719 The Shadows of Vengeance: Bloodlines, Betrayal, and the Final Reckoning at the Docks

I dismissed Chloe with a wave of my hand, ordering her to stay in the east wing until I sorted out the mess, and immediately summoned Vince Marino, my head of security and the man who had watched my back through every turf war in Brooklyn.

Vince stood by the desk, his graying crew-cut catching the lamplight, his expression grim as he slid a tablet onto the polished wood.

"We ran the perimeter checks, boss," Vince said without preamble. "No breaches. No unauthorized vehicles on the access road. The biometric logs show zero unrecorded entries for the past forty-eight hours."

"What about the internal intercoms?" I asked, staring at the glowing screen. "The nursery monitors? Can they be accessed remotely?"

Vince hesitated, his jaw tightening. "Only through the master network in the basement server room. Which requires your private encryption key or my override code."

"Check the server access logs for the last thirty days," I commanded. "Every single login. Every file transfer. I want to know if anyone has been listening to the girls' rooms when we thought they were sleeping."

Vince nodded, pulling a small flash drive from his pocket and plugging it directly into the side of my secure terminal. "I already pulled the raw data before coming up. It’ll take a few minutes to decrypt the routing history, but Dominic... you really think someone’s been ghosting our network?"

"Lucia didn't pull that sentence out of thin air, Vince," I said, leaning back in my chair and rubbing the bridge of my nose where a dull, throbbing headache had settled. "A four-year-old child doesn't accuse her father of murder unless she was told to believe it. And if someone inside this fortress is whispering poison into my daughters' ears while I'm out bleeding to keep them safe, I am going to skin them alive."

As the terminal hummed quietly, processing the encrypted data streams, my mind drifted back to the afternoon Isabella died.

The police report had been thorough. The federal task force had signed off on it. Three cartel hitmen in a stolen sedan, intercepted at a red light on Northern Boulevard. It was a classic, brutal hit designed to send a message to the man who controlled the docks.

The official story had no loose ends.

So why did the memory of Isabella's final phone call—made just ten minutes before the ambush—suddenly feel like a ticking bomb in my chest?

“Dominic, someone’s been following the nanny van,” she had whispered, her voice shaking over the line before the signal cut out with a burst of static.

I had assumed it was scouts from the Mendoza crew tracking our daily routines. But Mendoza was dead. His empire was dust. If the surveillance had been internal—if someone inside my own organization had sold my family out to set up that intersection—then the war I thought I finished fourteen months ago had only just begun.

"Boss," Vince's voice broke through the silence, sharp and tight. "The logs are decrypted. Look at this."

I leaned forward. On the screen, a series of timestamps scrolled past, showing remote access logins originating not from the master console in the study, but from a terminal inside the house.