Chapter 56 LEAKED, HE KNOWS WE HAVE THE BOX

Chapter 56 LEAKED, HE KNOWS WE HAVE THE BOX
NOVA'S POV

We were on the third USB drive when Elias found it.

He had been quiet for a while, scrolling through folders and cross referencing against the ledger without narrating any of it.

I had the physical documents from the box spread in front of me, going through them page by page. Callum was working through the coded transaction sheets with the ledger open flat at his elbow.

Then Elias stopped scrolling.

"Nova." He turned the laptop toward me, his finger still resting on the trackpad. "This folder."

The label was different from every other one on the drive. No date. No code. Just two words in my mother's handwriting.

For Nova.

Callum pushed the ledger aside without a word.

I clicked it open.

One file. A video. The thumbnail showed just the edge of a chair in a dim room but the timestamp in the corner told me everything before I pressed play.

Three weeks before she died.

My hand sat over the trackpad.

"You don't have to watch it right now." Elias shifted his chair closer until his shoulder was pressed against mine.

"I do." I pressed play.

Her face filled the screen.

She looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes looking straight into the camera with the same steadiness she had always carried when something mattered enough to push through.

"Hi baby." She unfolded her hands and pressed them flat against her knees, leaning slightly forward toward the camera. "If you are watching this then things didn't go the way I planned and I am sorry for that. I am sorry for a lot of things."

Elias went completely still beside me. Across the table Callum's hand curled slowly into a fist against the surface.

She looked down at her hands for a moment before lifting her eyes back up. "I need to tell you things that are going to be hard to sit with." She folded her hands back in her lap, that gesture from childhood, the one she did when she was preparing herself. "All of it, before you decide what you think of me."

She smiled then. The real one, the one that reached her eyes, the one I had not seen in eight years.

"I know you can handle it." She tilted her head slightly, still smiling. "You were always stronger than you gave yourself credit for."

I pressed my fingers flat against the table and kept my eyes on the screen.

"I knew Vincent Castellano before I ever knew Richard Blackthorn." She straightened up in the chair, squaring her shoulders. "I worked for him. Three years inside his organization, moving money through structures clean enough that nobody could trace where it came from or where it ended up." She dropped her eyes briefly. "I was good at it. That part I am not proud of."

Elias drew a slow breath beside me but stayed quiet.

"I got out when I found out what the money was actually connected to." She looked back into the camera, her jaw tightening slightly. "Castellano was not just a fraudster. The things those accounts were funding were things I could not be part of and still be the person I wanted to be. So I took everything I had spent three years building, walked out, and tried to start over." She shook her head once. "I thought I had outrun it."

She looked straight into the camera without blinking.

"You don't outrun Vincent Castellano. I should have known that from the beginning."

She reached off screen and came back holding a folded piece of paper, turning it toward the camera. "Everything in that box is what I took when I left, plus everything I have added since. It is enough to finish him permanently if it reaches the right hands." She tapped the paper once with her finger. "This is the name of a federal investigator I have already spoken to. He is expecting me in six weeks. If you reach him instead, tell him Isabella sent you and give him the case number written on the back."

The same number from the ledger.

She set the paper down in her lap and looked back into the camera.

"One more thing." She pressed her palms together slowly, choosing her words. "The man who recruited me into Castellano's organization. Who trained me? Who sat across from me for months and put every method I later used to build what is in that box directly into my hands." She held the camera's gaze without flinching. "His name was Konstantin Voss."

The refrigerator hummed somewhere behind me.

"He taught me everything in that ledger." She leaned slightly forward in the chair, her voice dropping. "Every coded structure, every layer of protection around that documentation came from him. He built those methods and he passed them to me himself."

She pressed her lips together for a moment. "Which means he knows exactly what I was capable of building with them. He has been searching for that box ever since I walked out because he understands better than anyone what is inside it."

I sat with that moving through me slowly.

Matthias had trained her. Had watched her walk away carrying everything he taught her. Had spent twenty years hunting the very evidence she built using his own methods turned against him.

"Be more careful of him than anyone else." She uncrossed her hands and gripped the arms of the chair. "He is more patient than Castellano. Smarter. He will come at you from the side before he ever comes directly."

She held the camera for a long moment without speaking.

Then she let go of the chair arms and folded her hands back in her lap one last time. "I love you more than I ever knew how to say when you were standing right in front of me." She looked straight into the lens. "Go finish what I started. You are more ready than you know."

The screen went dark.

The kitchen settled back around me. Riley stood at the counter with her back to us. Grey morning light pressed flat against the windows. The open box sat between us on the table with three USB drives still inside it.

Elias turned toward me, his hand finding mine under the table and holding on.

I looked at Callum across the table. Every careful layer of his expression was sitting slightly off to one side in a way I almost never saw.

"He trained her." I turned my phone over slowly in my free hand, staring at the dark screen. "Every method she used to document Castellano, every coded structure in that ledger, he put all of it in her hands himself. Then spent twenty years chasing down what she built with his own tools."

Callum pushed himself slightly forward, both forearms coming down onto the table. "He underestimated what she would do with everything he gave her."

"He underestimated both of them." Elias pressed his thumb lightly across the back of my hand. "Her then. You know."

I turned my phone face up on the table.

Two missed calls from Matthias. Below them is a text sent twenty minutes ago.

We need to talk. Tonight. Just the two of us.

I stared at the message until the screen went dark in my hand.

Then I set the phone down and looked at both of them sitting across that kitchen table with my mother's voice still sitting somewhere inside my chest.

"He knows we have the box." I put my phone face down. "Whatever he does next, he will not
take long."

Callum held my gaze from across the table, his jaw tightening once. "Good. Neither will we.”