Chapter 4

"You knew." Blair set the card on the kitchen table between them, letterhead up, the word Overdue facing her father like an accusation. "This whole time, you knew exactly who broke that window."

Stefano didn't reach for the card. He looked at it the way a man looks at a debt he's been avoiding long enough to have opinions about the handwriting.

"It's not your concern."

"It's in our kitchen. It's my concern."

"Blair—"

"Who is he? Not the father. The son. The one running things now." She hadn't meant to say it that certainly. Her father's head came up fast enough that she knew she'd said too much for a girl who wasn't supposed to know there was a son at all.

"How do you—"

"Rosa," she lied, smooth enough that she almost believed it herself. "Small town."

Stefano rubbed a hand down his face, and for a moment he looked every year of the debt he was carrying. "I'm going to see him this afternoon. Alone."

"I'm coming."

"Absolutely not."

"Someone broke into our house, Papà. I'm not sitting here arranging flowers while you go negotiate with the man who can decide whether that happens again."

Fiorella, silent at the stove until now, set down her spoon with a click that ended the argument before Stefano could. "Take her." Her voice didn't leave room for debate. "I want someone in that room who isn't afraid to open their mouth."

Stefano looked at his wife for a long moment, then at his daughter, and lost a fight Blair suspected he'd never really been winning.

* * *

The office above the harbor didn't look like anything. That was the first thing Blair noticed — no marble, no men with visible guns, just a plain door lettered LUMIERE TRADING CO. and a receptionist who checked their names against a list before buzzing them through like they'd come about a shipping invoice.

The man behind the desk didn't stand when they entered. He didn't need to.

He was younger than Blair had braced herself for — thirty, maybe a little past it — dark-haired, dressed like he had somewhere more important to be and had decided this was it anyway. One eye was blue. The other, when the light caught it, wasn't.

"Stefano Capri." He said it like he was confirming an appointment, not greeting a guest. "Sit."

It wasn't an invitation. Stefano sat like a man who understood the difference. Blair stayed standing a beat too long before she followed.

"And you brought company."

His attention moved to Blair the way a held breath moves — all at once, entirely deliberate. She made herself hold still under it the way she'd once learned to hold still under worse.

"My daughter," Stefano said. "She insisted."

"Did she." He didn't look away from Blair to say it. "I don't believe I caught a name."

"Blair."

"Blair." He turned the word over once, unhurried, like he was deciding whether he'd need it again. "Alessandro Lumiere. I'd say it's a pleasure, but you're here about money, so let's not waste each other's time pretending."

"With respect, Don Lumiere," Stefano started, "the arrangement was with your father—"

"My father is dead." He said it without weight, a fact stripped of grief a long time ago. "Whatever he agreed to, I inherited. Including the part where you haven't paid it."

"I need more time. I've always been good for it—"

"You have." Alessandro leaned back, unbothered, and for the first time looked almost bored by the whole conversation. "Which is the only reason you're sitting in a chair and not standing in a much less comfortable room."

Blair felt her father go very still beside her.

"Someone broke our kitchen window two nights ago," she said, before she could decide whether it was her place to say anything at all. "Was that supposed to be a reminder from you?"

Her father's head snapped toward her. Alessandro's didn't move at all — just his eyes, sliding back to her with an attention that felt several degrees sharper than before.

"Blair—" her father started.

"No," Alessandro said, mild, still watching her instead of him. "Let her ask. It's a fair question."

A pause, just long enough to mean something.

"It wasn't mine." For the first time since they'd walked in, something in his voice sharpened — not at her, past her, at whoever the sentence was really for. "When I collect, people know exactly who collected. A broken window is a child's message. I don't send children's messages."

Blair believed him before she decided whether she wanted to.

"Then who did?"

"That," Alessandro said, "is a very good question, and not one I have an answer to yet." He looked at her a moment longer than the conversation required, like he was filing something away for later use. "But I intend to find one."

He turned back to Stefano before Blair could decide what to make of that.

"Thirty days." He said it like a verdict, final and not up for negotiation. "After that, I stop being patient, and patience is the only thing keeping this pleasant."

"Thank you, Don Lumiere—"

"Don't thank me." He was already looking back at his papers, done with them both, except his eyes found Blair one last time on her way to the door — brief, assessing, impossible to read anything simple into. "Thank me when you find out who broke your window before I do."

Neither of them spoke again until they were outside, and even then it took Stefano two tries to get the words out steady.

"You shouldn't have said anything in there."

"Someone should have."

Her father didn't argue with that. He didn't agree with it either. He just walked a little faster toward the car, and Blair followed, aware of exactly one thing with total clarity — that whatever had just started in that office, it hadn't ended when the door closed behind them.