CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
The rain had been steady all afternoon, turning the city streets into blurred ribbons of water. Inside a dim corner of a cafe on the far edge of the financial district, Giuliana sat across from a man who had been avoiding her calls for weeks. He looked uncomfortable, shoulders hunched as if trying to fold himself into his coat. The steam from his untouched coffee curled between them.

“You have a daughter,” Giuliana said softly, her tone not matching the cold precision in her eyes. “She is almost done with her degree. Expensive school. The kind of place that does not take kindly to scandal.”

The man’s fingers tightened around his cup. “You said this was about a business matter.”

“It is. A simple one.” She leaned forward, lowering her voice. “There is a file. A public one. Belongs to Alessia De Luca. I need something placed in it. Nothing dramatic. Just enough to be noticed.”

His jaw flexed. “Why me?”

“Because you still have access,” she replied, glancing at the leather portfolio resting at his side. “And because if you refuse, I will have to make that missing De Luca shipment from three years ago look like your doing. The papers will eat it up. And your daughter… well, she might have to finish her degree somewhere less prestigious.”

His eyes flicked to the window, then back to her. There was no argument left in him. She knew it before he even exhaled.

“What do you want in the file?” he asked.

Giuliana smiled faintly. “Something small. A whisper of financial irregularities. Enough to raise a question without drawing a conclusion. Let it sit like a splinter until it festers.”

He nodded once, defeated. She slid a folded paper across the table, the details neatly written.

By nightfall, the man had done exactly as she asked.

What he did not know was that Matteo already had eyes on him.

From the moment the man accessed the restricted registry, a silent alert went off on Matteo’s network. By the time the altered document reached Alessia’s public file, Matteo was in his private study at the villa, watching the change happen in real time. He could have erased it completely. It would have taken less than a minute. But instead, he sat back in his chair, fingers steepled, and considered the possibilities. A portion of it could remain. Not enough to implicate her in anything, but enough to make her feel the heat of suspicion. Enough to make her wonder who was watching her and why.

It would drive her closer to him.

His decision was made in seconds. He stripped the most damaging sections from the file, replaced them with subtle inconsistencies that only someone looking closely would notice. Then he closed the program and poured himself a drink.

The next morning, Alessia was in the gallery’s office when she noticed the change. The clerk had called about a request for access to her public record, something she rarely thought about. Out of habit, she opened the database. There it was. A discrepancy in one of the asset transfers from last year. The numbers did not match what she remembered approving. She frowned, scrolling further. Another minor detail out of place. By the third one, a cold knot formed in her stomach.

Matteo appeared in the doorway without a sound. “What is it?” he asked, his gaze sliding to the screen before she could close it.

“There is something wrong in my file,” she said, her voice tighter than she intended. “Some of these records are wrong.”

He stepped closer, resting a hand on the back of her chair. “Wrong how?”

She pointed to the mismatched numbers. “See this? That is not what I signed.”

He studied it for a long moment, his face unreadable. “It could be an error in transcription,” he said slowly. “Or…” His voice trailed off, letting the implication hang.

“Or what?” she pressed.

“Or someone is trying to make it look like you made mistakes,” he said, his hand settling lightly on her shoulder. “Someone who knows how to get into these files.”

Her pulse quickened. “Who would do that?”

“I can think of several names,” Matteo replied. His tone was calm, but his eyes never left hers. “You cannot afford to ignore this. If someone is testing the water, it means they are looking for a way in.”

Alessia looked back at the screen, her mind spinning. She thought of the gallery, of the whispers in the crowd that night, of the moved painting and the empty wall safe.

Matteo’s hand tightened, almost imperceptibly. “Let me handle it,” he said. “You have enough to worry about.”

Something in her chest eased, though she could not explain why. She nodded slowly, closing the file.

“Good,” he said, straightening. “And do not mention this to anyone else. Not yet.”

When she left the office to return to the main floor, Matteo stayed behind. He reopened the database, confirming that the edits he had allowed remained exactly as he intended. He closed it again and reached for his phone.
The man Giuliana had coerced would not be an issue for long.

Giuliana’s study was a contrast to the rest of her townhouse. The rest of the place was polished for guests, all marble and glass, but the study was darker, lined with heavy curtains and the scent of clove smoke. A single lamp lit her desk, its pool of gold catching the edges of scattered photographs, torn documents and an open laptop. The laptop screen showed a grainy still image, frozen in time. Cai Navarro, or rather Mr Callen as Alessia knew him, leaning against a street railing in the early morning light. The image had been pulled from the memory of a burner phone, one Giuliana’s man had lifted from a discreet drop point near the gallery. It had taken only a few hours for her people to break into the device. Most of the contents were exactly what she expected — nothing identifiable, all neat and sterile. But buried under an innocuous set of archived street shots was a detail she had not anticipated.

In one photograph, half-reflected in a window behind Cai, there was a face. Older, sharper, framed by salt-and-pepper hair. Marco. The image was faint, but Giuliana’s trained eye did not miss details like that. She zoomed in, studying the subtle tension in his jaw, the way his gaze was fixed somewhere past the lens. It was not a chance encounter. He had been there to meet Cai. She tapped her fingernails against the desk in slow rhythm. The man who had been a quiet shadow in Alessia’s life was no longer keeping to the edges. He was here. And if Marco was here, it meant he was already moving against her.

She sat back, letting the possibilities arrange themselves in her mind. Marco’s involvement had always been a risk, but his choice to send someone like Cai in close to Alessia meant he was desperate. Desperate people made mistakes. Her phone buzzed once, a secure notification from her tech. The metadata from the photograph had been extracted. A single GPS tag blinked in the corner of her screen. She read it, memorised the coordinates, and smiled.

It was a location she knew. A quiet building on the edge of the district, no obvious ties to Marco on paper, but used by his trusted contacts over the years. He had made the mistake of letting it slip into a place she could reach. Giuliana leaned forward, resting her elbows on the desk. She could have moved immediately, could have sent men to take him before he made his next move. But timing was everything, and she preferred her enemies to walk into their own traps.

She opened her contacts list, scrolling past names until she reached one she had not called in months. A man who had a reputation for making problems disappear without leaving a trace. When the line clicked open, she did not waste time with pleasantries.

“Let him come for her,” Giuliana said, her tone calm and almost indulgent, as though she were discussing the weather.

A pause on the other end, then a low chuckle. “And?”

Her smile deepened, though it did not reach her eyes. “Let him die trying.”

She ended the call without waiting for a response, the sound of the connection cutting off sharp in the room.

Outside, the rain had eased into a steady drizzle. Giuliana reached for the photograph of Cai on her desk, her gaze lingering on the faint reflection of Marco in the background. She traced the outline of his face with her fingertip, almost absentmindedly, before setting it down again.

Everything was aligning now. The file in Alessia’s records, the unrest it would cause, the cracks it would open. Matteo might think he was the only one steering Alessia’s path, but Giuliana was already weaving her own net around them both.

In the quiet that followed, she returned to her chair and lit another clove cigarette, the smoke curling lazily toward the ceiling. She could almost hear the ticking of the clock in the silence. Marco would come. He always had tha
t flaw — the need to protect what he thought was his.

This time, she would be ready.