Chapter 4 - The Playback of Betrayal
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Ten minutes later, the third-floor private suite was locked down. Gianni, a veteran soldier with twenty years of loyalty to the Moretti family, stood outside the heavy mahogany doors with a submachine gun slung over his shoulder.
Downstairs in the master control room, the atmosphere was thick with smoke and quiet fury.
Alessandro sat in his leather armchair behind a bank of twelve high-definition monitors. Marco sat beside him, running the decryption algorithm on the memory buffer recovered from the camera inside the doll.
Victoria sat in a chair across the room, handcuffed to a steel radiator, her eyes wide with terror as she watched the technical crew work.
"Decryption complete," Marco announced. "Accessing the stored media file from the transmitter's local memory cache. Playing back from forty-eight hours ago."
The main monitor flickered to life.
The angle was low and slightly tilted, reflecting the vantage point of the top shelf in the nursery. Because the nursery door had been left cracked open to let in the hallway nightlight, the camera captured a clear view of the private corridor leading directly to Alessandro’s study.
The time stamp read 02:45 AM.
On the screen, a figure wearing dark, form-fitting clothes crept down the hallway. The figure paused outside Alessandro’s study door, pulling a specialized electronic key-card reader from a pocket.
"Pause," Alessandro ordered.
Marco hit the spacebar. The image froze.
"Enhance the reflection on the brass door handle," Alessandro said smoothly.
Marco tapped several keys, zooming in on the polished brass lever of the study door. The high-resolution optics inside the doll’s eye picked up a razor-sharp reflection of the intruder’s face as they turned toward the light.
When the image rendered, Marco stopped breathing.
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The face in the reflection did not belong to a rival mafia boss or a rogue assassin.
It belonged to Matteo Moretti—Alessandro’s younger brother and the second-in-command of the Moretti Syndicate.
