Page 135 of My Dark Ever After

“Raffa alone would tip the scales,” I admitted. “And that’s not factoring in his family and our friends.”

Dad rubbed his free hand over his mouth and nodded. “Okay then. I know your mother told you we plan to stay for some time, and she meant it. I can do most of my work from here and schedule videoconferences according to the time difference. I won’t leave you until I’m sure you’re settled. Until we feel good about our relationship again.”

My heart tripped lightly, suddenly unburdened of the weight of my father’s disappointment.

“I love you,” I told him, squeezing his hand. “I know you thought I would judge you for your past in the Mafia, but even if I hadn’t had my own experiences with it, I could never think you were anything less than the best dad in the world. You taught me how to take the true measure of a man, and it has everything to do with his heart and mind and very little to do with his social conformity.”

Dad laughed, and the exhaustion that had sandblasted his face broke open to reveal his handsomeness. “I tried to conform for almost thirty years, and look where it got me!”

I smiled at him. “Right back where you started. Which means maybe you want to help me with this?”

He got up from the chair and rounded the desk to peer over my shoulder as I finished resetting Leo’s password.

“How did you do that?” he asked.

“I had all his personal information right here,” I said, indicating the computer. “And the Romano Group’s information from Carmine. It was easy.”

Pride suffused Dad’s face as he smiled at me. “I never knew, all those hours we spent playing math and pattern-recognition games, that I was preparing you for a life of crime ... but whatever you do in the future, I am very proud to be your father. You are quite the woman, Guinevere.”

“I was taught by the best,” I quipped. “Now, pull up a chair and help me determine exactly where the money he’s been siphoning from the Romano Group and stealing from Lupo Nero’s companies is going.”

We worked in silence for an hour, long after Martina had brought in steaming mugs of coffee and curled up in the chair across from the deskwith another laptop to help us in our mission. She wasn’t as familiar with financial forensics, but she provided invaluable context.

Still, I could not find any evidence that the money Leo had been channeling away from Raffa’s enterprises was going into Leo’s own pockets.

Until I decided to stop looking for it in Leo’s coffers and just follow the trail of money.

My mind snagged on a pattern I vaguely recognized from having gone through the shipping manifests when Raffa was trying to figure out who was smuggling the Albanians’ drugs through Livorno.

A bastardized anagram, but this time with an affine cipher instead of a Caesar.

It took Dad and me a long time to work out the mathematical equations for the businesses in the Romano Group’s holdings, but eventually I used frequency analysis of all the company names to come up with the numbers needed to solve the simultaneous equation.

And thereby crack the code of where exactly Leo had hidden the money.

Only, the main holding company that was the pot of gold at the end of a very long rainbow, Nobiliaire, was not owned by Leonardo di Conte.

It was in a trust for a Maria Rizzo, his deceased mother, held by Antonio di Conte.

I was familiar enough with trust law to know that only the holder of the account could access the funds, and after a quick internet search, I found the same was true in Italy. So why would Leo funnel all his hard-won dirty money into an account he could not access?

Unless Leo was not the puppeteer but, instead, the puppet pulled by someone else’s hands.

The account holder: Antonio di Conte.

Uncle Tonio.

I blinked at the financial records, wondering if my sleep-deprived brain was imagining things.

We had not been suspicious of Tonio at all.

He was a seventy-year-old man, for one thing, and the Venetian was said to be a tall, fit young man.

But if Leo was working with him, then perhaps Leo had been the one to don the mask and do Tonio’s more aggressive legwork.

For another, he was already head of the Romano Group, with what had to be an incredible salary and a lot of sway in Florentine society as its CEO.

Sowhy?