed the routing keys.”
“Who?”
“I didn’t know until today.”
He looked at Marco.
“Bellini.”
Marco lunged against the guards.
“Liar.”
Adrian stepped closer.
“I followed your cleanup money for three years.”
He put a small encrypted drive on the table.
“Domenico’s wine. Gerald’s shell companies. Payments to the chemist who supplied the poison. Payments to men who staged my death.”
Valentina picked up the drive.
Everything she had spent the day digging toward sat in half an ounce of black plastic.
Marco’s eyes fixed on it.
“Destroy it,” he said.
Nobody moved.
Gerald stared at him.
Evelyn, pale from blood loss but conscious on a stretcher near the doorway, started laughing.
Not loudly.
Just enough.
Marco snapped.
He tore free of one guard, slammed his wounded arm into the other man’s throat, and reached for Lily’s trust binder on the table.
Valentina drove him down before he got two steps.
Her knee pinned his chest.
“You killed my father.”
Marco looked up at her.
“I preserved what he was too weak to keep.”
“You tried to use my daughter.”
“I tried to prevent a child from inheriting a war.”
“No.”
Valentina leaned closer.
“You tried to inherit it yourself.”
Behind them, Adrian said her name.
She looked over.
The lights flickered.
Once.
Twice.
May you like
Then every light in the estate went out.
