Blood and Bones

Prologue

Seraphina POV

2:47 a.m. and the data is talking to me again.

Not in words — it never works in words. It works in patterns. In the shape of a number sitting three degrees le! of where it should be. In a routing sequence that almost makes sense but not quite, the way a lie almost sounds like the truth until you've heard enough of both to know the difference. I've been doing this long enough that I feel it before I can name it. Something wrong lives in these files. I just have to find the room it's hiding in. Three monitors. one runs the passive scrape three shell companies I've been unspooling for six weeks, each one a ghost nested inside another ghost nested inside a Delaware LLC that exists only on paper and in the particular imagination of someone who is very good at not being found. The center screen runs my mapping so!ware. I built it myself at twenty-two because the existing tools were too slow and I don't like tools I didn't build. %e right screen runs feeds-ports, financial indices, encrypted channels I monitor because information is the only currency that compounds without a ceiling. My father thinks I spend my nights reading.

That’s not entirely a lie. Just not books. This room is mine in a way no other room in this house is mine. The rest of the townhouse is my mother's taste — warm and beautiful and expensive, every surface chosen to project exactly the image the Conti family wants projected. My room looks like the inside of my head. Whiteboards on two walls, half of them network maps, the other half cipher keys I've already cracked. A punching bag in the corner worn to gray leather at center mass. Gun cabinet beside the closet — three weapons, combination lock. My father knows about two of them. I find the thread at 3:12 a.m. A routing number. Buried six layers deep, shuttling money through a Cayman subsidiary into an account in Queens. An account belonging to a man who has been dead for four years. Someone is feeding money into a ghost. And ghosts only exist when someone very much alive needs them to. I sit back. Press my fingers to my mouth. I need two more pieces before I'll be certain, and I don't move without certainty I've built myself. That’s how mistakes happen. I can't afford mistakes — none of my family can, but me least of all, because the thing about being underestimated is that it only protects you as long as no one notices you're dangerous. The moment they notice, all that invisibility becomes a liability. I save the file, encrypt it under a name that means nothing to anyone — RECIPE_tiramisù_v4.doc — and close the screens. Dawn in two hours. Breakfast table by eight. Back to being my father's quiet daughter — the one who smiles and says very little and will someday be handed to whoever he decides is useful enough to deserve her. I pull the elastic from my wrist and tie my hair back. I haven't decided yet whether I'll let him.