Page 82 of Ruthless Vow
Instead, I draw her closer. Kiss her forehead.
“Tomorrow,” I agree.
She settles against me. Her body softens into sleep.
Tomorrow, we hunt.
Mine.
19
CASSIA
The answer has been in front of me for three days.
I just didn’t see it until now.
I left Dante sleeping at dawn, slipped out of sheets still warm from his body, and came straight here. The study has become my second home this week. Maybe my first. The bed we share is where I rest; this desk is where I prove I belong.
Stacks of vendor invoices cover the surface, organized by date, by amount, by authorization signature. My highlighter is dry. The coffee in my mug went cold hours ago. My eyes burn from staring at columns of numbers, but I can’t stop.
Not when I’m this close.
The pattern clicked this afternoon.
Forty-seven invoices over seven years. All from vendors I’ve never heard of despite auditing the family’s books for years. All billing fifteen to twenty percent above market rate. All authorized by the same signature.
Fabio Romano.
I pull another file from the stack. Crescent City Logistics. Registered in Delaware eighteen months ago. No physical address. No website. No employees listed. Just a bankaccount that’s received $2.5 million in payments for “shipping coordination services” that, as far as I can tell, were never rendered.
Gulf Maritime Supply. Identical registration agent. Identical phantom structure. Another $1.2 million over three years.
Southern Hospitality Holdings. A carbon copy. Again.
The routing is elegant, I’ll give him that. Payments flow from the family accounts to these shell companies, then bounce through Cyprus, Panama, the Caymans. By the time the money lands in its final destination, it’s been laundered so clean that tracing it requires the kind of forensic deep-dive no one thought to do.
Until I did.
I sit back in Dante’s chair and let the numbers settle. The leather still holds his scent. Cedar and smoke and something underneath that makes my stomach tighten every time I breathe too deep.
Eight percent. That’s what I thought at first. Then twelve. Now I’m looking at fifteen to twenty across forty-seven invoices, and every time I peeled back a layer, it got worse.
Close to a decade of skimming. Conservative estimate: four to six million dollars. All authorized by a man who’s been sitting at family dinners, attending family meetings, stood at Salvatore Santoro’s funeral with tears in his eyes.
Fabio Romano. Thirty-two years of service. Trusted captain.
Traitor.
My husband deserves to know. The thought sends heat through my chest, low and steady. Not the fire from last night, his voice cracking onlet me show you what you are to me, his hands so careful it wrecked me worse than rough ever could. This is quieter. The need to protect what’s his. What’s ours.
But I need to be certain first. I need evidence he can’t question.
That’s not everything.
Elena’s payment. The two million dollars someone wired to make her disappear.
I pull up the routing information I traced from her account and lay it next to Romano’s shell company structure.
