My lovely betrayal

Chapter 12: The Interrogation

I didn't sleep.

The USB sat on my nightstand, a small black rectangle that contained everything Mira had died to protect. I'd plugged it into a secure laptop Dante had provided—no internet connection, no network, just a screen and a processor and the ghost of my sister's final mission. Transaction logs. Encrypted communications. Names. Dates. A trail of blood and money that stretched across eight years and a dozen countries.

Webb was the center of it. Webb and a man identified only as "The Architect," whose scarred hand appeared in a single photograph attached to the files. The same scar I'd seen on Rourke's hand in the alley. The same scar on the bank guard's hand before I'd put him on the floor.

They were branded. All of them. A network of traitors marked by the same pale line across their left hands, a signature carved into flesh.

When the first light of dawn crept through my curtains, I was still reading.

Greta brought coffee without being asked. She set the tray on my table, glanced at the laptop screen, and said nothing. But her hand brushed my shoulder as she left—a brief, human touch that nearly undid me.

---

The cellar beneath the villa was older than the house above it. Roman, maybe. The stones were damp and the air was cold and the only light came from a single bulb swinging on a chain. Rourke was tied to a chair in the center of the room, his scarred hand bound to the armrest, his face a patchwork of bruises from his encounter with Dante in the alley.

He looked up when I walked in. His lip curled.

"The widow's sister," he said. "Come to gloat?"

"I'm not here to gloat." I pulled up a wooden stool and sat down facing him. "I'm here to make a deal."

"I don't make deals."

"You will." I set the laptop on the floor between us, the screen facing him. "Because I've spent the last eight hours reading everything Mira left behind. I know about the network. I know about the Architect. I know about the brand on your hand and the twelve other operatives who carry it. What I don't know is who the Architect is. You're going to tell me."

Rourke laughed. It was a hollow, rattling sound. "You think I'm afraid of you?"

"I think you're afraid of him. The Architect. I think you're more afraid of what he'll do to you than what I will. But you should be afraid of me, Rourke. Because I have nothing left to lose. My sister is dead. My career is gone. The man I trusted most in the world tried to kill me in a bank yesterday. You're the only leverage I have, and I will use every inch of it."

I said it calmly. That was the terrifying part. Somewhere in the long hours of the night, my rage had cooled into something crystalline and sharp. I wasn't angry anymore. I was certain.

"What do you want?" Rourke asked.

"The Architect's name. His location. The full list of operatives in his network. Everything you know about the orders he gave regarding my sister."

"And in return?"

"In return, I don't leave you in this cellar for Dante to find when his patience runs out."

Rourke's eyes flickered toward the door. Dante was standing there, silent as a shadow, his shoulder propped against the stone wall. He hadn't said a word since I'd entered. He didn't need to. His presence was a promise.

"You're bluffing," Rourke said. "Marchetti doesn't torture people."

"He doesn't." I leaned forward. "But I do."

I let the words hang in the cold air. It was a bluff, mostly. I'd been trained in interrogation techniques, but I'd never enjoyed them. Rourke didn't know that. All he knew was that I'd killed three men in a Prague alley without flinching, and that I'd walked out of a Geneva bank with his associate's blood on my collar.

"The Architect," Rourke said finally, his voice barely above a whisper, "is a man named Aldric Vane."

The name meant nothing to me. But behind me, Dante went very still.

"Vane," Dante said. "Aldric Vane has been dead for fifteen years."

"That's what he wanted everyone to think." Rourke's scarred hand twitched against its restraints. "He faked his death in a boating accident off the coast of Croatia. Walked away from a hundred-million-euro empire and reinvented himself as a ghost. He's been running the network ever since. Webb is his second. I'm his third. There are twelve of us total. The branded ones."

"Why the scars?"

"Loyalty. Permanence. You can't infiltrate the network without the mark, and you can't leave it without losing the hand." Rourke's voice was bitter now. "I tried to leave three years ago. Vane took my wife instead. So I stayed."

I didn't feel sympathy. I didn't feel anything except the cold, sharp focus of getting closer to the man who'd ordered my sister's death.

"Where is he?"

"I don't know. No one knows. He moves every few months. The only person who had direct contact was Webb."

"Then Webb knows where he is."

"Webb knows everything." Rourke's eyes met mine. "If you want Vane, you need Webb alive. And Webb is already running."

I stood up, the stool scraping against stone. "Then I'll catch him."

"You won't." Rourke shook his head. "He's been doing this for twenty years. He has safehouses in six countries, aliases in twelve, and enough blackmail material to bury half the intelligence agencies in Europe. You don't catch Marcus Webb. He catches you."

I thought of the bank. The chandelier. The scattered papers. Webb's voice, calm and paternal, calling me family while he pointed a gun at my head.

"He's already tried to catch me," I said. "He missed."

"Because Marchetti was there. Next time, you won't have backup." Rourke's gaze shifted to Dante. "Neither will you. Vane has been waiting for an excuse to move against your organization for years. You just handed him one."

Dante stepped forward, out of the shadows. His face was unreadable. "Then we move first."

He took my arm and guided me out of the cellar, leaving Rourke alone with the swinging bulb and the damp stones. The door closed behind us with a heavy thud, and we stood in the narrow corridor, the weight of what we'd learned settling around us like dust.

"Aldric Vane," I said. "You know the name."

"I knew him. Before he died. Or didn't die." Dante rubbed a hand across his jaw. "He was a rival don in the early years. Ruthless. Brilliant. He built a trafficking empire that stretched from Moscow to Madrid. When he supposedly drowned, his organization fractured. I absorbed some of it. The rest scattered."

"And now he's back."

"Now he's back. And he's been inside my house for years." Dante's voice was flat, but beneath it was something harder. "Rourke was my head of security. He had access to everything—my travel schedules, my safehouses, my family. If Vane wanted Leo dead, Rourke could have made it happen in an hour."

"But he didn't."

"Because Leo wasn't the target. Mira was. And now you are."

I leaned against the stone wall, the cold seeping through my shirt. "Webb is running. Vane is in the wind. We have one of their operatives in a cellar and a USB full of evidence that implicates half of European intelligence. What do we do?"

Dante was quiet for a moment. Then he turned to face me, and his eyes were the color of the lake before a storm.

"We do what Mira would have done. We follow the money."