Page 103 of Double Trouble for the Mafia Prince
"They’ve taken docks. Quietly. Bought off inspectors. Swallowed up crews we thought had folded. No demands, no manifesto. Just erasures." Luca’s eyes meet mine. "And now, there are records connecting them to Rossi routes."
"How many transfers?"
My voice barely holds steady.
"Four. Two in the last three weeks. All routed through dormant Rossi infrastructure."
The weight of it settles on my spine, pressing low and slow.
Valentina flips one final page.
It’s a manifest fragment.
Illegible except for a footnote—an audit signature.
ARD-001.
Valentina watches my face.
"That audit tag—ARD-001—was from a classified customs run in Sicily. Six years ago. Only five men had direct access to the operation."
Luca nods.
"Dante recovered a fragment of the old packing cloth this morning. Same marker. Same network."
Valentina’s voice lowers.
"Your brother wasn’t officially part of that list. But he was involved in logistics prep. Quietly. Off the books. There’s no version of that audit trail he should have known."
Luca adds,
"Unless he was working with someone who did." A beat. "Or unless he’s the one who brought it back."
I can’t speak.
"We didn’t act on that alone," Valentina continues. "But when we matched his estate logs against floor surveillance, something broke."
I look up.
"His badge scans are clean. Perfect attendance. Strategy meetings. Review sessions." Her voice tightens. "But there’s no corresponding heat trace. No door scans. No gate entries. He was showing up in the logs. But he wasn’t here."
Luca steps forward.
"It was a cloned badge. Routed through a Rossi-controlled mirror server. Whoever spoofed it wanted us to believe he never left."
The words land like a body at my feet.
I reach for the folder again, fingers shaking now, and flip through the rest.
Pages and pages of ghost movements.
The same clearance string.
Minor edits to the contents.
Always routed through Rossi pipelines.
Always Rafa’s name beneath the surface.
