"Translate It!” The Mafia Boss Mocked Her—Seconds Later, He Froze In Shock

Sunlight streamed through the tall glass windows of the penthouse the next morning, painting the charcoal linen sheets of the master bed in pale gold.

Elena woke up warm, safe, and tangled in a pair of strong, scarred arms. For a few seconds, she simply lay still, listening to the steady, powerful rhythm of Lucian’s heartbeat beneath her cheek, marveling at how forty-eight hours had turned her from an invisible temp into the woman waking up in Lucian Bellini’s bed.

Wait—he wasn't asleep.

His fingers were moving slowly through her loose hair, while his other hand held his encrypted tablet tilted away from the light.

"Morning," Elena murmured, propping her chin up on his bare chest.

Lucian looked down at her, the cold granite of his expression melting instantly into warmth as he pressed a kiss to her forehead. "Morning, tesoro. How is your shoulder?"

"Barely a scratch." She glanced at the tablet screen in his hand, noticing the frown returning to his brows. "What happened?"

"Agent Miller interrogated Enzo Ferrara at the federal holding facility at four this morning before Costa’s lawyers could slap an injunction on the room," Lucian said, sitting up against the headboard and pulling the sheet up around them. "Enzo didn't know how Sabatini got the blank customs letterhead for the Bellini Star last week—because Sabatini didn't steal it from the Lexington translation bureau."

Elena sat up beside him, instantly alert. "If Sabatini didn't steal the blank customs forms from the translator on Lexington, where did he get them?"

"Each customs bond sheet has a unique cryptographic watermark generated inside our own thirty-second-floor server room forty-eight hours before a ship docks," Lucian said coldly. "Which means Marco Rossi on Lexington only translated the document—someone working right downstairs on the thirty-second floor of this building generated the watermarked bond, handed it to Sabatini, and tipped off Enzo Ferrara which stairwell you and I were going to use at the Pierre Hotel last night."

A cold knot tightened in Elena’s stomach. "You have a traitor in the executive suite."

"Only four people on the thirty-second floor have level-five clearance to generate cryptographic customs bonds," Lucian said, tapping four photographs onto the screen of his tablet. "Me. My chief counsel, Clara Vance. My head of accounting, Arthur Donovan. And my executive floor manager—Brenda."

Elena stared at the three faces beside Lucian’s.

"Clara Vance was the one who raised the red flag on Sabatini’s Genoa contract in the boardroom on Tuesday morning!" Elena reasoned aloud. "If she were working with Sabatini, why would she beg you for forty-eight hours to bring in a forensic linguist?"

"Unless she knew I would refuse to delay the signing in front of the delegation—and she wanted it on the record that she advised caution so she’d have complete legal deniability when the feds seized our ships thirty days later," Lucian countered with ruthless logic.

"What about Brenda?" Elena asked. "She was at the Pierre Hotel last night! She saw us walk in together ten minutes before Ferrara’s men came through the kitchen!"

"And what about Donovan in accounting?" Lucian added. "He signs off on all the port escrow wires."

Elena thought back over eight months of being invisible on the thirty-second floor—eight months of pouring coffee, emptying shredder bins, and refilling water glasses while executives talked on the phone as if she were a piece of furniture.

Wait.

Her eyes widened suddenly.

"Lucian," Elena said, grabbing his forearm. "Mr. Donovan in accounting always takes his morning bagel toasted on one side only, with black coffee at seven-fifteen. Last Thursday morning, when I walked into his office at seven-fifteen to set down his plate, he was on his personal cellphone speaking in French—and he hung up the second I walked in."

"Donovan speaks French?" Lucian’s eyes narrowed. "His personnel file says he grew up in Queens and never left the tri-state area."

"It wasn't Parisian French," Elena said rapidly, her philology training locking onto the memory of the vowels and cadence she had overheard for three seconds last week. "It was Corsican-accented French mixed with southern Italian loanwords—the exact dialect spoken by maritime brokers in Marseille who work the smuggling routes between Corsica and Naples!"