Chapter 2: The Ghost in the Machine (2)
Aria Grimaldi.
But the boy made Julian reach for his phone, then stop.
He ran the child's facial structure through recognition software, comparing against the Costello family database. Seventy-six percent probability match.
Julian isolated the boy's eyes, enhancing until pixels grained. Dark, intense, intelligent. He opened Dante Costello's corporate headshots—Forbes, Wall Street Journal, the public face of a legitimate empire.
The eyes were identical.
Julian calculated timelines. The child: approximately four years old. Four years, nine months since the Masquerade Ball where Aria Grimaldi vanished. Where Dante disappeared from his security detail for three hours and returned with his jacket torn and someone else's lipstick on his collar.
Dante had been searching for the masked woman for five years. He'd never stopped. Julian had followed hundreds of cold leads, chasing the ghost of a woman Dante refused to discuss but couldn't forget.
She'd been in Beacon. Raising Dante's son.
Julian compiled the dossier with surgical precision. Financial records, blocked intrusion, facial recognition, timeline calculations. He printed one photograph—Leo Vance, age four, with his father's unmistakable eyes—and placed it at the front.
At 9:47 AM, he scheduled a meeting with Dante for 8:00 AM the next morning. Category One: Family Matter.
Then he deployed his surveillance team to Beacon with encrypted orders: passive observation, no direct contact, report all movement.
Julian studied Leo's photograph one final time. The boy had his mother's delicate features, but those eyes—Dante would see it immediately. And when he did, the controlled precision that made him the most dangerous man in New York would detonate into something primal.
Julian had served Dante for eight years. He'd seen him kill men with bare hands, dismantle organizations with surgical strikes, build an empire on calculated ruthlessness. But he'd never seen Dante lose control. Never seen him want something beyond wealth and power.
Until the masked woman vanished.
Julian locked the dossier in his safe, the photograph of Leo inside. His phone would ring within the hour. Dante would demand to know what qualified as urgent enough for a coded summons.
Julian composed a text. Three words that would change everything.
I found her.
He sent it at 10:03 AM.
Then Julian Thorne sat forty-seven floors above Manhattan and waited for the devil to call.