Chapter 14: Fifty Six Minutes

VITTORIA'S POV

I read the message four times.

Each time I read it, the fifty-six minutes got shorter and the room got smaller, and the man sleeping beside me felt simultaneously like the safest and most dangerous place I could be.

Detective Marcus Reid.

The name meant nothing to me. But the outline had already told me things I was not supposed to know yet, things I had been carrying around in the back of my mind like a map of a building I had not yet been allowed to enter. And one of the things I knew was that a detective named Marcus existed on the edges of this story, investigating quietly, building a case, watching things from a distance that nobody else was watching from.

Which meant this message was real.

Which made it infinitely more complicated than if it had been a trap.

I looked at Marcello beside me in the dark. The slow rise and fall of his chest. The absolute stillness of him in sleep. I thought about what he had said in the study, that quiet, unfinished sentence he had left hanging in the doorway like a door left deliberately ajar.

Whatever you are not telling me.

And then I thought about Alberto, out there somewhere in this city making movements that had already reached Marcello's ears, searching for a sister who had asked him to stay still and stay hidden and had apparently asked the impossible. Forty-nine minutes now.

I made a decision.

I slipped out of bed with the same careful silence I had used the night before, crossed the bedroom floor in the dark and went to the bathroom, closing the door softly behind me before I turned on the tap to cover the sound of my voice and sat down on the edge of the bath with my phone in both hands.

I typed back to the unknown number.

"I am reading this. Who gave you this number, and what exactly do you think you know?"

I kept the tap running and waited.

The reply came in under a minute.

"I have been monitoring communications connected to Diego Alcazar for eleven months. Your number appeared in his contact activity three days ago after your name came up in an intercepted conversation. I know you are inside the Giordano penthouse. I know you are there under a false surname. And I know that Alberto Alfonso has been attempting to locate you through channels that have already attracted attention from Giordano's people. Your brother is not being careful, Miss Alfonso. He needs to stop immediately."

I stared at the screen.

Alberto. Again. Always Alberto, moving through this city like a man who believed that love was sufficient armour against consequences.

I typed quickly. "What do you want from me?"

"Nothing that puts you at risk. I want you to stay exactly where you are and continue exactly as you have been. You are in a position that took Diego Alcazar two years of work to get someone into, and he failed every time. I am not asking you to spy. I am not asking you to feed me information. I am asking you to stay alive and stay in that building and respond to me when I reach out. That is all. Can you do that?"

I read it twice.

The tap was still running. From the bedroom, nothing. No movement, no change in the rhythm of Marcello's breathing that I had become so attuned to in three days that I could hear its absence from another room.

"And my family," I typed. "Alberto."

"I will make sure he is redirected tonight. He will not be told details, but he will be given enough to make him stand down. You have my word on that."

A detective's word. Offered through an encrypted message at eleven fifteen at night to a woman sitting on the edge of a bathtub with the tap running.

I thought about Diego at the service entrance. The careful assembly of him. The practised warmth. The way he had reached for my arm with the confidence of a man who had never once considered that his touch might no longer be welcome.

I thought about Nissi's four words. Don't do anything stupid.

I thought about Ric on the terrace, saying the truth always finds its way out in this family, and make sure he hears it from you first.

And then, underneath all of those thoughts, quiet and persistent and entirely unwelcome, I thought about Marcello's hand tucking that strand of hair behind my ear. The same strand. The same gesture. Already a habit after three days, as if his hands had decided something his mouth had not said yet.

I turned the tap off, stood up and looked at myself in the bathroom mirror for a long moment.

Then I typed one word back to Detective Marcus Reid.

"Okay."

I turned off the bathroom light and went back to bed.

Marcello had not moved.

Morning came grey and quiet, the kind of New York morning that looks like the city is gathering itself before something. Rosa had coffee ready before I reached the kitchen, which meant either she woke impossibly early or she never fully slept, and I was beginning to suspect the latter.

I sat at the kitchen counter, wrapped both hands around the cup and thought about Alberto.

By the time I had finished my first coffee, my phone buzzed with a message from him.

