Rinaldi’s office did not look like the kind of place where hunts were authorized.

  No banners.

  No maps with pins.

  Just clean surfaces and quiet screens, as if the building itself didn’t want to be remembered.

  Dante stood behind Matteo the way a door stood behind a room.

  Not blocking.

  Defining limits.

  Isabella waited at the conference table with a tablet already awake, files nested inside files.

  Antonio leaned in the corner with his hands folded, watching expressions instead of data.

  Alessandro had a hard case open beside him like a magician refusing to admit he did tricks.

  Rinaldi did not sit.

  He made standing feel like policy.

  He tapped a panel built flush into the table—no keyboard, no mouse, just glass that recognized touch like confession.

  The screen dimmed, then cleared.

  “From this moment,” he said, “this becomes a restricted hunt cell.”

  The words didn’t thrill the air.

  They tightened it.

  Matteo felt Dante’s attention shift, subtle as a safety click.

  Rinaldi’s gaze landed on the still frame Isabella had pulled from the tunnel feed.

  A blur.

  Metal.

  A ring that flashed for half a second, and yet felt like it had been staring at them for years.

  “No one outside this room,” Rinaldi continued, “will know what you are looking for. No one outside this room will know who you are looking for.”

  A small icon blinked on the table panel—an access indicator that vanished as soon as Matteo noticed it.

  Antonio’s mouth twitched.

  “Except the person touching our files,” he said.

  Rinaldi didn’t react.

  He didn’t need to.

  He gestured once.

  Isabella took the cue like it was hers.

  “Lab,” she said.

  They moved.

  Not through corridors that felt public.

  Through passageways that felt like infrastructure.

  Service doors.

  Keypads.

  A scanner that asked for pulse rhythm and waited long enough to make it clear that hesitation was a feature.

  The analysis suite smelled faintly of cold metal and disinfectant.

  Bright light.

  Silent vents.

  Workstations arranged like confessionals.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  On one wall, a screen lit with the still frame.

  The ring enlarged until it became an object you could hate.

  Silver band.

  Onyx face.

  Crest cut into it with the precision of an oath.

  Isabella snapped on gloves, not because she needed them.

  Because ritual mattered.

  “Run it,” Dante said.

  “Already running,” Isabella replied.

  She pulled three systems in parallel.

  Modern surveillance analysis.

  Archived internal inventories.

  And a third database so old the interface looked like it had been kept alive out of spite.

  “Archivum catalog,” she said.

  A pause.

  “Field recoveries,” she added.

  Another pause.

  “Legacy seals.”

  Matteo stepped closer, careful not to cross the line Dante represented.

  “Those exist?”

  Isabella didn’t look at him.

  “Everything exists,” she said. “The question is what we pretend not to.”

  Alessandro slid a sealed evidence bag onto the table.

  A tiny fleck of something brittle.

  Wax or resin.

  Almost nothing.

  “Recovered from the vault threshold,” he said.

  “Not enough for a match,” Dante said.

  “Not a match,” Alessandro corrected.

  “A fingerprint.”

  He placed the bag under a scope.

  A monitor filled with texture.

  Striations.

  A binder pattern like dried blood.

  “Unusual polymer,” Isabella murmured, eyes flicking.

  “Who uses it?”

  “People who do not want a seal to fail in heat,” Alessandro said.

  “And people who expect to travel.”

  Antonio’s voice came soft from behind.

  “Or people who expect to run.”

  Isabella tapped once and dragged the ring crest into an overlay.

  The crest broke into lines.

  Angles.

  A symmetry that wasn’t artistic.

  It was procedural.

  The system returned nothing.

  Then, against the black, a single list populated.

  Not names.

  Not addresses.

  Just incident codes.

  Dates.

  Locations redacted down to continents.

  Dante leaned in.

  “How many?”

  Isabella’s jaw set.

  “More than we’ve admitted to ourselves.”

