Chapter 9: Midnight on the East Terrace

VITTORIA'S POV

11:47 p.m.

I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the clock on the bedside table, watching the minutes move with the kind of slow cruelty that only clocks manage when you are dreading something.

Marcello was asleep. Or at least his breathing had settled into that deep, even rhythm that had kept me awake the night before. I had been lying beside him for two hours with my eyes open and my mind running in tight, panicked circles, waiting for the room to get quiet enough.

I looked at him once in the dark.

He was lying on his back, one arm behind his head, his face completely unguarded in a way it never was during the day. Sleep had smoothed the hard edges off him. He looked almost approachable. Almost human in the way that the word meant something softer than what he was.

I looked away.

I picked up my phone from the bedside table with two careful fingers and checked the message one more time, even though I had memorised every word of it an hour ago.

"I know who you are, Vittoria Alfonso. And by tomorrow morning, so will he. Unless you meet me tonight. Alone. The east terrace. Midnight. Come, or I go straight to Marcello with everything."

No name. No room for negotiation is buried anywhere in those lines. Just a door and a time and a threat dressed up as an invitation.

I set the phone down and stood up slowly, testing each movement for noise before committing to it. The floor was marble, and marble was unforgiving, but I had spent the last two days learning the geography of this penthouse the way you learn the layout of a place you might need to escape from, so I knew which stretch of corridor caught sound and which did not.

I pulled a light cardigan over my shoulders and moved towards the door.

Behind me, Marcello shifted.

I froze.

The sheets rustled once and then went still again. His breathing did not change.

I exhaled through my nose and slipped out of the room.

The east terrace was dark except for the ambient glow of the city below, all that light rising from the streets like the world down there was still fully awake and entirely unconcerned with what was happening twelve floors above it.

Ric was already there.

He was standing at the far railing with his back to me, a glass in his hand, looking out at the skyline the way a man looks at something he owns. He did not turn when I stepped through the terrace door, but his shoulders shifted slightly, acknowledging my presence the way predators acknowledge things that have entered their space.

"You came," he said.

"You gave me very little choice," I replied.

He turned then, slowly, and looked at me with those patient, measured eyes. Up close, in the low light, I could see the family resemblance to Marcello in the line of his jaw and the set of his shoulders, but where Marcello carried his danger openly, like a weapon on his hip, Ric kept his concealed. Folded neatly away behind good manners and quiet conversation.

That made him more frightening, not less.

"Sit down," he said, gesturing to the chairs behind him.

"I'll stand."

Something like appreciation moved across his face. "Suit yourself." He took a slow sip from his glass. "How long have you known that your father stole from this family?"

The directness of it hit me like cold water.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.

"Vittoria." He said my real name, my real full name, and the sound of it in this place, in this house, felt like a violation. "I have known since lunch yesterday. I recognised your eyes the moment you walked into this penthouse. Your father and I were acquainted a long time ago, before everything went wrong. You have his eyes exactly, just a different colour." He paused. "I also made three phone calls last night and confirmed everything I needed to confirm. The Alfonso family. Your father, Enzo's betrayal. The sixty million. All of it."

I said nothing. My back was straight, and my hands were loose at my sides, and I was concentrating very hard on not letting a single thing show on my face.

"So," he continued, "the question is not whether I know. The question is what happens next."

"What do you want?" I asked.

He tilted his head. "Straight to it. Good." He set his glass down on the railing and crossed his arms. "I want to know one thing, and I want the truth. Does Marcello know who you are?"

"No."

"Does he have any reason to suspect?"

"Not from anything I've said or done."

Ric nodded slowly. "And you intend to keep it that way."

"For as long as I can, yes."

He was quiet for a moment, looking at me with that careful expression, turning something over in his mind that I could not see.

"Your father hurt this family badly," he said. "Not just the money. The exposure. The FBI file that exists on Marcello today, the reason his face is on that list, a significant portion of that can be traced back to what Enzo Alfonso handed over to the authorities." He paused. "Marcello has never fully recovered from it. Not in terms of power, not in terms of trust. He built himself back up piece by piece, and it cost him things that money cannot replace."

I knew all of this. I had grown up in the shadow of it, in the silence my mother and brother kept around my father's name, in the way Alberto flinched every time someone mentioned the Giordano family anywhere near us.

"I know what my father did," I said quietly. "And I know I cannot undo it."

"No," Ric agreed. "You cannot." He picked his glass back up and looked into it. "But what you can do is not make it worse."

I waited.

"I am not going to tell Marcello." He said it simply, without drama, and the relief that moved through me was so strong it nearly buckled my knees. "Not tonight. Not tomorrow."

"Why?" The word came out before I could dress it up in anything more strategic.

He looked at me steadily. "Because I have watched my nephew go through thirty-five years of this life without finding a single person who made him look the way he looked at you at that dining table tonight." He let that sit for a moment. "I have no interest in destroying that before it has the chance to become something real."

I stared at him.

"However." His voice dropped a register, and the gentleness in it vanished completely. "If I find out that you are here with any agenda other than the accidental one that brought you through that door, if I find out that you are feeding information to anyone, working with anyone, or using your position in this house to cause harm to my nephew or this family, I will not only tell him who you are. I will tell him everything. Every detail. And I will make sure he hears it in the worst possible way."

The threat was so clean and so precise that it almost sounded like a promise.

"I understand," I said.

"Good." He picked up his glass and moved towards the terrace door, then stopped beside me, close enough to speak low without the city swallowing his words. "One more thing, Vittoria Alfonso. The truth always finds its way out in this family. Always. So when the time comes, and it will come, make sure he hears it from you first."

He went inside.

I stood on the terrace alone, the wind moving through my hair, the city blazing below me, and I pressed one hand flat against my sternum because my heart was beating so hard I was genuinely concerned Marcello would hear it from twelve floors up.

Ric was not going to tell him.

For now, I was safe.

I turned to go back inside and pulled the terrace door open.

Marcello was standing on the other side of the glass.

Awake. Dressed. His blue eyes moved from my face to the empty terrace behind me, to the two glasses on the railing, and back to my face.

"Who were you out here with?" he asked.

And the look on his face told me that this time, a simple answer was not going to be enough.