Not a call. A message, which already told me something because Alberto preferred calls. He said texts were for people who had something to hide.

"I have been advised to pause my search. I don't fully understand why, and I don't like it, but I trust the source. Are you safe?. One word is enough."

I looked at that last line for a moment. One word is enough. My brother,r who filled every room with his voice and his presence, asking for one word because he understood that even one word from me right now was more than the situation safely allowed.

I typed back. "Yes."

His reply came immediately. "Okay. One word from me, too. Hurry."

I set the phone down and pressed my lips together against something that wanted to be tears and was not going to be allowed to be.

Sera appeared in the kitchen doorway in her silk robe with her coffee already made, which meant she had beaten even Rosa this morning.

"You look terrible," she said, sitting beside me.

"Good morning to you,u too," I replied.

She looked at me sideways. "Marcello told me about Diego Alcazar coming here yesterday."

I turned my head. "He told you?"

"He tells me things he does not tell other people." She said it without pride, just as a fact. "We grew up together more than he and Ric did. Different kinds of trust." She turned her cup slowly on the counter. "Diego Alcazar is not just an ex-boyfriend, is he?"

It was not quite a question.

"No," I said carefully. "I don't think he is."

Sera nodded slowly. "Marcello ran his name last night. After you went to bed." She paused. "I don't know what came back, but whatever it was, it put three extra men on the building entrance by midnight."

Three extra men by midnight.

Which meant Marcello had been awake, running searches while I had been sitting on the edge of his bathtub, communicating with the detective who was investigating the same man.

We had been working in parallel in the same building without knowing it, and the thought of that, the strange intimacy of it, unsettled me more than it should have.

"Sera," I said. "Can I ask you something?"

She looked at me. "You can ask."

"When Marcello decides he cannot trust someone. What does he do?"

She was quiet for a moment, turning her cup again. Then she said, "It depends on someone."

"What does it depend on?"

She looked at me directly. "On whether he cares about them or not." She held my gaze with an expression that was doing several things at once. "If he doesn't care, it's quick, and it's final. If he does." She paused. "If he does, it's the worst kind. Because he gives them every chance to tell him the truth themselves, and if they don't take it, what comes after is not anger."

"What is it?" I asked quietly.

She set her cup down. "Grief. And Marcello's grieving looks exactly like Marcello destroying something."

The kitchen went quiet.

From down the corridor came the sound of the study door opening and Marcello's footsteps crossing the entrance hall. Unhurried. Deliberate.

Sera picked up her coffee, stood up from the stool and looked at me one more time with an expression that contained something close to compassion.

"Whatever you are sitting on," she said quietly, "don't sit on it much longer."

She walked out of the kitchen as Marcello walked in, and they passed each other in the doorway with the wordless ease of people who had shared a language since childhood.

Marcello looked at me across the kitchen.

He looked like he had slept well and thought even better, and the combination of those two things on a man like him was genuinely terrifying.

"Come with me," he said. "I want to show you something."

I stood up from the stool and followed him down the corridor, and he led me not to the study and not to the sitting room but to a door at the far end of the penthouse that I had noticed but never seen opened.

He pressed his thumb to a small panel beside it, and the lock disengaged.

Inside was a room that was smaller than the others, simpler, with one window, one chair and a table, and on the table was an open file.

He stepped aside so that I could see it clearly.

I walked forward and looked down at the papers spread across the table, and the first thing I saw was a photograph.

A family photograph. Old, slightly faded at the edges, taken outside a house I recognised immediately because I had grown up inside it.

My mother was in it. Alberto was in it. A younger version of me was in it, maybe eight years old, squinting slightly in the sun.

And my father, Enzo Alfonso, stood at the centre of the photograph with his hand on my shoulder and a smile that had no idea what it was standing on the edge of.

I could not move.

I could not speak.

I could not do anything except stand in front of that photograph in a locked room in Marcello Giordano's penthouse and wait for the world to finish falling.

"Sit down, Vittoria," Marcello said from behind me.

His voice was very quiet.

And it contained absolutely nothing that I could call mercy.