A maid hid her baby in a billionaire’s penthouse for three months, until the infant crawled into his office and grabbed his tie.

Inside the sunlit living room, where the marble fireplace cast a warm, orange glow across the polished stone floors, Alessandro sat on the dark leather sofa. Elena sat on the opposite end, watching his face intently as he flipped open the worn leather journal.

The pages were filled with Lorenzo’s precise, angular handwriting—written in dark ink, dated over sixteen months ago.

Alessandro’s dark eyes scanned the Italian script, his brow furrowing deeper with every line he read.

“If you are reading this, Elena, it means I have failed to return to you,” the text began. “The strike in Boston was not executed by New York. The ambush was ordered from within Chicago. A traitor inside the Duca inner council leaked my travel route to Don Carmine in exchange for fifty percent of the Midwest shipping distribution rights.”

Alessandro’s breath caught in his throat. His fingers tightened around the paper until the thick parchment crinkled under his pressure.

"A traitor inside Chicago..." Alessandro rasped, his voice dripping with pure, terrifying fury.

Elena leaned forward, her hands clasped nervously in her lap. "Lorenzo knew? He knew someone in your family betrayed him?"

"He suspected it," Alessandro answered, his jaw clenching tightly. "He didn't write the traitor's name in these first pages... he wrote a cipher. A security code that points to a private safety deposit box at the Continental Bank downtown."

He flipped to the last written page of the journal. Drawn across the paper was a detailed map of the bank’s subterranean vault network, accompanied by a specific five-digit security key.

Alessandro looked up from the journal, his dark eyes burning with a lethal fire that illuminated the dim living room.

For sixteen months, he had believed his brother died in a tragic rival ambush. Now, holding the journal in his hands, he realized the real enemy wasn't sitting across the river in New York.

The traitor who had destroyed Lorenzo was sitting inside his own organization in Chicago—quite possibly one of the senior lieutenants who walked through his penthouse doors every single day.

"Alessandro...?" Elena whispered, terrified by the dark, murderous expression that had overtaken his masculine features.