Chapter 4 - The Poison in the Household
The implication hung heavily in the air.
“You think Victoria was involved?” I asked, stepping closer to the desk.
Dominic laid out three separate documents. “Victoria’s maiden name is Moretti. Her father was an old-school boss in northern Italy whose shipping empire crumbled twenty years ago. When we married, it was an alliance to unite trade routes. But over the last six months, seven of our primary Mediterranean distribution hubs have suffered mysterious regulatory seizures.”
I looked down at the documents. They were written in old Venetian dialect and encoded corporate shorthand. To an untrained eye, they looked like standard import-export tax filings. But to someone trained in linguistic cryptology and historical treaty drafting, the hidden messages were glaring.
“These aren’t just tax filings,” I observed, pulling out my fountain pen again. “Look at the alternating paragraph indents. It’s an old Italian partisan cipher used during the 1940s. The first letters of every third clause spell out bank routing codes in the Cayman Islands.”
Dominic watched me intently, his eyes burning with a mixture of admiration and dangerous intensity. “Can you decipher the destination accounts?”
“Give me two hours, an Italian-Latin lexicon, and a pot of black coffee,” I replied confidently.
By 3:00 AM, the puzzle had completely unraveled.
The funds being siphoned from Dominic’s legitimate logistics companies weren't just going to offshore accounts; they were funding private security forces and purchasing offshore maritime liens registered directly under Victoria Russo and Don Valenti’s joint venture. Victoria wasn’t just an arrogant socialite throwing tantrums in fine-dining restaurants—she was actively orchestrating the financial decapitation of the Russo family empire.
Suddenly, the library doors swung open with a loud thud.
Victoria stood in the doorway, wrapped in a white mink coat, her makeup slightly smudged and her eyes wide with shock. Behind her stood two of Dominic’s personal guards, their hands nervously resting on their holsters.
“Dominic! What is the meaning of this?!” Victoria shrieked, storming into the room. “Why are your men searching my private suites in the Hamptons?! And why is this pathetic little waitress sitting at your desk?!”
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Dominic didn’t raise his voice. He simply picked up the ledger I had just decoded and dropped it onto the table in front of her.
“Because, Victoria,” Dominic said in a low, lethal whisper, “the ‘peasant’ you insulted over dinner just proved that you and Valenti have been stealing from my family for five years.”
