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"I'm getting started." Emiliano doesn't blink. "You survived five days in her care. That means she wanted you to survive. The question this room should be asking is why."

"Because she chose—"

"Because she's been waiting for you," Emiliano says. "For three years. I told her to watch. I didn't tell her to care. That part —" He looks at Isadora. "— that part she did on her own."

Isadora's knuckles are white on the mug. She says nothing. The nothing is louder than words.

Emiliano nods. Not approval. Recognition. The acknowledgment of a man who has carried the weight of two empires on shoulders that never trembled for anyone except a woman named Zina and the ghost sitting at this table.

"She told you about the network," he says. Not a question.

"She told me everything."

"Then let's hear it."

Isadora briefs us and my blood gets colder with every sentence.

Seven nodes. Seven sealed instructions from a dead man whose corpse I watched go into the ground. The marriage contract — my father signing my name to a syndicate alliance when I was fifteen, a boy promised like livestock. Communication routing embedded in Fabio's infrastructure before Fabio laid his first sensor — a knife buried in the floor, the house built on top of it.

"How long have you known?" I ask her.

"About the network? Three years. About all seven nodes?" She shakes her head. "I'm still mapping."

"And Zina?"

Isadora produces the handwriting. Angular. Precise. The penmanship of a woman who learned to write from nuns and kill from the world the nuns pretended didn't exist. She's been feeding intelligence through channels none of us knew existed while we tore the city apart hunting for answers already arriving on paper.

"The Queen was never sleeping," Emiliano says. Something in his voice — not surprise. Satisfaction. The sound of a man who bet on a woman twenty-three years ago and just watched the bet pay.

Santino steps forward. Studies the handwriting. His face does something complicated — the older brother recognizing his stepmother's hand, the protector calculating what it means that Zina has been operational from exile while the family she married into burned around her.

"She could have told us," Santino says.

"She couldn't." Isadora's voice is flat. Final. "Giovanni built the system to detect exactly that. Any direct communication through existing channels would have triggered a countermeasure. She had to go around. All of it. Every wall he built."

The kitchen absorbs this. The stick-figure sun. The turtle fruit bowl. The coffee cooling in six mugs. Giovanni's ghost pressing against every surface of a room that was supposed to belong to the family that survived him.

Then Dante speaks.

"Before the network."

Every body in the room locks. The freeze of a family that knows what this register means. Dante's quiet voice. The one he uses when the conclusion is a grenade and the pin is already out.

"Before the Marchese."

My hands press into the marble. Knuckles white. My gut screaming — the animal recognition that the thing my brother is about to say is the thing I've been sick with dread about since Fabio looked me in the eye and said someone was already inside.

"There's the Mole."

The room stops breathing. Nova's hand goes to her back — instinct, protecting what she carries. Santino turns to stone. Guido pushes off the wall — the kid who reads by what's missing suddenly rigid with the understanding that the empty square he's been staring at just produced a piece.

Emiliano doesn't move. He's been expecting this the way tides expect the moon.

Dante looks at me. Green eyes. Steady. The nineteen-year-old who chose mercy on the night of his capture and paid for it in chains — standing in his brother's kitchen about to name the person who walked through that mercy like a door.

"I know who it is."

Five words. Conversational volume.