Page 37 of Rook

The anger is clean. Specific. Not aimed at Fabio. Not at the Mole.

Aimed at the dead man.

"We tear it out," I say. "Every line of code. Every protocol he commissioned. Fabio — I need your memory. Every layer you built. Every contractor. Every foundation stone."

Silence on the line. Then — rough, fast, the gesture of a man wiping his eyes in a room where tears get you killed:

"I remember everything."

Pia's phone changes the game.

She leans between the seats and holds the screen where Santino and I can both see it. Her contact — a man who owes Pia a debt she has never explained — pulled procurement records from a shell entity tied to the three scrubbed warehouses.

The list loads and my blood goes cold.

Chain. Specific gauge — the kind of specification you write when you've already measured the man the chain will hold. Chair-frame welding commissioned from a fabricator in the outer corridor. Anchor bolts rated for reinforced concrete. Three inches deep. Engineered for a body that fights back.

My brother's body. Measured from photographs. Purchased through shells and assembled in a room built seventeen seconds at a time through the King's coded blind spots.

Then the last item on the list and my lungs stop.

A sedative. Not the kind of shit you buy from a dealer in the corridor. A specific compound — medical-grade, clinical, the kind that lives behind locked cabinets in hospitals and pharmacies and the private practices of doctors who've been writing prescriptions for decades. The quantity wasn't a guess. The dosage wasn't an estimate. Someone calculated exactly how much it would take to put Dante under for hours without killing him — accounting for his size, his age, his strength. The kind of calculation that takes years of training and the kind of access that doesn't come from a textbook.

This isn't a kidnapper dosing from a bottle and hoping the body survives.

This is someone who knows medicine the way Corsetti knew anatomy. By training. By education. By decades of professional practice that turned a drug into a scalpel instead of a hammer.

The alarm fires. Not Fabio's system. Mine. The one Giovanni's violence installed in my gut before I could spell my own name.

A shape. A face. A man who has stood in my kitchen. Who has taken my blood pressure and asked about my sleep and carried a black leather bag with a brass clasp and four vials arranged in a neat row. A man whose hands have touched every person in my family because his proximity reads as care. Because his presence reads as healing. Because the boys who watched him ease their mother's dying with steady hands and a gentle voice carved that trust into bone and never thought to question it.

Three visits in five days. Nova noticed. Nova counts the frequency of men who enter rooms where her siblings sleep because Nova learned to read men in the dark the way other women learn to read books.

The name forms at the back of my skull and I shove it down because instinct is not evidence and accusation without proof in this family gets people killed.

But the shape is there. And it fits.

I look at Santino. He is already looking at me. The blade has gone still — the specific, coiled quiet that precedes something irreversible.

"Who do we know," I say, and each word costs me something I will not get back, "who could calculate a sedative dose to the milligram for a nineteen-year-old without a physical exam?"

The question fills the car.

Santino doesn't answer. He doesn't need to. The answer is assembling itself behind his eyes the same way it assembled behind mine — in the gut, in the bone, in the place where the King's sons store the truths they're not yet willing to carry into the light.

Neither of us speaks the name.

The car idles. The corridor stretches. The Patek Philippe counts the seconds of a dead man's empire against my wrist.

And the shape of the answer sits between us like a loaded weapon neither brother is ready to aim.

11

isadora

"Being Read"

Iopen the door and the room has a different weight.