Chapter 38 The Source

Chapter 38 The Source
Three days passed without another message.

Gia kept the phone face up on the counter for the first night, then in her pocket, then eventually forgot to check it every few minutes the way she had at first. The bluff theory held. Renata remained in Baja, untouched. Reyes confirmed no movement from Hale’s office, no subpoenas filed against the florist, no indication anyone had so much as looked twice at a Silver Lake flower shop with a thirty-year-old landline.

Marco had been right.

It still bothered her.

Not because the threat had been empty. Because something true had been folded inside it. Hale’s people had known the word florist. Not the name. Not the shop. Just enough to make the message land, enough specificity to be frightening without being precise enough to actually compromise anything.

That kind of half-knowledge did not come from nowhere.

She found Maria in the kitchen on the fourth morning, the way she always did, and asked the question she had been turning over since the message arrived.

“Who knew about the florist channel?”

Maria did not look up from the bread she was kneading. “You. Marco. Me.”

“Anyone else?”

“No one else.”

Gia sat at the table. “Then how did Hale’s people know the word florist was connected to anything at all?”

Maria’s hands stilled.

For the first time since Gia had known her, Maria looked uncertain. Not frightened. Uncertain, which was rarer and more unsettling, because uncertainty was not a quality this house associated with Maria Reyes…  with Maria, full stop.

“I called the florist from the kitchen phone,” Maria said slowly. “The landline. I said nothing unusual. A delivery instruction. Nothing that should have meant anything to anyone listening.”

“Then how…” Gia started.

“Because I called twice that week,” Maria said. “Once for the actual delivery. Once after, to confirm the message had reached Reyes’s mother. Two calls to a florist in one week, the second with no order attached to it. To anyone listening for patterns, that is not suspicious on its own. But it is unusual enough to flag for a second look. And a second look is all Hale’s people needed.”

The kitchen went very still.

Marco confirmed it within the hour, after pulling apart the base of the kitchen’s landline phone with the patience of a man who had once made a career out of finding exactly this kind of thing.

A small device, barely larger than a coin, fitted into the housing where no one would think to look unless they were looking for it specifically.

“Professional grade,” he said, turning it over in his palm. “Not something you buy. Something you’re issued.”

“How long has it been there?” Gia asked.

“Long enough that I should have found it already.”

“I swept the house after the raid,” Marco said. “Found nothing. I should have checked again before now. I didn’t, because nothing since then gave me a reason to think anyone new had access.” His voice was flat in a way she recognized. “The fashion house’s lawyers. The contractor. Foundation staff. I let routine become an excuse.”

“That was reasonable,” Gia said.

“It was wrong,” Marco said. “Reasonable and wrong are not mutually exclusive.”

The device had been planted sometime in the last four to six weeks, by Marco’s best estimate, based on the dust pattern inside the housing.

After his sweep. After he’d called it clean.

Gia sat with the device in a small evidence bag on the kitchen table and went through the list of people who had been inside this house in the last month and a half. Foundation staff, delivered paperwork, a contractor repairing the east corridor’s old wiring, two FBI technicians completing final sweeps after the raid, Luca’s lawyer handling the acquisition documents, the fashion house’s legal team during the Paris negotiations.

Any one of them could have had thirty seconds alone near a phone.

It was an impossibly long list. Not the weight of one traitor among people she trusted. The weight of understanding that a house this open could not be sealed again, not without becoming the kind of house it had refused to be.

“This isn’t about finding one person,” Gia said slowly.

Marco looked at her.

“It’s about the fact that we built something open,” she said. “On purpose. The foundation, the legitimate businesses, Luca’s deals… we tore down the walls because the walls were the problem. The cameras. The blind spots. The secrecy. We built something that lets people in.” She looked at the device in the bag. “And now someone’s walked through the door we left open.”

Marco was quiet for a long moment.

“The don’s house had no doors,” he said. “Just walls and people who guarded them. Yours has doors. That was the right choice. It does not make this easier.”

Reyes arrived that evening, having driven herself, telling no one where she was going, leaving her phone at her office.

She examined the device under the kitchen light with the focused attention of someone who had seen its type before.

“This is federal-grade equipment,” she said finally. “Not something a private contractor buys on the open market. Not even something Caruso’s old network would have had access to.”

“Hale,” Gia said.

“Hale has access to surveillance technology through channels none of us can touch,” Reyes said. “Which means this was not installed by someone working for Hale in the criminal sense. This was installed by someone with legitimate federal access, who used that access to plant it.”

Gia felt the floor shift slightly.

“You think it’s someone inside the investigation,” she said.

Reyes did not answer immediately. When she did, her voice was careful in a way Gia had not heard from her before.

“I think Hale has been a federal prosecutor for twenty-three years,” she said. “He did not get this powerful by only corrupting people outside the system. People inside the system are easier. They already have access. They already have credibility. All they need is a reason.”

“Someone on your team,” Gia said.

“Someone on my team,” Reyes confirmed. “Or close enough to it that the difference does not matter.”

The kitchen, which had held confessions and recordings and seven empty chairs and four words from a don who rarely gave them, held this in silence too.

“Which means,” Marco said slowly, “Hale has known everything we’ve told Reyes. The portfolio. Renata. All of it.”

“Not everything,” Reyes said. “I have compartmentalized this investigation more than my own office knows. But enough.” She looked at Gia. “Enough that he knows you have leverage. He does not yet know exactly how much, or exactly what shape it takes. That gap is the only thing keeping all of us alive right now.”

Gia looked at the small device sitting in its evidence bag on the table that had held everything this family had ever needed to survive.

“Then we close the gap before he does,” she said.