Chapter 9 The Account
She showed him the screen without saying a word.
Marco looked at the zero balance. Then at the transaction date. Then he looked at her.
Three days before the gala.
She watched his face process it — the sequence of it, what it meant, the implication of that date sitting there clean and undeniable on the screen. She had expected him to reach for an explanation immediately. That was what he did — assess, analyse, move.
He didn't move.
He stood there looking at the date and something shifted behind his eyes that she had no name for yet.
"The attacks didn't start because you were close to leaving," he said.
"I was close to leaving because the attacks were already planned," she finished.
The studio held that between them for a long moment. Outside the window the Hollywood Hills sat in the early dark, all those expensive lights scattered across the canyon. She had looked at that view her whole life and called it home.
He took the burner phone and worked fast and silent, fingers moving across the screen with the focused efficiency she had come to recognise as his version of urgency. She sat on the worktable and watched him trace the transfer — the money moving through two intermediate accounts, each one cleaner than the last, before disappearing into a private banking institution she had never heard of.
He stopped.
Looked at the screen.
Three full seconds without moving.
"Marco."
He turned the phone so she could see.
The intermediate account had a name attached to it. A shell identity — constructed carefully, professionally, the kind of financial architecture that took months to build and significant knowledge to execute. Not the work of someone panicking. The work of someone who had been planning very quietly for a very long time.
The name on the account was Paige Ferraro.
The room tilted.
"She built this," Gia said slowly. "Before she died. She built the infrastructure to move money — to help people get out." She looked up at him. "She was going to use it for my mother."
Marco's jaw was tight. His hand holding the phone completely still but his knuckles white in the way she had learned to read — the only place his control ever showed its edges. She watched him absorb it. Watched him take the weight of it and distribute it across every assumption he had been carrying about Paige's death and what it had and hadn't accomplished.
"Someone has been using it," he said. Flat. Careful. Like a man handling something that could break. "After she died. Someone who knew it existed. Someone who knew exactly what it was built for."
Paige had been dead for seven years.
Her work was still running.
The money she had built infrastructure to move was still moving. Quietly. Deliberately. Through the same channels she had constructed — maintained by someone with enough access and enough knowledge to keep it alive without drawing attention.
Seven years.
Right under the don's roof.
They were standing close without having decided to be — both looking at the phone screen, the studio quiet around them, the weight of what they had just found sitting between them like something that changed the shape of the air.
The warmth of him beside her. The way his breathing had gone slightly uneven in a way it never did — not in confrontations, not under pressure, not in any of the moments she had watched him stay completely controlled when everything around him was falling apart.
This had gotten through.
Paige's name on that screen had gotten through every wall he had.
She didn't move away.
She stayed exactly where she was, close enough that their arms were almost touching, and let him have the moment without making it something he had to manage or explain or lock back down.
He looked at her.
Not the phone. Not the screen.
For a second. Long enough for her to see something in his eyes that he hadn't shown her before — something that wasn't grief and wasn't duty and had her name written all over it even though neither of them was going to say that out loud.
Not yet.
Not here.
She looked back at the phone screen.
He looked away.
Both of them pretending the last five seconds hadn't happened.
Twenty minutes later Luca was in the doorway.
She saw his face and knew immediately he hadn't come to explain himself.
"You found the account," he said.
"You knew," Marco said. Not a question.
"Before the gala." Luca stepped into the room. The exhaustion on him had nothing to do with sleep — the weight of someone who had been carrying a secret that was too big and too dangerous to put down and too heavy to keep holding. "I found out and I didn't know what to do with it. I was trying to figure out how to—"
"Who moved the money, Luca." Gia's voice came out quiet and sharp.
He looked at the door. Then back at them.
"Someone who has been finishing what Paige started," he said. "Someone inside this house the whole time. Someone my father has never once tried to control." A pause that had weight in it. "Because he never knew she was involved."
Marco asked it in two words.
"Who. Luca."
Luca looked at him steadily.
"Maria," he said. "Head of household. Twenty-two years in this house." He stopped. "She was here when Paige was here. She was the last person to see her alive."
The studio went absolutely silent.
Gia looked at Marco.
His face had gone to that controlled blank — but underneath it, in the set of his jaw and the particular stillness of his hands, she could see it. The expression of a man recalibrating everything he thought he understood about the last seven years.
Twenty-two years in this house.
Last person to see Paige alive.
Not once on anyone's radar.
Not once.