Chapter 6
"Then find the gateway," Miller snapped, his voice tight with suppressed rage. "We don't leave this room until we have total system override."
"Wait," I spoke up, pushing myself out of the folding chair.
My ankle gave out instantly under my weight, the sharp pain shooting up my calf. I grabbed the edge of the metal table to keep from sprawling onto the floor, sending a stack of printer paper fluttering across the floorboards.
Miller turned, his eyes narrowing into cold slits. "Gianna, sit back down."
"You said that drive held the evidence of my father's murder," I said, leaning heavily on the table, my heart pounding against my ribs like a trapped bird. "You told me it contained the dashcam footage from the Queensboro hit. The wiretaps proving Patrizio paid the hit team. Why are you only talking about blast doors and cellular jammers?"
The room went utterly, deadeningly quiet.
The two armed men near the front entrance didn't look at Miller. They shifted their weight, their hands resting loosely on the grips of their suppressed carbines, their eyes locking onto me with the flat, dispassionate appraisal of abattoir workers.
Miller slowly stood upright.
He didn't offer a reassuring smile. He didn't adjust his glasses. He walked around the table with slow, deliberate steps until he stood barely two feet away from me.
Up close, without the warm dome light of the truck, his face looked gray, lined with an ambition that had nothing to do with justice. The gold shield pinned to his windbreaker caught the harsh light of the work lamp—scratched, tarnished at the edges, pinned slightly crooked against the black nylon.
"Gianna," he said, his voice dropping into a low, patronizing purr that sent a wave of nausea through my stomach. "You did your part. You brought the key out of the castle. Now let the adults handle the siege."
"Show me the file," I demanded, my voice trembling, though I fought with every fiber of my being to keep it steady. "Show me the folder on Queensboro Bridge. I risked my life to pull that drive out of his safe. I deserve to see what he did to my father!"
Miller stared at me for a long, terrible moment.
Then, the corner of his thin mouth twitched upward into a cold, contemptuous smirk.
"Your father," he murmured, shaking his head slightly. "You really have no idea how this city works, do you?"
Before I could answer, a high-pitched, warbling tone erupted from the primary console behind him.
The technician stiffened in his chair. "Miller! We have an inbound anomaly on the perimeter sensor array. Route 9, three miles south."
Miller spun on his heel. "What is it? State police?"
"No," the technician said, his voice climbing an octave, his fingers pounding the keys with frantic urgency. "Single vehicle. Blacked-out transponder. Traveling at ninety-five miles an hour through the blizzard. It just blew through the state roadblock like it wasn't even there."
My breath caught in my throat.
*Ninety-five miles an hour. Through a whiteout.*
There was only one man in the entire state of New York who drove like that. One man who possessed the armored hardware to shatter a state police roadblock and keep moving through eight inches of unplowed snow.
Patrizio.
He hadn't stayed at the manor to regroup. He hadn't sent an army of capos to search the woods.
He was coming himself.
"Lock the exterior gates," Miller commanded, his voice turning into a whip of pure steel. The friendly agent was completely gone, replaced by a ruthless, predatory focus that matched anything I had ever seen in the Leoni parlor. "Arm the perimeter charges. If that vehicle breaches the outer treeline, take the engine block out with the Barrett."
The guard by the door racked the charging handle of his carbine with a sharp, heavy *clack*.
"What about the girl?" the guard asked, his eyes darting toward me.
Miller didn't even look back at me. He kept his eyes fixed on the cascading diagnostic readouts on the monitor, where a blinking red icon was closing the distance across the digital topography map of the mountain.
"Take her down to the cellar holding pen," Miller said, his tone as casual as if he were ordering a sandwich. "And cuff her to the support column. If the Don wants his wife back so badly, we're going to make sure he walks right into the center of the room to get her."
The guard’s hand clamped around my upper arm like a rusted iron vice.
"Move," he grunted, dragging me backward away from the table.
Pain flared through my twisted ankle, white and sharp, but my eyes stayed glued to the primary monitor. Across the digital topographical map, that blinking crimson beacon was moving with suicidal speed, carving a straight line through the snowed-out contours of Route 9.
He was coming. Alone.
"Wait," the technician barked, slamming both palms down on the desk. "Miller, hold up! The dead-man's wipe didn't trigger. The NATO layer just decentralized—the drive’s third partition didn't need a seed phrase. It was keyed to an external biometric handshake that just completed."
Miller froze two paces from me, his head snapping toward the screens. "What completed it?"
"The transponder in that incoming truck," the technician breathed, his eyes wide in the pale blue glare. "The moment that vehicle crossed into the five-mile radius of the drive's local receiver, the handshake closed. The files are unpacking. All of them."
"Pull the defensive grids," Miller ordered, his voice dropping into a razor-sharp whisper. "Find the override codes for his Hudson Valley relay. Do it now!"
"I'm trying, but it’s dumping everything into an open read directory! It’s not just security architecture, Miller—it’s an encrypted black-box archive. Rossi Family, Leoni Family... tactical surveillance logs from October."
*October.*
The word struck the center of my chest like a lead weight.
My father died on October fourteenth.
"Don't touch that directory," Miller snapped, taking a sudden, aggressive step toward the console. "Stick to the network overrides!"
"Get off me!" I screamed, driving my left elbow back with every ounce of frantic strength I had left.
The heavy heel of my elbow caught the armed guard squarely under his collarbone. He grunted, his grip slipping just enough on the slick wool of my coat for me to twist free. I didn't run for the door. I threw my entire weight against the edge of the folding table, stumbling forward on my ruined ankle, my hands slapping down against the plastic casing of the secondary monitor.
"Gianna, step back!" Miller lunged, reaching for my shoulder.
"Look at the screen!" I choked out, pointing a trembling, blood-crusted finger at the cascading text. "You said you didn't have the files! You said Patrizio kept the records of the Queensboro hit buried on his private server!"
The technician didn't stop typing. On the center display, an automated media viewer forced itself to the foreground, decoding a high-definition tactical dashcam feed stamped with federal inter-agency watermarks: *DOJ / SPECIAL ASSETS / COVERT RECON.*
It wasn't syndicate footage.
It was federal.
My breath stalled in my throat. The room, the hum of the server fans, the howling blizzard outside the boarded windows—everything faded into a deafening, vacuum-sealed silence.
