Chapter 9

The note was under her pillow, which was the part Blair couldn't get past no matter how many times her mind circled back to it. Not the porch. Not the mail slot. Under her pillow, in a room with a locked door and a man stationed at the end of the street whose entire purpose was making sure nothing like this could happen.

She'd found it making her bed, the way she had every morning of her life, and for one stupid, ordinary second she'd thought it was a note from Fiorella before she'd actually read it.

Tell your new friend to mind his own business.

Some debts don't transfer.

No signature. Handwriting she didn't recognize, careful and slanted, nothing like Andrew's loose scrawl on the birthday card still sitting unopened in her drawer.

She had the number dialed before she'd fully decided to call it.

"Yes."

"Someone was in my room." Her voice came out flatter than she felt, which was somehow worse than if it had shaken. "While I was asleep. There's a note."

The silence on the other end lasted exactly one second.

"Don't touch anything else in that room. I'm coming."

* * *

He was at the house in under fifteen minutes, which told Blair something about exactly how far above the harbor his real attention had been sitting all along.

He didn't knock. Fiorella let him straight through, pale and silent in a way Blair had never seen her mother go quiet before, and Alessandro took the stairs two at a time like the fifteen minutes it had taken to get there were fifteen minutes he intended to make someone answer for.

He read the note without touching the paper, hands clasped behind his back, and something moved behind his face that had nothing to do with the calm, businesslike register he kept for her father.

"Who was on the street last night?"

"Marco." One of the men, apparently, though it was the first Blair had heard his name. "He didn't report anything unusual."

"He wouldn't have. Whoever did this didn't come up the street." Alessandro crossed to the window, checking the latch, the drop below it, the angle of the neighboring roofline, with the focused, silent efficiency of a man who'd done this kind of inspection before and hated needing to do it again. "This window was forced and reset. Cheap lock. Good hands."

"So someone climbed into my bedroom while I was asleep."

"Yes."

He said it simply, without any of the softening most people would have reached for, and Blair found, oddly, that she was grateful for it. She'd had enough of people deciding what she could handle hearing.

Fiorella hovered in the doorway, arms wrapped around herself. "Should we call the polizia?"

"You can." Alessandro didn't turn around. "They'll write a report about a forced window and nothing else, because there's nothing else here to find. Whoever did this does this for a living."

"That's reassuring," Blair said.

"It wasn't meant to be."

He picked the note up at last, careful at the very edges, and read it a second time, longer than the first, and something in his jaw went tight enough that Blair saw it from across the room.

"What is it?"

"Nothing."

"You went somewhere just now. Don't tell me it was nothing."

For a moment he didn't answer at all, and the quiet stretched long enough that Fiorella quietly excused herself downstairs, some old instinct telling her this next part wasn't hers to hear.

"'Some debts don't transfer.'" Alessandro said it slowly, testing the words again in his own mouth. "I've heard that phrase exactly once before in my life. My father used to say it, near the end. About a man he'd had a falling-out with, years before I was old enough to understand any of it."

Blair's pulse picked up before her mind had caught up with why.

"What happened to the man?"

"He's the reason I became a don at eighteen instead of twenty-eight." Alessandro folded the note once, carefully, and put it in his jacket like it was something that might still bite. "I don't know yet if that's a coincidence. I intend to stop assuming it is."

He was already moving toward the door, already three steps ahead of the conversation the way he always seemed to be, and it was only once he reached it that he looked back at her, and for just a moment the calm slipped enough that Blair saw exactly how little of it was really about business at all.

"You're not staying in this room tonight."

"Where am I supposed to—"

"I'll arrange something." Final. Not up for the negotiation she opened her mouth to start anyway. "I've buried people I loved for less caution than I'm about to make you take, Blair. Don't fight me on this one."

It was the first time he'd said the word loved in front of her about anyone at all, and the fact that he clearly hadn't meant to left it sitting in the room long after he'd already gone.