Chapter 17: Blood on Clean Floors

VITTORIA'S POV

The rest of that day passed like a held breath.

The penthouse felt different in the afternoon. Tighter. The men moving through the corridors had changed somehow, same faces but carrying a different weight on their shoulders, the kind that comes when something has been confirmed that everyone was hoping would stay uncertain a little longer.

I stayed in the sitting room with Carmela, who sat across from me with her book open and her eyes moving across the page at a pace that told me she was not reading either. We had developed a wordless understanding over the past few days, Carmela and I. She did not ask questions she already knew the answers to, and I did not perform a calm I did not feel, and somehow that mutual honesty without any actual words attached to it had become the most restful relationship in the building.

At four in the afternoon, she closed her book and looked at me.

"You know what is happening," she said. Not a question.

"Seymour," I said.

She nodded once. "He does this every few months. Circles. Retreats. Circles again." She looked towards the window. "He is trying to find the gap."

"What gap?"

"The place where Marcello is not looking." She picked up her tea. "He has not found it yet because Marcello does not leave gaps." She paused. "But now there is you."

I looked at her steadily. "You think I am the gap."

"I think you could be used as one," she said carefully. "By people who are watching this house from the outside." She set her cup down. "I am not saying this to frighten you. I am saying it because you are smarter than you have been given credit for in this house, and I believe you deserve to understand the full picture."

"I already understand it," I said quietly.

She looked at me for a long moment with those dark, excavating eyes. Then she said, "Good." And opened her book again.

Marcello came to find me at seven.

I was in the bedroom reading, genuinely reading this time, when he appeared in the doorway with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up and an expression that told me the day had asked more of him than he was going to volunteer.

"Come with me," he said.

I followed him down the corridor, past the study, past the locked room, down a second corridor I had not been taken through before. At the end of it was a staircase going down, and at the bottom of the staircase was a door, and beyond the door was the basement.

I had known about the basement from the outline living in the back of my mind. The part I had been dreading.

The space was large and low-ceilinged, with concrete walls and industrial lighting. It smelled of cold air and something metallic underneath it. Several men were already there, standing in loose formation, and in the centre of the room, seated in a chair with his wrists bound behind him, was Envo Capone.

I recognised him. Marcello's right-hand man, the voice I had heard on the phone that first morning in the hotel room. The one who had been asked to bring the arranged bride to the room and had failed.

He looked up when we entered, and his eyes moved immediately to me, and what I saw in them was not fear of Marcello. It was something more specific than that.

Guilt, directed precisely at me.

Marcello stopped in the centre of the room and looked at Envo with the quietest expression I had ever seen on a man about to do something irreversible.

"You have been giving information about my wife's location and movements to Philip Seymour's people for eleven days," Marcello said. Not an accusation. A statement of fact.

Envo said nothing.

"The cars this morning knew exactly which side of the building to circle because someone told them which rooms she occupies." Marcello clasped his hands behind his back. "That someone was you."

Still nothing from Envo. Which was its own kind of confirmation.

I stood near the wall and kept my breathing even and my face still and told myself to keep watching because looking away would be worse than what I was about to see. Looking away would mean it happened in the dark, and I would fill that dark with whatever my imagination decided to put there.

Marcello turned his head and looked at me briefly. A look I could not fully decode. Something is checking on something. Then he looked back at Envo.

"I trusted you with everything," Marcello said quietly. "For nine years."

Envo looked up then. "Marcello."

"Do not." Marcello's voice did not rise. It dropped. "Do not say my name right now."

The room was completely silent.

What happened next was swift and absolute, and I will not describe it in detail because some things lose their weight when you put too many words around them. What I will say is that it was the most concentrated display of controlled violence I had ever witnessed, and that when it was over, Envo Capone was no longer breathing, and Marcello was standing in the same spot with his hands at his sides and his expression entirely unchanged.

He turned and looked at me.

I had not moved. I had not made a sound. I was standing with my back straight and my hands loose and my eyes on his face rather than on the floor, and I think that surprised him because something shifted in his expression that had not been there a moment before.

He crossed the room and stopped in front of me.

"Are you alright?" he asked quietly.

The question was so ordinary, given what had just occurred in the same room,m that I almost did not know how to process it.

"I am alright," I said. And the strange thing was that it was partially true.

He looked at my face for a moment, checking something I could not identify. Then he put his hand at the small of my back and guided me towards the door and up the staircase and back into the warmth of the upper penthouse.

In the corrido,r he stopped walking but kept his hand where it was.

"You did not look away," he said.

"I did not want to," I said honestly.

He looked at me steadily. "Most people do."

"I am not most people," I replied.

Something moved across his face. Slow and quiet, like light shifting through water. He dropped his hand from my back and took a small step back, and I recognised the movement as a man putting necessary distance between himself and something that had gotten closer than he had planned for.

"No," he said softly. "You are not."

He walked back towards the study, and I stood in the corridor alone for a moment, processing the evening in layers. Envo on the floor. Marcello's unchanged expression. The hand at the small of my back was guiding me away from it like something that needed protecting.

I went to the bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the floor.

My phone lit up on the bedside table.

Alberto.

Not a message this time. A call.

I picked it up. "Alberto, not now."

"Vittoria." His voice was low and urgent and stripped of everything except pure fear. "I need you to listen to me. I just received information from someone I trust about what is planned for the next forty-eight hours."

I straightened. "What information?"

"Seymour is not circling that building to frighten Marcello," Alberto said. "He is circling it to find you. Specifically you. Someone has told him that taking Marcello's wife is the fastest way to bring him into the open."

My blood went cold.

"Alberto"

"There is more." His voice dropped further. "The person who told Seymour where to find you and what you mean to Marcello." He paused. "It was not Envo, Vittoria."

I stood up from the bed.

"Then who?" I asked.

The silence on the other end of the line lasted two full seconds.

"It was Ric," Alberto said.