Chapter 5: Marco's Confession

Enzo found me three days later, in the small library off the east hallway where I'd taken to hiding between meals, and told me Marco was finally ready to talk.

"Ready how?" I asked, setting down the book I hadn't actually been reading.

"Ready like a man who's run out of reasons not to." Enzo leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, none of his usual easy humor in his face. "Dante's with him now. He asked me to bring you, if you still wanted to hear it."

I was on my feet before I'd fully decided to be.

***

They'd moved Marco to a room in the east wing I hadn't seen before — smaller than I expected, plain, more like an office than the cell my imagination had built over the last three days. He sat in a chair by the window, his injuries healing but not healed, one arm still bound close to his body. He looked smaller than he had at the wedding. Smaller than the man who used to bring my father his morning coffee and complain, every year without fail, about the heat.

Dante stood near the door when I entered, and something in his expression shifted at the sight of me — not quite surprise, but close to it, like he'd expected me to hesitate and was recalibrating now that I hadn't.

"Isabella." Marco's voice cracked around my name. "I didn't want any of this. You have to believe that."

"I want to," I said, pulling a chair closer, ignoring the small, sharp look Dante gave me for getting too close. "So tell me something that makes it easy to."

***

Marco's story came out slow at first, then faster, like a dam finally giving way after days of pressure building behind it.

"It started six months ago," he said. "A man approached me outside your father's estate. Said he worked for a business associate who wanted information — nothing dangerous, he said. Just details. Schedules. Who came and went from the house, and when."

"And you agreed," Dante said, not a question.

"I had debts." Marco's voice dropped, shame thick in every syllable. "Gambling debts, the kind that get worse instead of better the longer you ignore them. The money he offered would have cleared everything in one payment. I told myself it was harmless. Just information. Not betrayal."

"Information is never just information," Dante said, quiet and cold. "Not in this world."

Marco flinched but didn't argue.

***

"Who was the man?" I asked. "The one who approached you."

"I never learned his real name. He called himself Ricci. Middle-aged, well-dressed, careful about being seen." Marco's eyes flicked toward Dante, then away again, quickly. "But he wasn't the one giving the orders. He was just a messenger. Someone further up the chain wanted the information, and Ricci was how it moved."

"And the device," Dante said. "The one sewn into your jacket. Who gave you that?"

"Ricci again. Two weeks before the wedding. He told me it was a tracking beacon, nothing more — a way for his employer to know when key guests arrived, for security purposes, he said." Marco's hands trembled where they rested on his knees. "I didn't know it was meant to signal anyone. I swear to you, I didn't know what it was really for until your men found it."

***

"Do you believe him?" I asked quietly, glancing toward Dante.

Something in Dante's expression had gone very still, calculating in the way I was starting to recognize as his default state whenever a piece of a larger puzzle slid into place. "Partially," he said. "I believe he didn't know the full plan. I don't believe he's told us everything he does know."

Marco's face went pale. "I've told you everything, I swear—"

"You've told us about Ricci," Dante said, stepping closer, his voice dropping into something low and precise that made the hair on my arms rise. "You haven't told us who Ricci works for. And I think you know more than you're saying, Marco, because a man doesn't take that kind of risk for a stranger's money without at least a guess about who's really paying him."

***

The silence that followed stretched long enough that I found myself holding my breath, watching Marco's face war with itself — fear pulling one direction, self-preservation pulling another, and somewhere beneath both of them, the last threads of loyalty to a family he'd betrayed anyway.

"I have a guess," Marco said finally, so quiet I had to lean forward to hear him. "I never had proof. I want that understood. It's a guess, nothing more."

"Say it anyway," Dante said.

"Ricci mentioned once, only once, that his employer had 'more claim to the Moretti name than most people realized.' I didn't understand what he meant at the time. I still don't know for certain." Marco's eyes flicked toward Dante, hesitant, afraid. "But given everything since — given who benefits most from chaos inside this family—"

"Luciano," I said, before Marco could finish, before Dante could stop me.

Marco didn't confirm it out loud. He didn't have to. His silence did the work for him.

