Page 35 of Rook

His eyes find mine. The green is darker than mine — the King's pigment filtered through Bella's steadiness, producing a gaze that carries less heat and more edge. The blade. That is what Santino became when he shed the cloth and put on the holster. A blade that prays before it cuts.

He runs his hand along the interior wall. Palm flat. Reading the surface —

I catch the parallel and it drives into my chest like a fist.

The way Dante reads surfaces. The way the King did. Every son in this family inherited the same hands and the same instinct to press them against walls and floors looking for the fracture underneath. Different instruments. Same dead conductor.

"Whoever did this respects forensics," I say. The words taste like metal. "This isn't a street crew covering tracks. This is institutional."

Pia pockets her phone. "The Marchese bought influence. They never built rooms."

"No." I look at the solvent on the concrete. "Someone else is running logistics. Someone local. Someone who was already inside the infrastructure before the Marchese started writing checks."

Santino's jaw sets. The patience holds but I can feel the violence beneath it — coiled, heavy, the lethality of a man who killed Carlo Vescari with his bare hands and carried Pia out of the dark and will do worse than both if the trail leads where it's leading.

"Then we find the infrastructure," he says. "And we tear it out by the roots."

The car smells like Santino's gun oil and Pia's silence and the stale coffee I still haven't touched.

I drive. Santino rides shotgun with his forearm braced against the window frame, watching the corridor with the flat, measuring gaze of a man cataloguing threat zones by habit. Pia is in the back, thumbs working cross-references against procurement records her contact in the Marchese intermediary network pulled six hours ago.

Nova's voice surfaces. Two nights ago. The kitchen. Dish towel folded on the counter because the woman folds things when her hands need a task that isn't hitting someone. Her brown eyes on mine. Steady.

Then we change what we're searching for.

Eight words. Delivered the way she delivers everything — conversational, grounded, the earthquake wrapped in a grocery list. Follow the eraser. Not the erased.

I've been tearing through this grid looking for Dante. Three warehouses scrubbed to surgical standard. Every camera feed cleaned. Every trace eliminated with a precision that makes Fabio's work look sloppy. I've been running headfirst at the absence and the absence keeps winning because absence is not a target. Absence is a strategy.

But the erasure itself has a footprint. Someone bought that solvent. Someone coordinated three sanitizations without triggering a single flag in Fabio's net. That takes infrastructure. Personnel. Local knowledge.

"She's not alone," I say.

Santino's head turns. Two degrees. The blade listening.

"Isadora didn't build the room, scrub three floors, and relocate my brother by herself. There's a support structure. Local. Funded."

"Marchese bought influence," Pia says from the back. "They never built rooms. Their network was financial. This is something else."

"Someone who was already here." I grip the wheel. The leather creaks. "Someone with roots in this city deep enough to move materials through Fabio's grid using the King's own blind spots."

The sentence lands and nobody touches it. The implication sits between the three of us the way a grenade sits between soldiers who all see the pin is missing.

Inside. The word tastes like the bleach in that warehouse.

The Mole isn't feeding intelligence from a distance. The Mole is running supply lines. Cleaning scenes. Building containment rooms under our roof using access points the King coded into the walls before Fabio laid his first sensor.

"We follow the money," Santino says. "The solvent. The chain. The sedation. Whoever purchased those items left a receipt somewhere."

I nod. Turn south. Toward the commercial district. Toward the trail my wife told me to find.

Nova sees the board cleaner than any of us. Always has.

Guido's voice comes through the speaker without greeting. No hello. No preamble. Information delivered in the order it kills.

He's been at the estate since before dawn. Twelve cameras. Four days of feeds. Fabio routed the secondary monitoring station to him because Fabio is drowning in his own compromised system and the eighteen-year-old with his mother's patience is the only person in this operation who watches the way Dante watches — not for what's there but for what should be and isn't.

"The sensor override." His voice sits at a register I've never heard from a kid his age. Low. Weighted. Every syllable carrying the gravity of a young man who sat alone in front of screens for fourteen hours and didn't speak until the data was certain. "The seventeen-second window. It doesn't fire once. It cycles. Every ninety minutes during the third-shift rotation."