Reina POV
She heard them go in without her.
Seven in the morning. She was already awake she had been awake since five, sitting at the small desk in her room going through everything she remembered about the shell company name Fia had found, writing notes in the margins of a legal pad she had asked Renzo for the night before. She heard footsteps in the hallway. Multiple sets. Moving with purpose toward the east end of the third floor.
She counted to ten. Giving them time to settle.
Then she put down her pen, picked up her notes, and walked to the briefing room.
The door was closed. She knocked once and opened it.
Six men looked up. Renzo, two she recognized from the hallway, two she did not know, and Dante at the head of the table with a map and three open folders in front of him. He looked at her the way you look at something unexpected not angry yet, just recalibrating.
"Briefing started five minutes ago," she said pleasantly. "I would have been here sooner if someone had knocked on my door."
"This briefing is for operational staff," Dante said. Same flat voice. Same locked face. "I'll have Renzo summarize the relevant points for you afterward."
She smiled. It was not a warm smile. "I'm going to stop you there."
What happened next was not her finest moment in terms of volume control. She would admit that privately, to herself, later.
But she was not wrong. That was the thing she held onto while Dante looked at her with those cold eyes and told her, in a very controlled voice, that she was the client and clients did not sit in operational briefings because they were not trained, they were not objective, and their emotional involvement compromised the quality of the intelligence assessment.
She told him that her emotional involvement was called knowing these people personally and it was the single most useful thing in that room. She told him that she had been managing her father's unofficial correspondence since she was seventeen because Lorenzo trusted her judgment. She told him that she had already found two things the prepaid phone and the shell company connection before his entire professional team had gotten started, and she had done it while actively grieving and running on no sleep.
She told him what he could do with his client classification.
The hallway outside the briefing room was very quiet. She was aware, on some level, of Renzo and the other two men in the hall becoming extremely interested in the wall.
Dante stepped closer. She did not step back. He was taller than her by several inches and he used the stillness of his body the way other men used shouting like a wall coming toward you. It did not work on her. She tilted her chin up and waited.
"My house," he said quietly. "My operation. My rules."
"My father," she said. Just as quietly. "My family. My name. You work for me, Dante. The deal goes both ways."
Something moved in his eyes. Fast, and then gone.
He stepped back. He turned around. He walked into the briefing room and closed the door in her face.
The click of that door was the loudest sound she had ever heard.
She stood in the hallway with her notes in her hand and her heart slamming and her jaw so tight it ached. She breathed through her nose. She counted. She did not kick the door, which she wanted to do, because it would be satisfying for three seconds and undermine her for three weeks.
Five seconds passed.
The door opened six inches. Renzo's face appeared in the gap. He said nothing. He just tilted his head toward the inside of the room.
She walked in without saying thank you. She sat down at the far end of the table, put her notes in front of her, and looked at the map like she had been there the whole time.
Dante, at the head of the table, did not look at her. He kept talking.
She listened.
They were good. She would give them that. In less than eighteen hours they had cross-referenced the shell company against four separate financial databases and built a clean paper trail of eleven payments over eight months. They had the company's registered address a mailbox in the financial district and two names attached to the registration.
Neither name meant anything to her. She wrote them down.
The analyst talking a thin man named Cato who spoke fast and never looked up from his papers moved to the next section. Movement of funds after the payments. Where the money went. She followed it on the map he pointed to, tracing the arrows with her eyes.
She asked her first question when he finished. Simple: "Were any of these payments made in cash equivalents? Wire transfers can be traced but there are three gaps in the timeline where the money disappears for seventy-two hours before reappearing in the next account."
Cato stopped. Looked at his papers. Looked at her. "We were going to get to that."
"I know," she said. "I'm asking now because the gaps are the same length. Exactly seventy-two hours each time. That's not random. Someone was converting it to something untraceable and converting it back. You need to find out what moves in seventy-two hours in this city."
Cato made a note. The men around the table shifted slightly. Not much. Just enough.
Her second question was about the registered names specifically whether either of them appeared in voter records or property records for the same district, because shell company names were often lazy, pulled from something familiar. One of the other analysts said he would check.
Then she looked at the map again. At the final destination of the money. A neighborhood in the east of the city. She knew that neighborhood. She had been there once with her father, years ago, for a meeting she was not meant to understand at the time.
She looked at Dante for the first time since sitting down.
"Who owns the building at the end of this trail?" she asked.
He met her eyes. "A private holding company."
"Which traces to who?"
He was quiet for one second. "We're still confirming."
"I'm not asking for confirmation," she said. "I'm asking what your instinct says. You've been looking at this longer than I have. You already have a name in your head."
The room was very still.
Dante looked at her steadily. And for just a moment less than a second something crossed his face that was not coldness at all. It was closer to the look a person gives when someone hands them exactly the piece they were missing.
"We'll discuss it after," he said.
She nodded and looked back at the map.
The briefing ended forty minutes later. The men filed out. Renzo closed the door behind them, leaving her and Dante alone in the room with the map and the folders and the particular silence of two people who just fought and have not finished.
He gathered papers without looking at her. She waited.
"The payments," he said finally. He set a single sheet in front of her. "The first one."
She looked at the date. Then she looked again.
Almost two years ago. Ten months before her father died. Fourteen months before the attack.
"This started two years ago," she said.
"Yes."
She sat back. She thought about her father at the dinner table. At Sunday lunches. At the birthday party he threw her two years ago with the cake she asked for and the music she liked and the way he hugged her at the end of the night and said you are the best thing I ever did, Reina.
Two years ago he was already being betrayed. He ate dinner and bought birthday cake and hugged his daughter while someone around him was already counting down the days to his death.
She put her hand flat on the table. She pressed down hard.
"Someone planned this," she said. "This was never a sudden decision."
"No," Dante said. He was looking at her now. Directly. Carefully.
"They were patient." Her voice was very even. "They took two years. They were methodical. They were careful." She looked up at him. "Which means they didn't do this from anger. They did it from greed. This was never personal for them."
"No," he said. "But it's personal for us now."
Us.
She heard the word. She saw him hear it too, half a second after he said it. He looked away first.
She looked back at the date on the paper.
Two years. Her father had two years taken from him before he even knew to fight back.
She was not going to waste a single day of hers.