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She had hidden the truth from me. After everything we had survived, after every line I had crossed to keep her alive, she had looked me in the eye and lied.

Yet every time resentment sharpened, I remembered the way her hand had closed around those beads whenever fear threatened to overwhelm her. The rosary had been the last thing her father had given her, the final piece of him she had left to carry.

I understood why she had protected it, though understanding did not make the deception hurt any less.

Two days after Artemus received the drive, Atlas summoned us to the office in his home.

The room had once belonged to my grandfather. I remembered shelves crowded with ledgers, locked filing cabinets and the stale scent of cigar smoke embedded in the walls. He had conducted family business behind the old wooden desk, deciding the fate of men who had disappointed him.

Atlas had kept the desk. Everything surrounding it had changed.

Computer screens covered one wall, each displaying a different approach to the estate. Encrypted phones occupied a charging station beside the window, and surveillance equipment filled the cabinets that had once housed accounts and weapons. Wires ran behind the desk in tangled black lines, feeding information into the room like veins carrying blood to a heart.

The family no longer relied on men stationed at gates to know when danger was coming.

It watched danger from every angle.

Adriana entered beside me, close enough that her sleeve brushed mine before she moved away.

Her hands were empty.

For days, I had watched her reach for the rosary whenever unease tightened her face. Her fingers had always found the beads beneath her blouse, closing around them until whatever threatened to break through her control receded. Now her hand rose and met nothing. Her fingers pressed against the bare skin beneath her throat before curling into her palm.

She seemed unaware she was doing it.

Part of me wanted to tell her that Atlas would return the rosary once Artemus had finished with the drive. Another part wanted her to feel its absence, because I had spent two days feeling the absence of something too.

Trust had not vanished between us all at once. It had been removed as carefully as the drive from the medallion, leaving the outer shape intact while exposing the hollow space beneath it.

Artemus sat before three monitors, his attention divided between lines of code that moved too quickly for anyone else in the room to follow. He was younger than I had expected, with dark curls falling over his forehead, a narrow face, and the restless focus of a man more comfortable interrogating machines than speaking to people.

Atlas stood behind him, one hand braced against the back of the chair.

Raze leaned against the wall with his arms folded, while Marcello and Gianni occupied the chairs near the window. Tone sat on the leather sofa beside Archie, although Archie remained pitched forward, his forearms resting on his thighs and his attention fixed on the door. He looked prepared to kill anyone who interrupted us.

No one had been invited. Yet everyone had come.

Artemus glanced around the crowded office and exhaled.

“I said I had partial results.”

“In this family, partial results require a full audience,” Atlas replied. “You know that, Art.” Artemus muttered something under his breath before turning toward Adriana.

“The drive was built to resist extraction. The files are encrypted in layers, and each layer is protected by a different cipher. Whoever created it expected someone with serious money and better equipment than mine to come looking.”

“Can you open it?” Raze asked.

“I’ve opened part of it.”

The room fell silent.

Adriana stood beside me, and I felt the tension running through her. Her hand rose toward the empty space beneath her throat, then stopped when her fingers found no rosary.

“What did you find?” I asked.

Artemus turned back to the centre monitor and entered a command.

A spreadsheet filled the screen.