***

Dante's jaw had gone tight enough that a muscle jumped visibly beneath his skin, but his voice, when it came, stayed perfectly level — the same controlled calm I'd watched him deploy at our own wedding while a bleeding man was dragged past the cake.

"That's still not proof," he said, though I could hear how much he wanted it to be.

"No," Marco agreed. "It isn't."

"But it's a direction." Dante's eyes met mine across the room, and something passed between us — not quite triumph, because there was nothing to celebrate in a confession this ugly, but something like confirmation, like a suspicion finally given enough weight to be worth pursuing seriously. "It's more than we had yesterday."

***

"What happens to him now?" I asked, nodding toward Marco, whose hands hadn't stopped trembling since the moment Luciano's name had entered the room.

"That depends," Dante said, "on whether he's willing to keep helping us. Quietly. From wherever we place him next."

"You mean using him," I said. "As a source. Even after everything."

"I mean giving him a way to be useful instead of simply guilty," Dante said, and something in his tone told me this was, for him, as close to mercy as this world allowed. "It's more than most traitors get."

Marco's eyes filled, and for the first time since I'd entered the room, he looked less like a man caught in a lie and more like a man drowning in the weight of one bad decision made worse by every year he'd let it compound.

"I'm sorry," he said, and I couldn't tell if the words were meant for Dante, or for me, or for my father, whose trust he'd spent without ever quite deciding to.

***

"Isabella." My father's name — mine, technically, though it felt like his in that moment — pulled something loose in my chest. "Does your father know? About any of this?"

"I don't think so," Marco said quickly, too quickly, the same rushed defensiveness he'd used at the wedding. "Your father is a good man. Whatever mistakes I made, they were mine. Not his."

I wanted to believe that as completely as Marco seemed to want me to. But I thought of my father's guilty eyes across the garden, the way he'd flinched when I'd pressed him, the too-quick denial that had felt, even then, like something worn thin from overuse.

I didn't say any of that out loud. Not yet. Not in a room with Dante standing three feet away, holding me to a promise about truth I wasn't yet ready to keep in full.

***

We left Marco under guard and walked back through the house together in a silence that felt different from our usual silences — heavier, more deliberate, like we were both turning the same information over from different angles and arriving at conclusions neither of us wanted to say first.

"You went quiet," Dante said eventually, once we'd reached the hallway outside my room. "When he mentioned Luciano's claim to the family name. What are you thinking?"

"I'm thinking," I said carefully, "that a man doesn't say something like that unless he believes it. And I'm wondering what it would mean, if it were true."

Dante's expression shuttered so fast and so completely that I knew, instantly, I'd stumbled onto something he hadn't planned to discuss yet — something old, something buried under the same locked door as the grief I'd glimpsed in his eyes on our wedding day.

"Not tonight," he said, echoing words he'd used once before, though this time they carried less command and more exhaustion.

"You said we agreed. The truth, even when it's ugly."

"I know what I said." He rubbed a hand across his jaw, and for one unguarded moment, he looked less like the Don who ran this house and more like a man carrying a weight he'd never once been allowed to put down. "And I'll keep that promise, Isabella. Just not tonight. Tonight, I need to think about what Marco told us without also thinking about what it means for me."

***

He left me at my door with that unfinished sentence hanging in the air, and I stood alone in the hallway for a long time afterward, turning Marco's confession over in my mind — the debts, the messenger named Ricci, the careless, dangerous phrase about a claim to the Moretti name that Luciano apparently believed was his by right.

Whatever secret Dante was guarding behind that locked door, I understood now that it wasn't only about grief. It was tangled up in exactly the kind of danger circling this family, the kind that had put a bleeding man in chains and a signal device in a wedding jacket.

I thought of my father's silence, too, sitting uneasily alongside Dante's, two men in my life keeping truths from me for reasons they'd each convinced themselves were kind.

I was beginning to suspect that kindness, in this family, was simply anothe

r word for control. And I was beginning to suspect I wouldn't be content to keep accepting it much longer.

*End of Chapter 5.*