Chapter 12 - The Milan Connection
Dante stood up instantly, his dark eyes locking onto the glowing monitor. A digital map of Europe flashed on the screen, highlighting a pulsing red dot over the historic financial district of Milan, Italy.
"Who initiated the ping?" Dante demanded, his voice dropping into a dangerous register.
"Captain Moretti—your cousin, Lorenzo," Elena said, her fingers flying across the console to decrypt the incoming data stream. "The signal is encrypted with a Tier-1 emergency code. The kind we only use when an entire regional station has been compromised from the inside."
A secured audio transmission crackled through the office speakers, cutting through the silence with bursts of heavy static and distant gunfire.
"Dante... can you hear me?" Lorenzo’s voice strained over the line, interrupted by the sharp crack of a high-caliber rifle in the background. "The Milan vault has been breached. They didn't come for the money. They came for the Ledger of Blood—the physical archives of every syndicate alliance established over the last thirty years."
Dante gripped the edge of his desk so hard his knuckles turned white. "Who has the archives, Lorenzo?"
"We don't know!" Lorenzo shouted over the sound of breaking glass and shouting men. "The security system didn't trigger an external breach. The vault door was opened using a master biometric override code that only three people on earth possess: you, uncle Salvatore... and someone else we never anticipated."
The audio feed abruptly cut out with a deafening screech of feedback, leaving nothing behind but a flat, continuous dial tone.
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Elena stared at the screen in disbelief. "If Salvatore is locked in a black-site prison, and you are sitting right here... whose biometric override was used to open the Milan vault?"
Dante slowly closed his eyes, a cold realization washing over him. The game wasn't over. Claire Bennett had merely been a distraction—a well-funded, highly trained pawn in a much larger, global chess match orchestrated by an invisible enemy who had been watching them all along.
