The nursery grew so quiet that the hum of the electronic air purifiers sounded like a jet engine. I stared at the underside of Theo’s mattress, my chest tightening with a cold, metallic dread that I hadn't felt since my early days in the underworld.

The letter rustled against the cold steel table, its final sentence echoing through my mind like a gunshot. Take care of little Sophie, Adrien. She has your mother’s eyes, and my blood.

For a moment, the reinforced concrete walls of the underground bunker seemed to close in on me. My father. The man I had buried—or rather, the man whose empty bronze casket I had mourned over twenty years ago when a private jet supposedly exploded over the Mediterranean—was not dead. He had engineered an elaborate illusion, abandoning his empire to test me, to forge me in the fires of the underworld until I became ruthless enough to survive the absolute worst.

And Sophie.

If my father's letter was true, then the quiet, observant little girl who lived downstairs with her mother wasn't just a maid's daughter. She was my half-sister. A Moretti by blood, carrying the exact genetic markers that made our family both feared and hunted across three continents.

I picked up the parchment again, my fingers trembling slightly. In the harsh fluorescent light of the vault, the familiar slanting handwriting of my father, Vincent Moretti, looked as sharp and commanding as it had when I was a boy standing before his mahogany desk. Every loop of the pen, every sharp cross of the T, was unmistakable.

"Boss?" Bruno’s voice broke the heavy silence from the doorway. He had descended the metal stairs, his face etched with caution as he noticed the stunned expression frozen on my features. "You found something in the trunk. What is it?"

I didn't answer immediately. I folded the letter, slipping it into the inner pocket of my jacket directly over my heart, right beside my custom Beretta.

"Nothing that concerns you right now, Bruno," I said, my voice dropping back into its usual controlled, icy register. "Double the security detail around Elena’s quarters. I want an armed guard stationed outside their door twenty-four hours a day. Nobody gets near them. Not the kitchen staff, not the new recruits, nobody."

Bruno narrowed his eyes, clearly sensing the seismic shift in my demeanor, but he knew better than to question a direct order. "Understood. The guards are already in position. What about the rest of Dante's network? We locked down his European assets, but his American cells haven't made a peep."

"They're waiting for a signal," I said, stepping past him toward the bunker exit. "Dante was just a middle manager for a larger syndicate board based out of Zurich. Now that he's out of the picture, the board is going to try to reclaim his territory. And they're going to use whatever leverage they think they have left."