Page 119 of Double Trouble for the Mafia Prince
No seal.
Inside are four pages with my father’s signature with old stalwarts like the Lombardi senior, cold in its phrasing.
Strategic relocation of assets.
Rerouting of high-risk shipments through neutral syndicates.
Back-channel transport vessels registered to shell identities I’ve seen on freight logs, but never tied to a single port.
At the bottom of the final page is a third annotation. Initials: R.R.But not in Rafa’s handwriting.
This one is sharper.
Harsher.
The lettering belonged to the man who taught Rafa to write that way.
My father.
And beside it—not a date, not a seal—but a crest drawn in faint ink.
Not the lion.
The hawk.
The private Rossi sigil.
The one he used on things not meant for courtrooms or council rooms.
The one he stamped on blood money.
It takes everything in me not to drop the folder.
Because if someone is invoking Operation Umber now—rerouting shipments, activating shell companies, pulling ghost names like Silvano out of retirement—then they’re using my father’s old world to build something new.
And the infrastructure isn’t Salvatore.
It’s Rossi.
I sink back against the stone wall, breath shallow, the pages fluttering in my lap like they know what they carry.
If Rafa’s tied to this—if he’s using our father’s buried systems, the names and routes that were meant for wartime only—then he’s not trying to protect the bloodline.
With no inkling about how I do it, I somehow manage to get out of the estate, into another taxi, and go home.
My intention is singular: I need to find Valentina.
It comes as a relief when a maid tells me she’s in the east solar.
Breaking into a run, I barge inside, and she looks up to see me in my disheveled state.
Surprise shines in her eyes.
"Gianna," she says, her voice even. "I wasn’t expecting?—"
I hold up the folder.
Her eyes flick to it.
