Chapter 3: The Account nobody Mentioned

Elettra

Enzo came with the bandage, as promised.

He didn't look at me when he knelt on the marble, and he didn't speak. He pressed a folded towel against my side and wound a strip of gauze around my ribs so tightly that I gasped. His hands were shaking.

"Uncle," I whispered. "Please."

"Don't."

"You taught me to ride a bicycle."

"I know what I did." His voice broke on the last word. He tied off the gauze and stood, still not meeting my eyes. "Can you walk?"

"I think so."

"Then walk. Your old room. Quietly."

He took my elbow, and I leaned on him because I had no choice. The stairs seemed to go on forever. Every step pulled a thread of pain through my side, and the blood from my palm left small dark prints on the bannister.

My old room was at the end of the upstairs hall. Mirella had kept it exactly as I left it at nineteen. The yellow curtains, the shelf of paperbacks, the stuffed rabbit on the pillow that I was too embarrassed to throw away. Enzo helped me onto the bed. I looked at the rabbit and wanted to scream.

"Rest," he said.

"You're going to lock the door."

He paused with his hand on the frame. For a moment I thought he'd say no. I watched him stand there, a grey-haired man in a cardigan, and I willed him to turn around and carry me out to the car and drive me to a hospital.

"I'm sorry, Elettra," he said.

The key turned in the lock.

I lay still and listened to him go down the corridor. Then I did what I'd have told anyone else to do: stop crying and start thinking. It took a long while. The tears came anyway, and I let them, but underneath them a small cold part of me began to take stock of everything I had left.

The window. I dragged myself across the room and tried it. Painted shut years ago, after I climbed out of it at sixteen to meet a boy. The door was solid oak. My phone was gone. My side was wet again beneath the gauze, and the room was spinning at the edges.

I slid down the wall beside the old radiator and rested my forehead on the cool metal.

That was when I heard the voices.

The heating pipes in Villa Vesperi ran like a nervous system through every room. When I was little, I used to lie on the floor with my ear against the vent and listen to my parents argue about money in the kitchen below. Tonight the vent was warm, and sound travelled up from the study, thin and echoing but clear.

"She's upstairs," Mirella said. "Enzo locked her in."

"And the phone?" That was Dario.

"Destroyed. The bag, the laptop, everything she brought. Nothing leaves this house."

I pressed my ear to the grille. A third voice had joined them, one I couldn't place. It came from a speakerphone, flat and slightly metallic, as if filtered through water. I couldn't tell whether it belonged to a man or a woman. It had that careful neutral pitch people use when they don't want to be recognised.

"The signature is irrelevant now," the voice said. "You've all been foolish. The signature was never the real risk."

"What is?" Enzo asked.

"The birth file."

Nobody spoke. Even from upstairs I could feel the silence change shape. I held my breath.

"It hasn't been found," Mirella said, a little too fast. "We searched the clinic archive. We searched Vittorio's office. Nothing."

"Which means someone else has it, or it was moved." The voice was unhurried. "If that file reaches the girl, no transfer and no forged signature will matter. The estate was never hers by law. It was hers because of that file. And the Bellarosa account will open itself the moment someone with the right proof walks into the bank."

"The Bellarosa account is dead," Mirella said. "It's been dead for twenty years."

"Accounts like that are never dead. They sleep."

I frowned into the dark. Bellarosa. I turned the word over, and it meant nothing to me. Not a person, not a bank, not a street. I'd never heard it in my childhood. Never seen it on a letter. That was strange in itself, because a house like ours kept every name in a drawer somewhere.

"Who else knows?" Dario asked. He sounded different now, tight and a little frightened. It was the first real feeling I'd heard from him all night. "I was told this was only about the trust."

"You were told what you needed to be told," said the voice.

"Then I want to know the rest."

"No."

The word fell like a stone. I pictured Dario's face, the face of a man who's just found out he isn't the one holding the leash. If I'd been less afraid, I might have enjoyed it.

"Finish tonight," the voice went on. "Leave nothing behind. Not a footprint, not a hair. The house must be empty by dawn, and whatever remains of her must stay a private family sorrow."

"Whatever remains," Mirella repeated softly.

"You have your instructions."

The line clicked and went dead.

I knelt at the vent with my cheek against the cold metal and tried to hold on to what I'd heard. Every word felt precious and impossible to keep. Birth file. Bellarosa. The estate was never hers by law. A file that might prove something about who I was. I didn't understand any of it. I only knew that a stranger had spoken my death aloud as if reading from a list, and that the people I loved had agreed.

