Chapter 60 Luca

Chapter 60 Luca
Aria's POV

Sienna's apartment was the kind of place that looked exactly like Sienna. Warm colors and too many throw pillows and plants on every available surface that somehow all stayed alive because Sienna talked to them, which she maintained was not strange and which everyone who knew her maintained absolutely was.

Luca was already at the kitchen table when they arrived. He stood when they came in, which was the kind of thing he did, and shook Dante's hand with the careful politeness of a man meeting someone he found genuinely intimidating but had decided to deal with anyway.

Sienna had coffee ready. She always had coffee ready. It was one of her best qualities.

They sat down.

Luca had a folder in front of him, the physical kind, which told Aria he'd been careful about this. Nothing digital that could be accessed or traced. Just paper and his own handwriting and the particular caution of someone who understood that what he was doing sat outside the boundaries of his normal life.

"I want to say upfront that I'm not an investigator," Luca said. He had the slightly formal manner of someone who'd rehearsed how to begin. "I'm a financial accountant. I look at numbers for a living and I'm good at it but I want to be clear about what this is and isn't."

"Understood," Aria said.

He opened the folder. "You sent Sienna financial documents about three weeks ago. Accounts connected to what you described as organ trafficking operations." He looked at her. "I've been working on them since."

"Three weeks," Aria said. "You've been sitting on this for three weeks."

"I wanted to be sure before I said anything." He looked at the papers. "I had to be sure."

She understood that. Moved on.

"What did you find," Dante said. His voice was even. Not pressuring. Just asking.

Luca pointed at a column of figures on the top page. "These accounts. The ones listed as procurement processing. They receive funds from multiple sources and redistribute them." He traced a line with his finger. "I followed the redistribution. Most of it goes to what look like legitimate medical supply companies. Shell companies, but convincing ones."

"Bruno's been running them through legitimate-looking fronts," Aria said.

"Standard practice for this kind of operation," Luca said with the tone of someone who found it professionally interesting despite everything else about it. "What's less standard is this." He turned to the second page. "One of the redistribution channels goes somewhere different. Not a medical supply shell. A holding company registered in Malta."

He pushed the page toward them.

A company name. A registration number. Aria looked at it. Dante looked at it.

"This holding company," Luca said, "is connected through two intermediate entities to a subsidiary of Bruno Salvini's primary art dealing business. A subsidiary called Adriatic Cultural Holdings." He looked up. "I checked the registration documents. Adriatic Cultural Holdings was established fourteen years ago. Its listed purpose is investment in cultural preservation projects across the Mediterranean."

"And actually it moves money from organ trafficking into Bruno's legitimate business," Dante said.

"Based on what I can see, yes." Luca sat back. "It's not definitive. There are steps between the procurement accounts and Adriatic that are harder to trace and would require access I don't have. But the thread is there. Clear enough that someone with the right authority and the right subpoenas could follow it to its end."

The table was quiet for a moment.

Sienna was leaning against the counter watching Luca with the expression of someone who'd known he was good at his job and was watching other people discover it.

"Luca," Aria said.

He looked at her.

"This connects the organ trafficking directly to my father's legitimate business. If Romano follows this thread and finds what you're describing—"

"It's not just money laundering," Dante said. "It's a direct financial link between the trafficking operation and Salvini himself. Personal. Not just companies he might claim he didn't know about."

"Yes," Luca said. "That's how I read it."

Aria looked at the papers.

At her father's name in a company registration that connected to accounts that connected to procurement operations that connected to fourteen death certificates with her name on them.

The chain was there. In Luca's handwriting on paper he'd printed at home and put in a physical folder because he'd been careful.

"You could lose your job for this," she said.

"Probably." Luca said it without drama. "If it comes out that I accessed these documents and followed them this far without a client instruction I'll be in breach of several professional standards and at least two confidentiality agreements."

"Then you don't have to—"

"Sienna told me what they did with your name." He met her eyes. "What Bruno Salvini did with your medical credentials and your reputation and fourteen people who died." A pause. "I'm in."

Aria looked at him.

Luca Ricci, who was an accountant and dated her best friend and drove a sensible car and cooked elaborate Sunday dinners and had shown up in Sienna's apartment on a Tuesday evening with a folder of documents he'd spent three weeks being careful about because someone had done something wrong and he'd found evidence of it.

She hadn't expected to be moved by it.

She was.

Not the dramatic kind of moved. Just the quiet kind that settled somewhere in your chest and stayed there.

"Thank you," she said.

He nodded like it wasn't enormous, which made it more enormous.

They spent the next hour going through everything. Luca walked them through each connection, each step in the chain, which assumptions were solid and which were inferences that would need official investigation to confirm. He was meticulous and clear and honest about where the evidence was strong and where it needed more.

Dante asked questions that told Aria he understood the financial structures better than she'd expected, which she filed away as another thing she was still learning about him.

Sienna made more coffee and stayed out of it except to refill cups, which was her version of being useful in a situation where her particular skills weren't what was needed.

By the end of the hour they had a document. Luca's summary of what he'd found, the chain of connections, the companies, the accounts. Clear enough for Romano to understand and act on. Specific enough to give her the thread she needed.

"This goes to Romano through your channels," Dante said to Luca. "Not through me or through Marco. Through you, officially, as a financial professional who identified a concern and reported it."

"That protects me better," Luca said.

"It also makes it usable," Dante said. "If it comes from you through proper channels it's not anonymous and it's not legally compromised. Romano can act on it directly."

Luca looked at him for a moment. The look of someone reassessing what they'd expected.

"I'll call Romano's office tomorrow morning," he said.

"Ask for her directly. Use my name if they give you trouble," Aria said.

"Okay."

They left an hour later.

On the street outside Sienna's building Aria looked at Dante beside her and said, "He put himself at risk for me."

Dante looked at her. "For what's right."

"Because of what happened to me."

"Because someone used you to hurt people and he found out and he's an accountant with a conscience." Dante looked at the building's entrance, the ordinary residential door that Luca was somewhere behind. "He could have decided it wasn't his problem."

"He didn't."

"No." A pause. Something in his face that was quieter than his usual expression, like he was processing something that had come from an unexpected direction. "That's what good people do."

He said it the way you said something you were remembering rather than stating. Like the concept of a person simply choosing to do the right thing because it was right had arrived somewhere in him that didn't get information like that very often.

Aria looked at him in the street outside Sienna's apartment.

"You know good people," she said. "Rocco. Leone."

"I know loyal people," he said. "That's different."

She thought about that distinction on the walk back. About loyalty being a transaction and goodness being something else. About a man with a folder of documents he'd spent three weeks being careful about because someone had done something wrong.

About whether she agreed with the distinction or not.

She wasn't sure she did. But she understood why he made it.

And she understood what it meant that Luca's choice had landed on him the way it had.

Like something he was glad still existed in the world.

Like maybe he'd wondered.