Chapter 5 - THE MAN WHO SAVED ME BEFORE WE MET
Dante spent the next six hours searching records his father had ordered destroyed.
At 4:20 A.M., Daniel found one surviving server backup.
The warning email originated from an executive terminal in Moretti Maritime’s old headquarters.
Only three people had access.
Dante’s father, Antonio Moretti.
Marco DeLuca.
And Antonio’s younger brother, Salvatore.
Dante stared at the names.
“Marco ran.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Which makes him look guilty.”
“Too guilty.”
He gave me a look.
“Normal people see a suspect flee and assume guilt.”
“Normal people don’t survive Geneva.”
Fair.
Salvatore Moretti was seventy-one now.
Retired.
Or supposedly retired.
He lived on a private estate near Lake Forest and rarely attended family meetings.
He had always been pleasant to me.
Too pleasant, perhaps.
He called me principessa while asking absolutely nothing about my life.
Dante hated my suggestion immediately.
“You think my uncle warned you?”
“I think one of those three did.”
“My father?”
“Possible.”
“Marco?”
“Possible.”
“Salvatore?”
“Also possible.”
Dante sighed.
“You enjoy this.”
“I enjoy being useful.”
The sentence came out sharper than intended.
He looked at me.
I did not soften it.
“At dinner, you told me to be your wife instead of the smartest person in the room.”
His face tightened.
“I know.”
“You laughed when they insulted me.”
“I know.”
“You needed their business more than you needed to respect me.”
“That is not—”
“It is exactly what happened.”
Dante stopped.
For once, the great Don Moretti had no argument.
“I was wrong.”
I looked at him.
Men like Dante apologized rarely enough that each word had weight.
“I thought keeping the negotiations smooth mattered more than correcting Lorenzo.”
“And now?”
“Now I would happily throw him into the river.”
“Growth.”
His mouth twitched.
Then Daniel interrupted.
“We found something.”
An old payroll archive showed an unexplained transfer two days before the warning email.
Five hundred thousand dollars.
Authorized by Antonio Moretti.
Paid to a company called Northline Consulting.
I knew Northline.
Everyone involved in the Geneva case did.
It was Julien Marchand’s private investigative firm.
My dead colleague.
Dante went still.
“Why would my father pay your colleague?”
I opened Northline’s old billing records.
One invoice remained.
CLIENT: A. MORETTI.
SERVICE: INTERNAL CORRUPTION REVIEW.
Antonio Moretti had hired Julien before I ever discovered Orfeo.
Dante looked shaken.
“My father was investigating his own company.”
“Yes.”
“Then he may have known who was using our routes.”
“Yes.”
Daniel found the final entry in Julien’s encrypted notes.
It was dated three days before he died.
A.M. IS CLEAN.
M.D. IS COMPROMISED.
S.M. IS THE ARCHITECT.
Dante read the initials.
Marco DeLuca was compromised.
May you like
But the architect was Salvatore Moretti.
His uncle.
