I left Sofia’s apartment with Dante driving. We crossed back into Bergen County in silence. The rain had started to mix with late-autumn sleet, hitting the windshield like handfuls of coarse salt.

"Call Paulie," I told Dante. "Have him meet us at the warehouse in Secaucus. Not the main office. The storage annex behind the cold-storage bays."

"Boss," Dante hesitated, his eyes meeting mine in the rearview mirror. "Paulie's been running the union books since your uncle was indicted. If he's seen with you tonight, the state monitors will log it."

"Let them log it," I said. "If Paulie doesn't explain what happened to that server file before midnight, the state monitors won't be the ones he has to worry about."

The Secaucus annex was cold, smelling of diesel exhaust, damp cardboard, and the bitter copper tang of old refrigeration pipes. Paulie Varga was waiting inside a small prefabricated office, wearing his grease-stained Carhartt jacket over a button-down shirt. He didn't sit behind the desk. He was pacing beside a space heater that rattled every few seconds.

When the door clicked shut behind me, Paulie stopped pacing. He looked at my hands, saw they were empty, and let out a short, ragged breath.

"Alejandro," Paulie said. "You shouldn't be here."

"Forty seconds, Paulie."

Paulie didn't feign ignorance. He didn't ask what I meant. His shoulders dropped an inch, and he looked down at the linoleum floor.

"Nico told me you’d never pull the raw drive," Paulie said quietly. "He said you were so focused on giving the feds a clean case against your uncle that you'd hand over the mirrored copy your IT guy made. The mirrored copy had the gap smoothed over. It looked like a standard frame-rate drop."

"Why did Nico cut forty seconds out of my study?"

"He wasn't cutting Emma out," Paulie said. "He was cutting himself out."

"Explain."

Paulie pulled a worn USB drive from his pocket and laid it on the metal desk between us. His fingers were stiff from the cold.

"When you collapsed," Paulie said, "everybody in that room froze. You know that. Carlo was sitting in the leather armchair, watching you choke on that walnut oil they slipped into your espresso. Carlo wanted to wait until your pulse stopped before he called 911 so he could claim it was a sudden heart failure."

"I know that part," I said, my voice steady. "What did Nico do?"

"Nico didn't freeze because he was scared, Alejandro," Paulie said, leaning forward. "Nico moved toward the bookshelf before Emma ever ran into the room. He didn't run to help you. He ran to the shelf, reached behind the encyclopedia volume where the lens was mounted, and unplugged the secondary microphone."

I stared at the black plastic drive on the desk. "Why would he care about the microphone if the video was already recording Carlo?"

"Because of what was being said in the room five seconds before Emma kicked the study door open," Paulie said. "Carlo wasn't talking to Nico. Carlo was on speakerphone with someone in Trenton. Someone who was guaranteeing that if Carlo took over the shipping contracts, the grand jury investigation into the port terminals would be shut down by the end of the month."

The air in the room suddenly felt thin. "Who was on the phone?"

"Nico knew the voice," Paulie said. "And if that voice ended up on the federal server, it wouldn't just take down Carlo. It would incinerate the entire Moretti logistics network. Every warehouse. Every pension fund. Every legitimate business you spent ten years cleaning up. Nico didn't wipe the video to save Carlo. He wiped the audio to save *you*."