Mia buried her face against his suit while sobbing.

The private executive suites of the Drake Hotel sat behind two sets of reinforced oak double doors on the eighth floor, shielded from the ballroom’s chaos by eighty yards of soundproofed corridor and three layers of electronic keycard locks.

Rocco did not wait for the freight elevators.

He carried Mia up the north emergency staircase, his breath deep, rhythmic, and even, his heavy arm never loosening its protective clamp around her waist. Behind him marched Franco—his sixty-year-old underboss who had served his father before him—and four men carrying suppressed submachine guns beneath their overcoats.

Behind them, dragging his feet between two guards whose hands were buried deep in the collars of their shirts, stumbled Adrian.

And behind Adrian walked Celeste. She did not speak. She did not weep. She walked with the stiff, brittle gait of a woman marching toward a firing squad, her hands clutching her silk skirt above the floor to avoid tracking her lover's blood onto the carpet.

Rocco kicked open the door to the master bridal suite.

The room smelled of tuberose, champagne spilled on a vanity table, and the cold draft coming off Lake Michigan through the open balcony sliders.

Rocco walked straight to the king-sized bed, setting Mia gently onto the down comforter. He pulled a heavy cashmere throw from the foot of the mattress, wrapping it around her small shoulders, tucking it beneath her chin with infinite, heartbreaking gentleness.

"Mia," Rocco said, his voice dropping an octave into that soft, ancient Italian he only spoke when they were entirely alone. "Piccola mia. Look at Daddy."

The little girl turned her head. Without her glasses, her eyes were squinted, vulnerable, darting around the massive room trying to find the outlines of furniture. A dark purple bruise was already beginning to form beneath her left eye where Celeste’s fingers had caught her during the scuffle in the ballroom.

"Did she hurt you, sweetheart?" Rocco asked, his thumb gently brushing her temple, careful to avoid the tender skin. "Anywhere else? Did she touch you?"

Mia shook her head, her breath hitching in her chest. "No... she just... she took the bunny off my dresser. And she said if I looked through the hall door when the chime rang, she would throw my drawing books into the incinerator in the basement."

Rocco’s jaw tightened until the muscles along his jawline looked like braided wire.

"And Adrian?" Rocco asked, keeping his tone impossibly level. "What did Adrian do in the room?"

"He didn't come into my room," Mia whispered, clutching the cashmere blanket with both hands. "He went into Mommy’s dressing room. The one with the green lock. He had a metal box with little drill bits. He stayed in there until three o'clock. Every Tuesday."

Rocco stood up.

He didn't turn around immediately. He stood at the edge of the mattress, looking down at his daughter’s small shoes, taking three long, measured breaths through his nose.

Then he turned around.

Celeste was standing in the center of the sitting room, flanked by two guards. Adrian was on his knees by the fireplace, his face pale as lard, a linen towel pressed against his bleeding mouth.

"The dressing room," Rocco said, addressing Celeste.

"Rocco, please," she began, her voice cracking into a dry, reedy pitch. "You don't understand the pressure—the families—"

"Franco," Rocco commanded without looking at his underboss.

Franco stepped forward, pulled an antique brass skeleton key from his waistcoat pocket, and walked to the mahogany door at the far end of the master suite—the room that had belonged to Rocco’s late wife, Elena, a room that had remained padlocked since her death in a fiery highway accident eighteen months earlier.

The brass lock turned with a dry, heavy thump.

The door swung inward.

Inside, the room was not a pristine sanctuary of grief. It was an archaeological dig.

The carpet had been peeled back from the northern baseboard, exposing the concrete subfloor beneath. The cedar-lined jewelry armoire had its rear plywood backing sawed through with a fine-toothed blade. And resting on the marble vanity table, beneath an industrial jeweler’s lamp that had been plugged into the shaving outlet, lay an open aluminum equipment case containing three digital bypass decoders, an assortment of diamond-tipped drill bits, and a heavy, red leather ledger stamped with the seal of the Port of Chicago Maritime Commission.

Rocco walked into the dressing room.

He didn't look at the jewelry. He didn't look at the torn wallpaper.

He picked up the red ledger.

He opened it to page one hundred and twelve.

Across the top of the parchment, written in his late wife’s delicate, precise calligraphy, was a list of thirty-four commercial shipping container numbers, accompanied by date stamps, arrival manifests, and banking routing codes for an offshore clearing account in Grand Cayman named Nautilus Capital.

And pinned to the bottom of the page, secured by an oxidized paperclip that had left a rust stain against the linen paper, was an autopsy report.

Not Elena’s.

The autopsy report of Captain Thomas Moretti—Rocco’s father—who had supposedly died of a massive myocardial infarction in his private office five years ago.

Except the coroner’s signature on the bottom line had not been signed by the Cook County medical examiner.