Chapter 5 - Whispers in the Catacombs
By the end of the first week, the mansion had ceased to be a prison and had become a war room.
I was moved from the third-floor bedroom down to the private library on the ground floor—a massive, vaulted room lined with thousands of leather-bound volumes, secured behind biometric steel doors. On the central mahogany conference table, maps of European air transit, encrypted financial server layouts, and bank routing diagrams were spread across every inch of space.
I had spent four years earning a master's degree in forensic accounting at Columbia—a degree my father had laughed at, calling it an ""expensive hobby for a girl who will marry into the senate.""
Now, that ""hobby"" was Marco Carbone's most lethal weapon.
""He didn't move the nineteen million directly to Paris,"" I said, leaning over a glowing dual-monitor display, pointing at a labyrinth of wire transactions with a stylus. Marco stood behind me, his shoulder brushing mine, the clean scent of cedar and tobacco rolling off his skin. ""Roland is too paranoid. He uses an algorithmic splitting method. He splits the principal into four hundred micro-transactions under nine thousand dollars each to bypass the automatic bank reporting flags, routing them through dummy import-export firms in Marseille.""
Marco narrowed his eyes at the code. ""Can we intercept them before they consolidate?""
""Only if we obtain his personal private key,"" I replied, looking up at him. ""The key isn't stored on a cloud server. He never trusted the internet. He carries it on a physical hardware token—a titanium USB drive with a fingerprint scanner.""
""Where is it?""
""It’s in Manhattan,"" I said, my voice dropping. ""In the safe behind the wine cellar in our townhouse on 68th Street. He never moves large sums without it.""
Marco stared at me for a long moment, studying the cold determination in my face. The terrified girl in the blood-stained wedding dress had vanished, replaced by an architect who was now ready to dismantle her own father’s kingdom stone by stone.
""The townhouse is currently under federal surveillance,"" Marco warned. ""And Senator Rossi’s private enforcers have been watching the block since the church shooting. If we go in there, we are stepping into an ambush.""
""Then we don't go in as thieves,"" I said, a dark smile touching my lips for the first time in ten days. ""We go in as heirs. The title of that townhouse is held in my name. Roland put it in my trust fund to avoid estate taxes. The police cannot stop me from entering my own property, and neither can the Rossi family.""
Marco’s lips parted slightly, an expression of genuine admiration flickering across his stern face. ""You would walk right into their sights?""
""You said it yourself, Marco,"" I said, meeting his intense gaze without flinching. ""I have no father. I have no fiancé. I have nothing left to lose. But Roland Vance took your family and he tried to feed me to the wolves. Let's go get your nineteen million dollars.""
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Marco reached out, his rough, warm fingers gently brushing a stray strand of dark hair away from my cheek. The contact was brief, but it sent a sharp, electric jolt straight to my core.
""We leave at midnight,"" he murmured. ""And Isabel? Wear something you can run in.""
