Chapter 105 The Road

Chapter 105 The Road

Luca's Pov

Elena told me about Rafael at the kitchen table.

She put the documents in front of me in the order she had found them. The holding company. The Bruni layer. The coastal property registration. The routing record from twenty-six years ago. The lineage connection between the Moretti name and her own family line.

I read each one without interrupting.

When she finished laying them out she sat back and waited.

"He called you," I said.

"Yes," she said.

"He told you my father arranged your father's death."

"Yes."

I looked at the routing record for a long moment. "This connects his grandfather's holding company to a police account," I said. "There is no De Santis name in this chain."

"I know," she said. "I told Sienna I did not believe it. I am telling you because you deserve to know what he said and because I do not hold things from you anymore."

"Do you believe it," I said.

She held my gaze. "No," she said. "He found a real document and reframed it. The connection is his family, not yours. But he knew your father's history was the one claim I could not immediately disprove."

"Because it involves your father," I said.

"Yes," she said.

I closed the documents. I pressed my hand flat on the stack. "Carlo will pull everything on Rafael by tomorrow," I said.

"I asked Sienna to start last night," she said.

"Good." I held her gaze. "Elena."

"I know what you are going to ask," she said.

"Ask it anyway," I said.

She looked at the table briefly. Then back at me. "Yes," she said. "It affected me. Not because I believe the claim. Because it concerns my father. That subject does not have the same distance as everything else." She held my gaze. "But it did not change my answer to him. It did not change anything between us."

I held her gaze for a long moment. Then I nodded once.

"The weekend," I said.

She blinked. "What weekend," she said.

"The coast," I said. "The hotel we booked three weeks ago. Two days where nothing requires our immediate attention."

"We cannot leave right now," she said. "Rafael has a twenty-four-hour window open. Carlo is still building the picture on him."

"Carlo will call when he has something," I said. "Sienna has the city covered. Dr. Voss has been suspended from access. The Victor documentation is with the regulators." I held her gaze. "We leave tomorrow morning."

She looked at me for a moment. "You are serious," she said.

"The house attack was three weeks ago," I said. "Rafael. Victor. Ferraro. Voss. Mateo." I kept my voice level. "Two days is not abandonment. It is necessary maintenance."

She almost smiled at that. "Maintenance," she said.

"Yes," I said. "Required maintenance."

We left the next morning. Gio had arranged the route and a different vehicle than usual. Two of Sienna's team followed at a discreet distance. The coast was three hours from the city. The hotel was small and had been chosen by Elena through a colleague at Hartwell specifically because nobody in any relevant network would have reason to know about it.

The first day was the closest thing to ordinary I had experienced in months. A walk along the waterfront in the morning. Lunch at a restaurant where nobody looked twice at us. An afternoon in the hotel room that required no decisions from either of us.

In the evening I sat on the small balcony with Elena and a glass of wine. The water was doing what water did in the evening light.

"The capitalization documentation," she said. "The lawyer confirmed this morning that the subpoena for the routing record is viable."

"Pursue it," I said.

"If it confirms what I think it confirms, we have documented evidence that Rafael's family was connected to her father's case," she said. "Not yours."

"It closes the lie," I said.

"Yes," she said. "It gives us something to work with if he tries to use the claim publicly."

I looked at the water. "He will make another move within the twenty-four-hour window," I said.

"The window closed at noon today," she said. "He will know I did not call back. He is adjusting."

"Then we have a short period while he adjusts," I said.

"Yes," she said. "Possibly two days."

"Then we are using them correctly," I said.

She held her glass. The light on the water was going flat the way it did in the last hour before dark.

"The eastern territory supplier," she said. "The throughput review concluded yesterday. Sienna sent the numbers."

"I read them," I said.

"The capacity is real," she said. "Not paper capacity. Actual operational throughput."

"Yes," I said. "The Serrano arrangement can scale."

"Without Victor," she said.

"Without Victor," I said.

She settled in her chair. "The direction is working," she said.

"Yes," I said. "It is."

We stayed on the balcony for another hour. The conversation moved through practical things and then away from them. The north bed lavender at the house. A structural problem she had identified in the third act of a book she was reading. Something Arda at Hartwell had said that had genuinely made her laugh.

Normal things.

On the second morning we had breakfast at the hotel and walked the waterfront again. Elena photographed the water with her phone. I watched her do it.

"For the house," she said without looking up.

"Yes," I said.

We left at noon. The drive back was easy. The Sienna team held their discreet distance. The road was open.

An hour from the city the route narrowed into a single-lane stretch through a forested section. The kind of road that appeared on a map as a shortcut. The trees on both sides made the light uneven.

I noticed the second vehicle three minutes before it moved. A large car at the edge of the tree line, positioned at an angle that no parked vehicle at rest would naturally take. I reached for my phone.

The car came out of the tree line at speed. It hit us on the passenger side with a force that rotated the world. Elena's window became the ground. Our car stopped when it reached the ditch on the far side of the road.

I checked myself. Upright. Functional. I turned to Elena immediately.

She was against the passenger door with a cut on her forehead where the window had caught her. She had her hand pressed against it, applying pressure the way someone did when they had done it before.

"I am fine," she said before I completed the check.

I pushed my door open. The other vehicle had stopped thirty meters down the road.

I called Gio. "Road incident. One hour out. The forested stretch on route seven." I gave the coordinates from the map.

"Ten minutes," Gio said.

Elena had her door open. She was standing in the ditch. Her hand still at the cut on her forehead. She was looking at the other vehicle.

"How many," she said.

"Two visible," I said.

The two figures from the other car had not advanced. They stood beside it and watched us without moving.

"They stopped," she said.

"Yes," I said.

"A ram at that speed on that road was survivable if calculated correctly," she said. "They are not trying to kill us."

"Another message," I said.

"Rafael," she said. "The window closed. He did not hear from me. This is his adjustment."

I looked at the two figures. They got back into their vehicle. The car reversed into the tree line and disappeared before Gio's team came around the bend.

I turned to look at Elena. The cut on her forehead. The ditch. The ruined car. The two days we had taken that had now been folded into whatever Rafael was constructing.

"When Carlo finds him," she said.

"Yes," I said.

"We move immediately," she said. "No adjustment period. No waiting for him to make another move."

"Yes," I said. "We do."

Gio arrived. He looked at the car. Then at Elena's forehead. Then at the tree line where the other vehicle had been.

"Rafael," I said.

"Yes," Gio said. He did not ask how I knew.

He called for a second vehicle while his team swept the road. Elena accepted a clean cloth from the kit in Gio's car and held it to the cut. She was already looking at her phone. Reading something.

"Carlo sent a preliminary location," she said. "Forty minutes ago while we were driving."

I crossed to where she was standing. She held the phone toward me.

A city in the far south. A property registration. A name on the registration that connected to the same holding company chain she had traced that morning.

Rafael had been there for three weeks.

"He has been stationary for three weeks," I said.

"Yes," she said. "Long enough to coordinate everything from one location."