Dante Greco knew his sister had found Ibrahim Lawal because the access went dark at 2:16 p.m. He closed the laptop in his hotel room and stood by the window. Lagos spread beneath him in humid afternoon light, familiar in the way of places remembered mostly through other people’s grief. His mother had once told him that memory was dishonest about cities. It kept the roads where something happened and discarded the thousands of roads where nothing did. For Chiara, Lagos was a warehouse she never entered, a convent gate, an airport departure and the house where Matteo did not come home.
For Dante, it had been a father’s voice until he was seven and silence afterward. He had known he had a sister since he was nine. He found Chiara at the kitchen table in Milan after midnight, crying over a photograph she tried too late to hide. It showed a newborn wrapped in white, only half a face visible.
“Who is she?”
His mother looked at him for a long time.
“Your sister.”
At nine, he understood two things: the baby mattered, and asking more questions would break something his mother was struggling to hold together. He stored the questions. Dante became very good at storing things. He found Amara properly four years ago.
A forensic accountant in Lagos. Fostered. Impeccable record. No public connection to the Greco family. He had stared at her professional photograph until she stopped looking like evidence and began looking like a person he should have known. He did not call.
That decision had seemed strategic at first. Matteo’s surviving copies proved enough to make Ade afraid, but not enough to reconstruct three decades of money or establish what still existed inside the company. They needed current records. Someone independent. Someone the Adeyemis would not connect to the Grecos. Amara was perfect.
Dante arranged the introduction to the audit through intermediaries and told himself he was giving his sister an opportunity worthy of her ability. He stopped believing that version months ago. His phone vibrated. A message from his remaining contact inside Adeyemi Group.
LAWAL ACCESS DISABLED. THEY FOUND THE INDEX.
Dante typed back.
Stop. No more internal access.
The reply came immediately.
WE STILL NEED THE SETTLEMENT FILES.
Dante looked toward the city.
No.
A long pause.
Then:
SHE’S FASTER THAN YOU SAID.
He almost smiled. Amara had reached Greco Maritime on her first day. She had reached the seventh-letter reference within a week. He should have felt vindicated. Instead he remembered seeing her leave Adeyemi Group two nights earlier. She had stood on the pavement and looked up at the sky with her whole face, unguarded because she thought nobody was watching.
Chiara had always said Matteo looked at beautiful things that way. Dante had wanted to cross the road. Not as strategist. Not as Matteo’s son. As her brother. He had stayed where he was.
Because if Amara learned who he was now, she would also learn how she had been placed inside the company. She might leave the audit. Once, that possibility frightened him because it would ruin the plan. Now it frightened him because she might never forgive him. His phone lit again. A photograph this time.
Amara and Kolade leaving the Apapa storage facility together. Dante stared at Kolade’s hand on the car door above his sister’s head. Something hard moved through him. He did not trust an Adeyemi standing that close to her. The hypocrisy was immediate and unpleasant. Dante had used her without permission and was now resenting another man for being near her.
He deleted the photograph. Then he called his mother.
“We are running out of time.”
Chiara was quiet on the other end.
“No,” she said. “You are running out of places to hide.”