The silence on the terrace was absolute. You could have heard a velvet petal drop onto the Italian marble.

Two days later, the estate had returned to a pristine, terrifyingly normal routine.

The broken double doors of the foyer had been replaced with reinforced custom mahogany; the shattered glass on the terrace was gone; and the rose garden had been freshly mulched, hiding any trace of the blood that had soaked into the soil.

I sat at my mahogany desk in the study, reviewing the forensic report on the sniper round that had killed Marco Vane in the garden.

Julian Vance walked into the room, tossing a heavy, encrypted data drive onto the blotter.

"The ballistics report came back from our contacts in Interpol," Julian said, adjusting his glasses. "That sniper round wasn't fired by a standard syndicate hitman. It was a custom tungsten-core round used exclusively by a private intelligence contractor based out of Geneva."

I narrowed my eyes, looking up from the report. "A private contractor? Not the Syndicate?"

"That's the interesting part," Julian said, leaning against the edge of the desk. "The contractor is owned by a holding corporation called Apex Global. And do you know who sits on the board of directors for Apex Global?"

"Tell me."

"Viktor," Julian said grimly. "Not Viktor the mob boss. Viktor Vance—a former high-level financial intelligence officer for the European Union who went rogue ten years ago and started laundering dark-money portfolios for global cartels."

The pieces fell into place with absolute clarity.

Viktor wasn't just a leftover ghost from my past in Palermo; he was the apex predator of the new financial underworld. He didn't care about Moretti's revenge or Vanessa's petty cruelty. He cared about the multi-billion-dollar ledger that bridged the gap between legitimate corporate finance and international syndicate money.

And as long as I held the estate, and as long as I breathed, I was the only man standing between him and total financial control of the Eastern Seaboard.

"He thinks he can hide behind corporate layers in Geneva," I said, a dark, dangerous smile touching my lips.

"What are you going to do, Evan?" Julian asked, looking at me with genuine concern. "You're out. You have a family now. You have Sophie and Caleb."

"Precisely why I have to finish this," I said, standing up and walking over to the safe.

I opened the heavy steel door, reached past the cash reserves and the legal files, and pulled out a battered, unmarked passport bearing a name I hadn't used in ten years—along with an encrypted satellite phone linked directly to international transport networks.

"Julian," I said quietly.

"Yes?"

"Take care of my children for forty-eight hours."