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But Dante does not forget what he files. And the clock on the wall is ticking alongside the clock in my chest, and I am running out of margins to hide in.

Seven Months of Silence

The estate sits forty minutes outside the city in a neighborhood that does not exist on any map Fabio did not draw himself.

Costa’s room is not a cell. It is worse than a cell. It is comfortable — bed, chair, table, a window that overlooks a garden Costa has not stepped into in seven months. The comfort is the cruelty. Giovanni would have appreciated the design. Keep a man fed, rested, and staring at a world he cannot touch, and eventually the silence becomes louder than anything you could do to his body.

Santino goes in first. He does not sit.

“Seven fucking months.” Santino’s voice fills the room the way Santino fills every room — sharp, compressed, the voice of a man who was born with a blade where his patience should be. “Seven months of three meals and clean sheets and you sitting in this chair like a goddamn Buddha while our father’s network ticks in the dark. I’m done waiting, Costa.”

Costa does not look up. His hands rest on the table — open, still, the hands of a man who served Giovanni for three decades and learned that silence is the only currency that survives every regime change. His face holds nothing. His eyes hold less.

Dante leans against the far wall. Coffee in his scarred hands. Watching.

“Romeo wants to know about the remaining nodes,” Santino says. He plants both hands on the table and leans in. Close. The scar on his jaw catching the overhead light. “Four empty circles on Nova’s notepad. Four pieces of our dead father’s bullshit still sitting out there waiting to go off. You built half of it. You know what’s coming.”

Nothing. Costa’s breathing does not change. His hands do not move. Seven months of this — Santino’s blade bouncing off a wall that does not flinch.

“Fuck this,” Santino mutters. He pushes off the table. Turns to Dante. “Your turn. Run your frequency or whatever the hell you do.”

Dante does not move from the wall. He takes a sip of coffee. Sets it down on the windowsill. And then he speaks — one phrase, dropped into the room like a match onto gasoline.

“Shadow Network.”

Costa’s left hand twitches.

Involuntary. A micro-contraction of the fingers — the index and middle curling inward half an inch before the discipline catches up and flattens them back against the table. The motion lasts less than a second. A man without Dante’s frequency would have missed it entirely.

Dante does not miss it.

“There it is.” Dante’s voice is quiet. Not gentle — surgical. The flat, devastating calm of a man who just watched seven months of silence crack on two words. “You know the name. Not just the architecture — the name. Giovanni gave it a name, and you know what it means.”

Costa rebuilds the wall. The hand goes still. The face goes blank. The silence settles back into position like a door slamming shut.

But the twitch told them everything the silence was hiding.

Costa knows. Not pieces. Not fragments. The whole goddamn thing — every node, every trigger, every layer of the dead King’s design. He has been sitting in this room for seven months, holding the blueprint while this family scrambled in the dark.

Santino sees it too. His jaw resets. His fists clench at his sides.

“Son of a bitch,” he says softly. “He’s been playing us the whole time.”

The Strongest Heart in the House

The hallway holds the particular silence of a building designed to keep conversations from leaking through walls.

Santino and Dante are gone — carrying Costa’s twitch back to Romeo like a severed wire, proof that the dead man’s network still has current running through it. I hear the car doors. The engine. The gravel under tires as they pull away.

I wait until the sound disappears. Then I open the door.

Costa does not flinch. Does not shift in his chair. But his eyes — the eyes that gave Santino nothing, that gave Dante only an involuntary tremor he could not catch in time — his eyes change.

Not defiance. Not the disciplined blank he has been wearing like armor for seven months.

Something older. Softer. The look of a man staring at a boy he last saw standing in the margin of Giovanni’s kitchen, twelve years old, quiet as a shadow, watching everything and saying nothing.

“You got tall,” Costa says. His voice is wrecked — seven months of silence stripping it down to gravel and rust. But the words themselves carry a warmth that has no business being in this room.