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I pour coffee. Black. My hands are steady. They’ve been steady for three days because steady is the only setting I can afford and the cost of affording it is a sound in my chest I will not make. Not in this kitchen. Not where the walls carry my family’s breathing.

I pick up the phone and dial Santino.

Nova is already moving.

She’s been moving since before I woke up — I know because the coffee is hot and the counter is wiped and Tomás’s lunch is packed in the blue bag by the door with the broken zipper replaced by one he can reach. She does this. She has always done this. The world cracks open and Nova Vasquez Rivas makes lunches and wipes counters and pours coffee with the terrifying efficiency of a woman who learned at eighteen that falling apart is a luxury billed to people who can afford it.

I watch her between calls. The scan my body runs on her now — the one that started in Knight and never shut off. Her pulse at her throat: steady. Her breathing: even, managed the way she manages everything, deliberately, without waste. And the thing she doesn’t know I see — her left hand pressing against her lower back when she reaches for the cabinet above the stove. Quick. Practiced. Gone before I could catch it if I weren’t already looking.

I am always looking.

Three weeks. The raspberry. She told me at two in the morning with her voice at conversational volume because Nova delivers earthquakes the way other women deliver grocery lists — steady, direct, at a decibel that makes the content hit harder because the container refuses to shake.

Nobody else knows. The knowledge lives between us like a second heartbeat in the room while Fabio’s grid blinks and somewhere six miles south my brother breathes through cracked ribs in a room I cannot find.

She cuts toast into triangles. Tomás is ten and his uncle is missing and the house smells like cold coffee and fear the adults are working hard to keep below the frequency a child’s ears can detect. He wants triangles. She cuts triangles.

I cross the kitchen. Two strides. My hand finds the back of her neck — warm skin, the fine hair at her nape. I press my mouth to the top of her head and hold it there. Her shampoo smells like coconut. Her shoulders carry weight I can feel through my lips.

She doesn’t turn around. Doesn’t stop cutting. The knife hits the board in clean, even strokes and her free hand comes up and wraps around my wrist — one squeeze, two seconds, the full force of everything she will not say compressed into the pressure of four fingers against my pulse.

She doesn’t need comfort. She needs me to find Dante and come home breathing. That has always been the deal — she holds the ground, I come back to it.

I let go. Step back.

She sets a mug on the counter by my laptop. Black. Still hot.

She doesn’t look at me.

She doesn’t have to.

Santino picks up on the first ring.

His voice comes through the speaker like a blade laid flat on a table. The priest who shed the collar and kept the discipline.

“Thermal sweeps negative across the primary grid. Avenue Seven to the waterfront, forty-two properties cleared.” A pause. I hear the fatigue in the spacing — the hesitation between sentences that thirty-six hours without sleep puts into even the steadiest man. Santino would die before he admitted he was tired. Santino would also die before he stopped searching. These are not contradictions. They are the same man.

“Two properties flagged for secondary review. Ownership buried under shell companies routed through a real estate trust in Delaware.” He exhales through his nose. “The shells are clean, Romeo. Too clean.”

Clean shells cost money. Lawyers, registered agents, quarterly filings designed to withstand exactly this kind of scrutiny. Street-level operators rent warehouses with cash and forget to lock the back door. This is someone who planned the room my brother is sitting in the way the King planned his empire — nothing left to chance.

Pia’s voice enters the call. Brief. Targeted. The woman doesn’t waste syllables any more than Santino wastes motion. “The registered agent cross-references against a name in the Marchese’s financial network. Third-tier connection. Thin, but it threads.”

“How thin?” I ask.

“Thin enough to be coincidence. Present enough that it shouldn’t be.”

I file it. Thin threads are still threads. Pull enough of them, something unravels.

“Stay on the grid,” I tell Santino. “Secondary properties first. Pia’s thread gets priority.”

“Already moving.” The line holds for a beat. I hear Pia’s boots on concrete in the background, the hum of the industrial corridor — two people who operate as a single unit covering ground my security team has been sweeping for three days without finding what a former priest and a woman who survived a torture basement are going to find by instinct.

I disconnect. Dial Guido.

He answers before the second ring. Already awake. Already at the estate — I can hear the echo off marble floors the King imported from Carrara because Giovanni believed even his hallways should remind visitors who owned the ground they stood on.

“I need you in the field.” I grip the counter. “With Santino. As a brother. He’s earned that.”