Mia buried her face against his suit while sobbing.

The silence in the master dressing room was heavier than the damp lake air blowing through the cracked balcony doors.

Rocco did not drop the red ledger. He held it in his left hand, his fingers resting flat across the brittle parchment, while his right hand drifted slowly, casually, into the pocket of his charcoal trousers.

He walked back out into the sitting room, stopping three feet from where his cousin Adrian was still kneeling on the carpet, shivering despite the warmth of the gas fireplace.

"Calvin Vance," Rocco murmured, tasting the syllables on his tongue like copper and ash.

Adrian flinched, his head sinking lower between his shoulders. "Rocco... it was five years ago. Uncle Thomas was seventy-one. His heart was bad—he had three stents put in at Northwestern—"

"My father had an iron constitution," Rocco interrupted, his voice dropping into that terrifying, subterranean register that made Franco quietly step back two paces toward the door. "He bench-pressed two hundred pounds on his seventieth birthday. He ran the Calumet docks in the middle of January wearing nothing more than a wool cardigan and a pair of work boots."

Rocco tossed the red ledger onto the coffee table. It landed with a dull, heavy slap that rattled the crystal decanters.

"Calvin Vance was my father’s personal cardiologist for twelve years," Rocco continued, his gaze drifting from Adrian to Celeste. "He signed the death certificate on a Sunday morning. No autopsy. Closed casket within forty-eight hours, per 'family instructions' that my mother was supposedly too grief-stricken to verify."

Celeste took a sharp, jagged breath. Her hands were trembling so violently that the diamond drops at her ears chimed against the collar of her crepe gown.

"My father didn't do anything wrong, Rocco," she stammered, her voice rising in a frantic, defensive cadence. "Thomas had an arrhythmia! He collapsed at his desk! My father was just trying to spare the family the humiliation of an inquest!"

"An inquest?" Rocco took two slow steps toward her, his shadow falling across her ivory dress like a black drape. "Why would there be an inquest for a natural heart attack, Celeste?"

She didn't answer. Her eyes darted toward the red ledger on the table, where the paperclip held the second document.

"Let’s talk about Elena," Rocco said softly.

The name dropped into the room like a live grenade.

Adrian’s breath hitched in his throat. He raised his eyes, blood still trickling from his split lip, looking at his cousin with an expression of pure, unadulterated terror. "Rocco... no. Leave Elena out of this. Elena died in an accident. The brakes failed on the Skyway—everyone saw the highway patrol report—"

"Elena was an auditor for the Federal Maritime Commission before I married her, Adrian," Rocco said, never breaking eye contact with Celeste. "She spent six years tracking dirty manifests through the Great Lakes. When my father died, she spent eighteen months quietly pulling every bill of lading from the Calumet distribution center."

He reached down, picked up the micro-prism camera that had fallen from Mia’s glasses, and rolled it between his fingers.

"She knew," Rocco whispered. "She found the forty million dollars that was siphoned out of the dockworkers' pension trust between 2015 and 2020. She knew the money didn't disappear into bad real estate investments. It was wired into Nautilus Capital—an account controlled jointly by Adrian Moretti and the Vance Surgical Foundation."

"It wasn't like that!" Adrian shrieked, finally scrambling to his feet, his hands outstretched in pathetic supplication. "The pension fund was bleeding red ink, Rocco! The unions were threatening to pull their endorsement for the mayor's race! We needed a bridge loan—we were going to replace the capital once the riverfront rezoning cleared—!"

"And Elena found the transfer slips," Rocco said, stepping into Adrian’s space until his chest was touching the younger man’s lapels. "She put them in that red ledger. She locked them in that dressing room safe behind the cedar wall. And three days before she was scheduled to meet with the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois... the master cylinder on her Mercedes miraculously parted at seventy miles an hour on the Calumet curve."

Rocco’s right hand came out of his pocket.

He didn't draw a pistol. He didn't pick up a knife.

He reached out, caught Adrian by the throat with an iron grip, and hoisted him off his feet, slamming his spine back against the mahogany wainscoting with enough force to crack the plaster behind the wood.

Adrian gagged, his hands clawing frantically at Rocco’s wrist, his wingtip shoes kicking two feet above the carpet.

"Rocco!" Celeste screamed, throwing herself toward his arm. "Stop it! You’ll kill him!"

Franco did not pull his weapon. He simply stepped forward, caught Celeste by the wrist with one weathered hand, and twisted her arm behind her back until she was forced onto her knees beside the coffee table, her cheek pressed flat against the cold marble top.

"Be quiet, little bird," Franco muttered in her ear, his voice rough as river gravel. "You’ve done enough talking with that camera."

Rocco did not tighten his grip enough to crush the windpipe; he held Adrian pinned, watching the younger man’s face turn a mottled, suffused purple, watching the veins in his temples throb against the skin like thick worms.

"Did you touch her car, Adrian?" Rocco asked, his voice dead, quiet, conversational. "Tell me before your lungs run out of air. Did you put your hands on my wife's brakes?"

Adrian’s eyes rolled back in his head, his fingers twitching against Rocco’s sleeve. He shook his head frantically, choking out a single, wet, ruined syllable:

"N-No... not... not me..."

"Then who?"

Adrian’s trembling finger lifted from Rocco’s wrist.

He didn't point at Celeste.