Chapter 7 - The Honeypot
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With only six hours until the ceremony, Alessandro needed to secure the bait.
He walked into his private study and locked the heavy mahogany doors. He approached the large oil painting of his mother that hung behind his desk, pressing a hidden switch beneath the frame. The painting slid silently to the right, revealing the massive, brushed-steel door of the biometric safe.
He pressed his right thumb against the glass scanner and punched in the six-digit rolling code. The heavy bolts clicked, and the door swung open.
Inside sat the true ledger—a small, black encrypted hard drive containing his empire.
Alessandro removed it carefully. He walked over to his desk and opened a hidden compartment in the floorboards, sliding the real drive into the dark space and locking it away.
From his desk drawer, he pulled out an identical black hard drive.
He and Matteo had spent three hours the previous night coding this specific drive. It was a honeypot. A digital trap designed to look exactly like his banking ledger. It contained fake account numbers, dummy routing codes, and a very specific, highly aggressive malware virus.
The moment this drive was plugged into a decryption terminal, the virus would instantly reverse-track the connection. It would bypass the Falcone syndicate’s firewalls and violently drain every single one of their offshore accounts, routing the stolen money into untraceable cryptocurrency wallets controlled by Alessandro.
If they wanted to steal from a Rienzi, they were going to pay with everything they owned.
Alessandro placed the fake drive into the center of the safe. He shut the heavy steel door, listening to the bolts lock into place.
He slid the painting back to its original position.
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“Take what you want, Genevieve,” Alessandro whispered to the empty room. “It will cost you your soul.”
He turned around and walked out of the study, heading toward the guest wing to check on the only two innocent people left in the house. He needed to make sure Fatima and Amara were secure before the blood started to spill.