Footsteps crossed the hall below. A door shut, then another. Suitcases dragged across the floor. I heard the iron bolt of the front door scrape open, and a car engine growl to life on the gravel.

"Is everything off?" Mirella called.

"Gas is off at the main," Enzo said. "Heating too. The pilot lights are out."

"Good. It'll look like a faulty boiler."

"Mirella." Enzo's voice cracked. "She's still alive upstairs."

"She won't be by morning," my mother said. "The house is old and the night is cold, and she's lost a great deal of blood. I'm not asking you to touch her. Only to leave."

A long silence followed.

I waited for him to say something. I'd have forgiven him anything, then, for one word. I leaned toward the vent with my whole body, as if my need alone could pull it out of his mouth.

"Fine," Enzo said.

That was all.

The car doors slammed, one after another. I counted four. The engines turned over, and the tyres crunched across the gravel, and the sound thinned and faded down the long road until the only noise left was the rain.

I stayed at the vent a long time. I don't know how long. Then I tried to stand and couldn't.

So I crawled. I crawled to the door and beat on it with both fists until my cut hand split wider and blood ran down my wrist. I shouted until my voice scraped raw. I screamed for Enzo, for Mirella, for the housekeeper who'd gone home for the night, for anyone. The house swallowed it all. The villa sat on its hill above the lake, three kilometres from the nearest neighbour, and on a night like this nobody would drive past.

When I stopped, my arms were trembling, and my side felt packed with hot coals.

The room was cold now. I hadn't realised how fast it would turn. The radiator beside me ticked and went still, and a draft slid under the door and curled around my ankles. My breath showed in the dim grey light from the window.

I pulled the quilt off the bed and wrapped myself in it. I dragged the stuffed rabbit into my lap, because it was there, and because I couldn't bear to be entirely alone. It smelled of dust and old lavender. It smelled like being nine years old.

I thought about my father. Vittorio was in Rome, as far as I knew. He'd never been a warm man, but he'd taught me to read a balance sheet at the kitchen table when I was twelve. Did he know? Was he part of it? I couldn't tell, and that frightened me most, that I could no longer say who had loved me and who had only kept me.

My thoughts started to slow and slide.

I fought it. I made myself repeat the words. Birth file. Bellarosa. Birth file. Bellarosa. If I died here, they'd clean up, and no one would ever know what I'd learned. The words were my last piece of evidence. They were all I had left to give the world.

I needed to write them down.

I looked around for something. There was no pen, no paper. I felt along the floor and found the edge of a loose floorboard I'd once used to hide diary pages. I pried at it with numb fingers. Nothing underneath but dust and a dead moth.

So I used my own hand.

I dipped my finger in the blood on my wrist and wrote on the old white skirting board beside the bed, in letters that shook so badly they looked like a child's. B. E. L. L. A. R. O. S. A. Then, below it, a smaller one, because I was running out of strength: a single line. Find the file.

I lay back against the wall and looked at what I'd written.

It was ugly and shaky, and it was the most important sentence I'd ever produced. I wanted to believe someone would find it. A cleaner. A detective. A buyer, in a year or ten, ripping out the old boards of a dead girl's room. I wanted to believe the house would remember me.

The light at the window was turning blue. Dawn, or what passed for it behind the rain.

I was so tired. The cold had stopped hurting, which I knew was a bad sign, and a heavy warmth spread through my arms and legs. My eyelids kept sliding shut. I forced them open and looked at the rabbit in my lap. It had one button eye missing. I'd lost it when I was ten. I remembered crying about that, and Mirella sitting on the edge of this very bed with a needle and thread, saying it didn't matter, we could sew on a new one, she would always fix whatever broke.

"You said that," I told the rabbit.

My voice was a thread.

"You said you'd always fix it."

The window had gone from blue to grey. The rain was easing, and in the sudden quiet I could hear my own heartbeat, slow and loose and far away. I thought of the green dress, ruined now. I thought of the ring on my finger that had never belonged to anyone. I thought, with a strange calm, that I'd never been to Sicily, and that Dario would go there someday with someone else.

I closed my eyes.

The last thing I remember is the smell of lavender, and a low sound from somewhere deep in the house. It might have been a pipe. It might have been the wind. But it sounded very much like a door opening downstairs, and someone, slowly and carefully, beginning to climb.