Chapter 13: The Things We Trade for Safety

VITTORIA'S POV

The study was not what I expected.

I do not know what I had imagined behind that locked door. Something cold and deliberately intimidating, maps on walls, weapons on display, the kind of room that announces itself as dangerous before you have taken a second step inside it.

What I found instead was a room full of books.

Floor to ceiling on three walls, dark shelves packed tightly, the spines worn in the way that meant they had been read and not just collected. A wide desk sat at the centre with two screens and a leather chair behind it, and to the left, a smaller seating area with two armchairs angled towards each other and a low table between them.

It smelled of old paper and something faintly woody. Cedar maybe.

Marcello closed the door behind us and gestured to one of the armchairs. I sat. He took the one across from me, and the positioning of it, face to face, no desk between us, felt deliberate. Like he had designed this room specifically for conversations that required complete honesty, and had learned that furniture arranged as a barrier made people feel permitted to hide behind it.

He leaned back in the chair and looked at me with that patient, unblinking focus.

"Tell me," he said.

I took a breath and organised the version of the truth I had decided to give him. Enough to be useful. Enough to protect myself. Not so much that the name Alfonso fell into the room like a grenade.

"Diego did not come here only because he was worried about me," I said. "He used information as leverage. He told Rosa he knew things about my family that I would want to hear before anyone else did. That is what made me agree to go down and speak with him."

Marcello's expression did not change. "What information?"

"He didn't specify. He used it to get me to the door, and once he had me there, he switched to the other approach. Trying to convince me to leave with him. Presenting himself as the safer option."

"And you think the information was real or a bluff?"

I looked at him steadily. "I think Diego Alcazar does not bluff. I think everything he does is calculated and everything he says has a purpose behind it."

Something moved in Marcello's eyes. No surprise. Recognition. The look of a man hearing a description of someone he already knows from the other side.

"How long were you with him?" he asked.

"Three years."

"And in three years, did he ever talk about his work? Specifically?"

I thought about this carefully. Diego had always been vague about his work. Import and export consulting, he had called it, with a smoothness that I had never questioned because I had been too busy being grateful that someone who looked like him had chosen someone who looked like me.

The naivety of it sat in my stomach like something sour.

"He was always vague," I said. "I assumed it was the nature of his industry. Now I think the vagueness was the point."

Marcello nodded slowly. He was quiet for a moment, his fingers laced together, looking at the middle distance between us while he processed whatever he was building in his mind.

"Your friend," he said. "Nissi. The one who arranged the escort the night we met."

My spine straightened slightly. "Yes."

"How much do you trust her?"

The question arrived exactly where I had been dreading it would arrive, and I sat with it for a moment, giving it the weight it deserved before I answered.

"I trusted her completely until this morning," I said.

Marcello looked at me. "What happened this morning?"

"She sent me a message after Diego's visit. The timing was too precise. She knew he had been here before I told anyone, which means she told him where to find me." I paused. "I sent her a message back telling her I knew. She replied, telling me not to do anything stupid."

The room was very quiet.

Marcello unclaced his fingers and leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees, and looked at me with an expression that I could not fully decode. It contained several things at once. A sharp analytical attention. Something that looked like it might be anger, controlled and directed inward for the moment. And underneath both of those, something quieter that I did not have a name for yet.

"You figured this out on your own," he said.

"I had time to think today."

"And then you came to tell me."

"Yes."

He was quiet again. Then, "Why?"

I met his eyes. "Because Diego coming to this building is not just about me. Whatever he wanted when he got here, it was never just about convincing an ex-girlfriend to leave. Men like him do not make personal visits for personal reasons."

Marcello looked at me for a long, steady moment.

"No," he said quietly. "They don't."

He stood up, walked to the desk and stood with his back to me for a moment, his hands flat on the surface, looking at the screens. I watched the line of his shoulders and the stillness of him and thought about what Carmela had said the night before.

The underworld takes things from you. Things you don't even notice going until one day you reach for them and find space.

"I need to ask you something," I said to his back. "And I need you to answer me honestly."

He turned his head slightly, not enough to look at me fully. "Go ahead."

"The conversation you had when you came in tonight. The one in the entrance hall." I kept my voice level and my hands still in my lap. "I heard three words through the wall. I want to know what they meant."

He turned around fully now and looked at me across the room. His expression was unreadable in the way it got when he was deciding something.

"What three words?" he said.

I held his gaze. "Alfonso. New York. Tonight."

The silence that followed lasted four seconds. I counted them.

Then Marcello straightened up from the desk, crossed the room back to his chair and sat down and looked at me with an expression that had shifted into something new. Not the analytical look. Not the controlled danger. Something more careful than both. The look of a man who had just recalibrated.

"The Alfonso family," he said slowly, "is a matter that belongs to my father's history more than mine. But it has been brought to my attention that a member of that family has been making movements in the city in the last forty-eight hours. Trying to locate someone." He paused. "A woman."

Every cell in my body went completely still.

"Why are you telling me this?" I asked. My voice came out steady, which was nothing short of miraculous.

"Because you asked," he said simply.

He looked at me with those blue eyes, clear and direct and giving nothing away, and I looked back at him and understood with a terrible, sinking certainty that one of two things was true.

Either Marcello Giordano had no idea that the woman being searched for by the Alfonso family was sitting three feet away from him in his own study.

Or he knew exactly who I was, and he was giving me the chance to tell him myself.

And I could not tell, sitting there in that cedar-scented room full of well-read books, which one it was.

"I am sorry to hear that," I said carefully. "I hope she is found safely."

Something moved at the very edge of his expression.

"So do I," he said softly.

He held my gaze for one more beat, then stood and walked to the study door and opened it, signalling the end of the conversation with the clean efficiency of a man who knew exactly when a discussion had reached its most useful limit.

I stood and walked towards the door, and as I passed him in the doorway, his hand came up to my arm the same way it had on the terrace last night.

I stopped and looked up at him.

"Vittoria." He said my name quietly, with a weight behind it that I felt in my chest. "Whatever you are not telling me."

He did not finish the sentence.

He did not need to.

I walked out of the study and down the corridor to the bedroom, and I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark and pressed both hands over my face and stayed like that for a long time.

He knew.

I did not have evidence for it. I could not point to a single concrete thing he had said that confirmed it. But the instinct sitting in the centre of my chest was too loud and too specific to dismiss.

Marcello Giordano knew who I was.

And he was waiting for something.

The question that kept me awake for the rest of that night, staring at the ceiling while he slept beside me with that infuriating stillness, was the one I could not answer.

What was he waiting for?

My phone screen lit up on the bedside table.

A message from an unknown number. Different from Ric's. A number I had never seen before.

I picked it up with cold fingers and opened it.

"Miss Alfonso. My name is Detective Marcus Reid. I have been investigating parties connected to the Giordano family for the past eighteen months. I have reason to believe you are in immediate danger. I need you to respond to this message before midnight, or I cannot guarantee your safety or that of your family. You have one hour."

I looked at the clock on the bedside table.

11:04 p.m.

Fifty-six minutes.