SERA POV
The east wing door was unlocked.
Sera had tested it twice already. First at night when she couldn't sleep. The handle had turned smoothly. The door had opened onto darkness. She had closed it and gone back to bed without looking inside.
The second time was different.
It was just past seven in the morning. The penthouse was quiet in that specific way that meant Dante had already left for meetings. Nina was still asleep. The guards had shifted their positions to the outer perimeter. The moment felt fragile and temporary.
She walked into the east wing.
What she found was a room that existed in a completely different world than the rest of the penthouse. Servers. Eight of them, running in climate-controlled silence. Monitors on the walls showing feeds she recognized immediately. Street cameras. Building cameras. Her own apartment building on one screen, though the angle was different from the photographs.
This was the center of it. Not some secondary operation across the city. The family's entire information infrastructure was here in this room. That meant either Dante had absolute confidence in his security or he was too arrogant to consider failure.
Sera counted the screens.
Sixteen monitors. Seven running feeds. Four dark. Three showing surveillance footage from neighborhoods she didn't recognize. The system was military-grade. Encryption was solid on the network junction. But the physical security was weak. Too many windows. The server room location too obvious once you knew to look for it. Someone with the right tools could cut power from the breaker room upstairs. Someone with time could photograph everything in this space.
Someone was going to realize all of that eventually.
She stood in the doorway for maybe ninety seconds. Long enough to understand the vulnerability. Long enough to know she shouldn't be seeing this. Then she went back to her room and didn't mention it to anyone.
Breaking the second rule happened at breakfast.
Priest was making coffee when she came downstairs. Nina was in the living room on a call about something legal. The kitchen was empty except for the two of them. He asked her a question about courthouse security procedures while pouring her a cup.
It was casual. The kind of question someone asks when they already know the answer but want to verify it.
"The old system or the new one?" she asked.
"Both."
She should have stopped. She should have said she couldn't discuss it without Dante present. Instead, she found herself sitting on the counter stool explaining how the old metal detectors had blind spots near the stairwell. How the new system was better but still vulnerable if you had someone on the inside to disable the perimeter alerts.
The conversation went for forty minutes.
Priest didn't interrupt. He asked follow-up questions that suggested he actually understood building security architecture. He caught when she made an assumption about the judicial wing layout and corrected it gently. By the time they finished, they had mapped out three different ways to breach the building's security and two ways to shore it up.
She was still talking when Dante appeared in the doorway.
He didn't say anything. He just looked at her sitting on the counter and looked at Priest standing by the coffee maker. Understanding moved across his face in stages. First, the realization of what they were discussing. Then, something that might have been anger. Then, nothing at all.
"Sera," he said quietly. "My office. Now."
She slid off the counter and followed him.
The office felt smaller than it had yesterday. Dante closed the door and stood with his arms crossed over his chest. She waited for the punishment. For the anger. For the moment when he decided she had broken his trust and thrown her out.
Instead, he said: "What did you find in the east wing?"
She blinked. "How did you know I was in there?"
"The motion sensor on the door logs to my phone. I checked it an hour ago." He took a step closer. "What did you find?"
She told him. She explained the server configuration. She walked him through the physical vulnerabilities she had identified. She laid it out the way she would have for a legal team preparing a defense, methodical and detailed.
Dante listened without interrupting.
When she finished, he was quiet for a long moment. Then: "That is a real problem. What would you change?"
She hadn't expected that question.
"Your windows are the first issue. You need darker glass. Reflective. Anyone watching from the adjacent building can see the servers if they're using the right equipment. Second, the network junction needs a secondary security lock that's not electronic. Something manual. In case someone gains access to the main system."
He pulled out a chair. "Sit down."
They worked for an hour.
He pulled up architectural diagrams of the building. She marked the vulnerable access points. They talked through solutions. He asked about implications. She asked about logistics. The conversation moved between them like they had been doing this for years instead of hours.
At some point, Sera realized she had stopped thinking about whether this was a test. She was just working with someone who listened. Someone who treated her analysis like it mattered. Someone who didn't interrupt when she was thinking.
It was disorienting.
Nina appeared at the office door around noon with an expression Sera would later recognize as hope. At the time, she was too busy noticing the way Dante looked at her when she suggested a solution to one of the camera angles. It was the look of someone realizing something they didn't expect to find.
"Lunch is ready," Nina said, watching them both with barely hidden interest.
They worked until two.
By then, the vulnerability had transformed into something manageable. Not perfect. Nothing was perfect. But significantly harder to exploit. Dante seemed satisfied. He stood and rolled his shoulders like they were muscles he rarely used.
"Thank you," he said.
She didn't know what to do with that.
"For breaking your rules?" she asked.
"For being honest about what you saw. Most people would have pretended they didn't understand the implications. You explained them anyway."
He was still looking at her when Priest appeared in the doorway. His face was completely neutral. That particular neutral that meant bad news.
"We need to talk," Priest said.
Dante moved immediately into operation mode. Whatever moment had existed between them disappeared. His expression hardened into something tactical.
"What happened?"
"Three different neighborhoods. North side, west side, south side. People asking about Sera. Where she's living. Who she's with. Whether anyone's seen her recently. The questions started this morning."
Sera felt her chest go tight.
"Which families?" Dante asked.
"Unknown. The questions came through intermediaries. Low-level people who might not even know who they're working for. But Dante, they knew her name. They knew to ask about her specifically."
Dante's hands went very still.
Sera moved to the window and looked down at the city. Forty floors below, people were walking around like the day was normal. Like the world wasn't contracting around her again. Like she hadn't just made herself a target by suggesting that a criminal's security system needed improvement.
"How long?" she asked.
"Eight hours, maybe less," Priest said. "Before we shut it down."
"Shut what down?" she turned back to face them.
"Anyone who asks about you," Dante said. "We have people in those neighborhoods. They'll remove the threat. But we have a problem. Someone knows you're here. Someone beyond Vincent. Someone with enough reach to ask questions in three different parts of the city."
He looked at her across the office.
"Which means my decision to bring you here was either the only move that could save you or the biggest mistake I've made in five years. We're about to find out which."