Chapter 12: When the Hunter Starts to Circle

VITTORIA'S POV

I was on my feet before I had made the conscious decision to stand.

My body had heard those three words before my mind had finished processing them, and it had made its own decision, pulling me upright and pressing me flat against the sitting room wall beside the doorway, out of the sightline of anyone passing through the entrance hall.

Alfonso. New York. Tonight.

My family name. My city. A timeframe.

I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and listened.

The voices were close but not close enough. I caught fragments. Pieces of sentences with the most important parts swallowed by distance and the thick walls of the penthouse. Marcello's voice was doing what it always did when something serious was happening, dropping lower instead of rising, getting quieter instead of louder, as if the more dangerous the information, the less noise it deserved.

I heard my brother's name.

Alberto.

Just once, just clearly enough that there was no possibility I had misheard it, and then the voices moved further away towards the study and the door clicked shut behind them, and the entrance hall went silent.

I stood with my back against the wall and my heart somewhere in the region of my throat and counted to twenty before I trusted my legs to carry me normally across the room.

Alberto had done something.

That was the only explanation. I had asked him to stay hidden, to keep his head down, to give me two weeks and not do anything that would draw attention to the Alfonso name in this city. I had asked him clearly, and he had agreed,d and now somehow, some way, his name was in a sentence being spoken in hushed, urgent tones inside Marcello Giordano's penthouse.

I sat back down in the armchair and picked up the book from the side table and opened it to the same page I had been staring at all afternoon, and I held it in front of my face, and I did not read a single word.

I was still sitting exactly like that when Marcello came into the sitting room twenty minutes later.

He stopped in the doorway and looked at me. I kept my eyes on the page for two more seconds, performing the end of a sentence, then looked up with what I hoped was the expression of a woman who had spent a quiet evening reading and was only mildly curious about her husband's early return.

"You're back," I said.

"Change of plans." He crossed the room and sat on the sofa across from me, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, and looked at me with an attention that was different from his usual scrutiny. More focused. More specific.

"Is everything okay?" I asked.

"Tell me something," he said. "Has anyone contacted you today? Any calls, any messages, anyone at the door?"

The question landed with the quiet precision of a scalpel.

Every option available to me in that half second arranged itself in my mind with perfect clarity. I could tell him about Diego. I could tell him Diego had come to the service entrance, that Rosa had witnessed the entire exchange, that I had sent him away without letting him say whatever he had really come to say. That version was almost entirely true, and it would satisfy the question, and it would also, if he asked the right follow-up questions, unravel everything else.

Or I could say no, and lie cleanly, and buy myself whatever time that bought.

Rosa appeared in the doorway behind Marcello before I could decide.

"Mr Giordano," she said quietly. "You asked me to inform you of any visitors while you were out."

I went completely still.

Marcello turned to look at her.

"A man came to the service entrance this afternoon," Rosa said. "Mrs Giordano spoke with him briefly and asked him to leave. He left without incident."

Marcello turned back to me slowly.

The silence that followed was the loudest thing I had heard since I walked into the wrong hotel room.

"Who was he?" Marcello asked. His voice was very quiet.

"My ex-fiancé," I said. "Diego Alcazar. He found out I was here and came to ask me to leave with him. I told him no and sent him away."

Marcello looked at me without blinking for a long moment. Then he looked at Rosa. "Thank you, Rosa."

She disappeared back into the corridor.

He stood up from the sofa slowly, and there was something in the way he moved, that controlled, deliberate quality that reminded me of watching a very large, very calm animal decide whether to act, that made my skin tighten across my shoulders.

He walked to the window and stood with his back to me, looking out at the city.

"You sent him away," he said.

"Yes."

"Why?"

The question surprised me. I had expected anger. I had expected the interrogation. I had not expected that quiet, genuine why.

"Because I had nothing to say to him," I answered.

"He came all the way here, and you had nothing to say to him."

"He cheated on me with my cousin two days before our engagement. He does not deserve my time or my words." I paused. "And this is my home now. I am not going to bring that kind of chaos into it."

Marcello was quiet at the window for a long moment.

Then he turned around and looked at me across the room, and the expression on his face was something I had not seen on him before. Not the cold assessment. Not the controlled danger. Something more private than either of those things, something that looked like it had caught him slightly off guard.

"Your home," he repeated softly.

I realised what I had said. I had not planned to say it. It had come out of its own accord, born from the argument I had been constructing in my head and arriving in the room ahead of the rest of the sentence.

"For now," I added.

The corner of his mouth moved. That almost-smile that appeared and disappeared so quickly, you were never entirely sure it had been there.

He crossed the room towards me, and I tracked every step of it without moving, and he stopped in front of my chair and looked down at me with those blue eyes that gave nothing away and everything away simultaneously.

"Diego Alcazar is not a man you should be opening doors for," he said.

"I barely opened it," I said. "And I closed it again."

"Next time, you don't open it at all. You call me."

I looked up at him. "You were out."

"I don't care if I am in another country. You call me." He held my gaze with a steadiness that made the instruction feel less like a rule and more like something else entirely. "Understood?"

"Understood," I said.

He nodded once and straightened up, and I thought the moment was over.

Then he said, "Tell me what he said to you."

And there it was.

I set the book down on the side table, laced my fingers together in my lap and told him a version of it that was true in every particular except the parts about Nissi, the parts about the FBI, and the parts where Diego had used the Alfonso name as leverage to get me to open the door. I told him Diego had claimed to be worried about me, that he had tried to convince me to leave, that I had refused, and that was the end of it.

Marcello listened without interrupting. Without changing his expression. Without giving me a single indication of what he was thinking.

When I finished,d he was quiet for a moment.

"He knows you are here," he said finally. It was not a question.

"Yes."

"Which means other people know you are here." He said it quietly, almost to himself, turning something over in his mind. "That changes things."

He walked back towards the study without explaining what things had changed or in which direction, and I sat in the armchair with my laced fingers and my unread book and tried to calculate how much time I had before the name Alberto had come up in that hallway conversation connected itself in Marcello's mind to the woman sitting in his living room.

My phone buzzed.

Nissi again.

But the message this time was not the warm, casual follow-up of a friend who had received a four-word text and was pretending not to understand it.

It was four words of her own.

"Don't do anything stupid."

A warning. Clean and cold, dressed up in nothing.

Which meant Nissi had told Diego about my reply. Which meant Diego now knew I had figured out at least part of what they had done. Which meant whatever plan they had already set in motion was about to accelerate.

I looked at the message for a long time.

Then I walked to the study door and knocked twice.

Marcello opened it almost immediately, as if he had been standing close to it.

"I need to tell you something," I said. "About Diego. The part I left out."

His eyes sharpened. He stepped back and opened the door wider.

And as I walked into that study and prepared to give him the version of the truth that would protect me while giving him just enough to act on, I understood for the first time that I had stopped thinking about escaping Marcello Giordano.

I had started thinking about surviving everyone else.