Chapter Three — Fire and Gasoline

The east wing bedroom was nicer than her apartment in Palermo.

That bothered her more than it should have.

She sat on the edge of the bed at two in the morning, still in her damp jacket, the encrypted phone on the pillow beside her, and stared at the wall like it owed her an explanation. The room had high ceilings and heavy curtains and a bathroom with heated floors. 

Someone had left a glass of water and two painkillers on the nightstand without being asked.

She didn't know what to do with that.

She didn't know what to do with any of this.

Her phone... the old one... had fourteen missed calls from Rino. 

She couldn't call him back. Not yet. Not until she had decided what version of tonight she was going to tell him, because Rino had been with her for three years and he deserved the truth but the truth right now was a grenade she wasn't ready to hand to anyone.

She lay back on the bed fully dressed and stared at the ceiling and thought about her father.

Not the way she usually thought about him... as a wound, as a mission, as the reason for everything. She thought about him the way she used to before he died. His voice. The specific way he laughed at his own jokes before he got to the punchline. The Sunday mornings when he made terrible coffee and acted like it was the best thing he'd ever produced.

She thought about Marco sitting at that same Sunday table. Laughing too. Belonging.

She pressed the heel of her hand against her sternum and breathed.

Not yet, she told herself. Fall apart later. Think now.

She was up before six.

She found the kitchen by following the smell of coffee and discovered Lorenzo already at the table, suit jacket on, a folder open in front of him, reading like a man who had not slept and didn't particularly care.

He looked up when she walked in.

She looked at him.

Neither of them said good morning.

She poured herself coffee and sat down across from him because the table was large enough that it didn't feel like a concession.

"There's food," he said.

"I see it."

"You should eat."

"I should do a lot of things." She wrapped both hands around the mug. "I want to see the files today. All of them."

"After nine. My lawyer is bringing the second set."

"You have a lawyer who makes house calls at nine in the morning?"

"I have a lawyer who does whatever I need him to do." He turned a page. "His name is Fausto. Don't be charmed by him. He's very charming and completely without conscience."

She almost smiled. She stopped herself.

"We need to talk about the public announcement," Lorenzo said.

"What about it?"

"It needs to happen within the week. The longer we wait the more time Marco has to build a counter-narrative once word gets out that you were here last night."

 He finally closed the folder and looked at her properly. "He will find out you were here. He has someone inside this estate."

That landed cold. "You know that?"

"I suspect it. I haven't identified who yet." His voice was completely level. Like a leak in a building he hadn't gotten around to fixing. 

"Which means you and I need to be extremely careful about what we say inside these walls and where we say it."

She stared at him. "You're telling me there's a spy in your own house and your response is... be careful?"

"My response is to let them keep reporting to Marco while controlling exactly what they see." 

He picked up his coffee. 

"A panicked enemy is useful. An enemy who thinks he's informed is more useful."

She sat back. Looked at him. This man operated three steps ahead of every conversation and did it without blinking.

"You enjoy this," she said.

"I'm good at it," he said. "That's different."

The kitchen went quiet. Outside the window the estate grounds were grey and still, the gardens wet from last night's rain, a single guard doing a perimeter walk along the far wall.

"My brother is going to lose his mind," she said quietly.

"Dante."

"He's twenty-two. He thinks I've been in Palermo working for a shipping firm for the last eighteen months." She looked down at her coffee. "He has no idea what I've been doing."

"What will you tell him?"

"That I fell in love very fast with a man he's going to hate on principle." She said it flat. No emotion. "He'll believe the falling fast part. He'll believe I'd do something reckless without consulting anyone."

 "He knows me."

Something shifted in Lorenzo's expression. Not softness exactly. More like recognition.

"And your mother?" he said.

"My mother will light a candle and pray this ends well." Her voice came out smaller than she wanted. "She's been doing that for five years. About everything."

Lorenzo looked at her for a moment. Just looked. Not calculating, not assessing. The way you look at someone when you are unexpectedly close to understanding them and aren't sure whether to say so.

He didn't say so.

He looked back down at his folder.

She was grateful for that.

Fausto arrived at nine and he was, in fact, extremely charming.

He was sixty, silver-haired, and he set the files on the table with the energy of a man delivering birthday presents.

"Everything you asked for," he said to Lorenzo. 

Then he looked at Valeria with bright interested eyes. "You look just like your father. He was a good man."

"You knew him?" she said.

"Briefly. We negotiated across a table twice." He sat down, straightened his cuffs. "He was sharp. Honest, which was rare. 

Trusted too easily, which was unfortunate." He said it gently. Not as a wound. As a fact he had carried with some sadness.

She looked at the files. Reached for the first one.

Lorenzo's hand came down on top of hers.

Not hard. Just... present. She looked up.

"Fausto," Lorenzo said, not looking away from Valeria. "Give us the room."

Fausto stood without question, took his coffee, left.

The door clicked shut.

"What?" she said.

"Before you open those," Lorenzo said, and his voice had dropped to something quieter than she had heard from him yet. 

"I need you to understand something. What's in those files is not going to feel like information. It's going to feel like betrayal. Each document is going to rewrite a memory you have of your uncle and by the time you finish, the man you thought you knew will be completely gone."

 His hand was still on hers. 

She hadn't pulled away. "I've read all of it three times. It doesn't get easier. So I need to ask you... do you want to do this alone or do you want me to stay?"

The question was so unexpectedly human that for a second she didn't know what to do with it.

She looked at his hand on hers. She thought about the fourteen missed calls from Rino. She thought about Dante thinking she worked in shipping. She thought about her mother and the candles.

She thought about how long it had been since anyone had asked her that.

"Stay," she said.

He nodded. Moved his hand. Sat back.

She opened the first file.

Thirty seconds in she found a document that made her breath stop completely.

Her uncle Marco hadn't just arranged her father's murder.

He had been planning it for three years before it happened.

And the first entry in his personal log... dated the week of her fifteenth birthday... the week her father had thrown her a party and danced horribly and laughed too loud at his own jokes…

Was a meeting with the man he eventually hired to pull the trigger.

Her hands were completely still on the page.

"Valeria," Lorenzo said quietly.

"Don't," she said.

She turned the page.

She kept reading.