  Matteo read the dates, and felt the floor tilt.

  Some were decades old.

  Some were recent.

  One—

  “That one,” Matteo said.

  Isabella froze the screen.

  The newest incident code.

  A file header.

  The same name they had spoken earlier.

  RICHTER — LEGACY / UNCONFIRMED

  A thin gray bar sat beneath it.

  Metadata.

  Last accessed.

  Isabella stared.

  Then stared again.

  Dante’s hand moved near his hip.

  Not drawing.

  Preparing.

  “Say it,” Rinaldi ordered from the doorway.

  He had arrived without sound.

  He had a talent for being present at the exact moment decisions became irreversible.

  Matteo could have sworn Rinaldi had been in the corridor a moment earlier, speaking into the quiet like it could carry messages.

  Isabella swallowed once.

  “Someone opened the Richter file,” she said.

  Antonio tilted his head.

  “Opened?”

  Isabella turned her tablet so they could all see.

  A log entry.

  A timestamp.

  An access token that had no business existing.

  It wasn’t a name.

  It was a format.

  The kind of legacy shorthand that belonged to people who had been inside the system long enough to stop leaving fingerprints.

  “Not opened,” Isabella corrected.

  “Edited.”

  The room went quiet in a way that felt practiced.

  Dante spoke first.

  “How long ago?”

  Isabella’s eyes didn’t leave the timestamp.

  “Twenty-two minutes.”

  Matteo’s mouth dried.

  “While we were being briefed,” he said.

  Rinaldi stepped closer, gaze hard.

  “Which means the person had the file ready before you arrived.”

  Antonio’s eyes slid to Matteo.

  Not accusation.

  Assessment.

  “Or the person knew you would.”

  Isabella pulled up the edit diff.

  Most of the page was black bars.

  Redactions stacked like bricks.

  But a single line—just one—had been altered.

  A location tag.

  A routing note.

  A breadcrumb placed like a dare.

  Dante read it aloud without thinking.

  Then stopped, as if the air itself might punish syllables.

  Matteo leaned forward and didn’t touch the screen.

  He didn’t need to.

  He could see the shape of the trap.

  “It’s a pull,” Matteo said.

  “Or a warning,” Antonio countered.

  Rinaldi’s eyes stayed on the altered line.

  “Either way,” he said, “it’s movement.”

  Alessandro closed his case with a snap that sounded like a verdict.

  “Give me a team,” he said.

  Dante’s gaze hardened.

  “We already have one.”

  Isabella’s fingers were still on the tablet.

  Steady.

  Focused.

  But Matteo saw the smallest tremor in her thumb.

  Not fear.

  Excitement.

  Or anger.

  Rinaldi looked at Dante.

  Then at Isabella.

  Then at Antonio.

  Then—last—at Matteo.

  “Escort protocols stay in place,” Rinaldi said.

  “No improvisation.”

  He let the last word land on Matteo like a collar.

  Matteo nodded once.

  He could live with a collar.

  He could not live with ignorance.

  Rinaldi turned to the room.

  “Pull what you can from Archivum and legacy inventories,” he said.

  “Lock this suite.”

  He pointed at the access log.

  “And find me the hand that touched our file.”

  Dante stepped beside Matteo.

  Close enough that it could be read as protection.

  Close enough that it could not be mistaken for it.

  “Where are we going?” Matteo asked.

  Isabella answered without looking up.

  “To the place that breadcrumb points,” she said.

  “And to whoever thought we wouldn’t notice the edit.”

  Dante opened the door.

  The hall beyond looked ordinary.

  That was the lie it told well.

  “Move,” he said.

  Matteo followed.

  Not because he was ordered.

  Because someone had just reached into the Vatican’s most secret file and left a fresh fingerprint.

  And fingerprints meant bodies.

  Somewhere ahead, Richter wasn’t a continuity anymore.

  He was a location.

  And the hunt had finally become real.