Elena woke to a soft knock at her door and Damian's voice, low and urgent, on the other side of it. She let him in without hesitation, some old instinct already reading the tension in his shoulders before he'd said a single word.
"It's Aldo," he said, once the door was closed behind him. "It's real. I heard him say it myself."
He told her everything — the archive, the transcripts, the burner phone still buzzing in the drawer, the voice on the other end telling someone to handle it about a Marchetti girl getting too close. He told her about the confrontation, Aldo's justification wrapped around something that sounded almost like conviction, the threat underneath the warning to think quietly.
Elena sat very still through all of it, her broken arm cradled against her chest, feeling the las
