Dante Moretti had signed a hundred contracts without lifting his eyes from the page. He was forty-two, boss of all bosses of the five eastern families, and no man in a room spoke until he spoke first. Then the cook's daughter walked into his study — three years old, one ribbon lost, a gray stuffed cat crushed against her chest — and said it out loud. *Your fiancée is a thief.* He did not shout. He did not move for three full seconds. He let the ink bleed across the signature he had almost finished. And when the room was empty again, he went to a drawer that only two living men knew existed, and found the bronze seal sitting three millimeters to the left of where it had sat that morning. Children say foolish things. In the Moretti family, no sentence — not even one spoken by a child — is ever ignored twice.

At 2:00 AM, the estate was finally quiet. Dante sat in the subterranean security bunker beneath the wine cellar. The room was bathed in the blue glow of a dozen monitors.

Silvio walked into the bunker, tossing a thick manila folder onto the metal desk.

"You were right, Boss," Silvio grunted, pouring himself a measure of scotch from a crystal decanter. "Victoria isn't working for a rival Italian family. We ran the encryption signatures on the virus she tried to upload to the dummy drive."

Dante leaned forward, opening the folder. "Bratva?"

"Russian," Silvio confirmed, taking a sip. "The Sokolov syndicate out of Brooklyn. They've been trying to push into our eastern seaboard shipping routes for two years. They knew they couldn't take us in a street war, so they decided to gut us from the inside."

Dante stared at a surveillance photo in the file. It showed Victoria Thorne—or whoever she truly was—sitting in a high-end Manhattan cafe, passing a sleek briefcase to a heavily tattooed Russian man.

"Her real name is Katerina Volkov," Silvio explained. "She's an infiltration specialist. The man she's meeting with is Ivan Sokolov, the head of the Bratva. They aren't just partners, Dante. They're lovers."

Dante’s jaw locked. The betrayal ran deeper than a simple corporate heist. The woman sleeping in his guest suite was actively plotting to bankrupt his family and hand his empire over to her Russian lover.

"Ivan Sokolov is on the guest list for the wedding," Dante noted, tracing the Russian's face in the photograph. "He RSVP'd under a fake corporate alias. He's coming to collect the hard drive in person."

"Half the guests at the reception will be Bratva hitmen in tailored suits," Silvio warned, his voice grim. "They plan to execute you and the capos during the reception, grab the drive from Victoria, and walk out of the bloodbath as the new kings of the East Coast."

"They are walking into a slaughterhouse," Dante stated coldly.

"Should I cancel the wedding? Call off the caterers?"

"No," Dante commanded, his eyes completely dead. "We let them assemble. We let Ivan Sokolov walk right into my ballroom, drink my champagne, and smile at my bride. We use the wedding to put the entire Bratva leadership in one room."