Chapter 58 - The Gate Code
The room seemed to shrink, the walls closing in until there was nothing left except the cold space between Sofia Rossi and me.
"What is he talking about?" I whispered. My voice sounded thin, stripped of all the fierce resolve I had carried up that elevator. "Signora... what does he mean, gate codes?"
Sofia did not look away. Her dark eyes met mine with an unflinching, terrible honesty that was far more frightening than any lie.
"David was my auditor, Maya," she said, her raspy voice perfectly level. "He was brilliant with mechanical systems, but he was reckless with corporate boundaries. When he found the toxic ballast records, he wanted to go directly to the United States Attorney."
"He wanted justice!" I shouted, the fury tearing through my chest.
"He wanted an explosion," Sofia countered, not raising her voice by a single decibel. "And in this city, when a common diver sets off an explosion against a cartel like the one Giancarlo built, the government does not protect him. The government takes the files, cuts an administrative settlement with the polluters, and buries the diver in an unmarked ditch."
"So you gave them the codes?" Gabriel asked, his gun lowering an inch, his voice laced with pure horror. "Mother... did you give Giancarlo the security clearance to Slip Nine?"
"I gave the security clearance to Hector," Sofia said. "Because David told me he had hidden the master ledger inside the ballast tank of the *Caledonia*. I intended to have my own men extract David that night and place him in a safe house in Wisconsin until the legal transfer was completed."
"Then why was he dead?" I choked out, tears of rage burning behind my eyes. "Why did they pull him out of the lake?"
"Because Hector did not send enforcers to question him," Giancarlo interrupted with a malicious, triumphant smirk. "Hector panicked. My dear, stupid brother realized that if Sofia got hold of that ledger, she would use the Giammona clause to strip him of every dock he owned. Hector didn't order David's interrogation. He ordered his immediate execution."
Giancarlo took a step toward me, his face twisted in vicious satisfaction.
"Sofia thought she was playing chess," Giancarlo whispered. "She set the trap for Hector, and your brother was the cheese. She didn't kill him with her own hands, Miss Vance. But she left the cage open knowing the wolves were starving."
The room spun.
Every memory of the past six months shifted under my feet like shifting cargo in a heavy swell. The way Sofia had looked at me when I first arrived at the mansion—not with suspicion, but with a silent, agonizing debt. The way she had pushed David’s silver watch across the table. Her insistence that I stay close, that I be her voice.
She wasn't just using me to translate her silence.
She was using me to absolve her conscience.
"Is it true?" I asked Sofia.
Sofia sat in Hector’s chair, her face carved from gray marble.
"I calculated the risk," she said quietly. "And I was wrong. I believed Hector was still a creature of pride who would demand a trial before the family. I did not realize he had already surrendered to his terror. David paid the price for my misjudgment."
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"Misjudgment?" I cried out, my voice cracking. "You killed him! You sacrificed him so you could keep your father's docks!"
Before Sofia could answer, the sharp, wailing howl of federal sirens echoed up from the harbor road below.
