Chapter 16: The Game

Viktor had not slept properly in four days, and it was beginning to show in the small, uncharacteristic mistakes he kept catching himself making—a name misfiled, a contact called twice by accident, the particular fog of a mind that had spent too many hours turning over the same unresolved question without arriving anywhere useful. Find out if she knows what she is. He’d been trying. The trouble was that everything he’d learned since Alessandro gave him that instruction seemed to raise three new questions for every one it answered, and none of it pointed toward anything as simple as a girl quietly, ignorantly living out a stolen inheritance. The two men who’d approached her three nights ago hadn’t been his. He’d made certain of that within hours, running down every thread he had access to, and had come away with nothing—no employer, no clear origin, nothing but a secondhand account of a stranger intervening before either man could finish what he’d started.

That detail troubled him more than anything else. Someone else was already circling her. Someone competent enough to send trained men, and careless enough, or arrogant enough, to send them before understanding that the girl wasn’t unprotected. He sat now in a rented room three streets from Alessandro’s house, papers spread across a table that had seen better decades, and tried to make sense of an archive he’d spent two days failing to locate. The Romano family had kept records—every family like theirs did, ledgers and account books and the particular paper trail that accumulated around decades of moving money through legitimate and illegitimate channels alike. If that archive still existed, it would settle everything: whether the girl was truly Elena Romano’s daughter, what remained of the family’s frozen assets, and—more urgently, more dangerously—exactly what evidence it might contain about who had orchestrated the massacre in the first place.

Viktor had spent two days searching records he shouldn’t have had access to, calling in favors he’d been saving for a decade, and had found only fragments. A property listing for the old estate, tied up in the same legal limbo he’d already encountered in the records. A reference, in a twenty-year-old court filing, to an “unresolved archive” whose location the filing itself didn’t specify. Dead ends, all of them, circling something that refused to come fully into view. He was still staring at the court filing, willing it to yield some detail he’d missed, when his phone buzzed with Alessandro’s number.

“You’ve found something,” Alessandro said, without preamble, when Viktor answered. It wasn’t a question. Alessandro rarely asked questions when he already knew, or suspected he knew, the shape of the answer.

“Fragments. Nothing solid. There’s an archive—family records, financial and otherwise—that seems to have survived the fire. I can’t locate it.”

“Keep looking.”

“I intend to. I wanted to update you on something else.”

Viktor hesitated, weighing how much to say, an old habit that had kept him alive this long.

“Two men approached the girl three nights ago. Not mine. Someone else is already watching her closely enough to act.”

The silence on the other end of the line stretched a beat too long.

“Do you know who sent them?”

“No. I’ve made inquiries. Nothing’s come back yet.”

“Make more inquiries.”

Something had sharpened in Alessandro’s voice, a rare urgency that Viktor had learned, over the years, to take seriously.

“This matters a great deal, Viktor. If someone else has reached the same conclusion we have, and moved on it before we’ve had a chance to manage things properly, the consequences could be considerable. For the girl. For all of us.”

“I’ll find out who they were.”

“Good.”

A pause, and when Alessandro spoke again, his voice had softened into something almost paternal, the tone he used when he wanted Viktor to feel, specifically, trusted.

“You’ve done excellent work on this, Viktor. Better than I expected, given how little you had to start from. I want you to know that hasn’t gone unnoticed.”

“Thank you.”

“I have a favor to ask. Something delicate.”

Alessandro’s voice dropped lower, more confiding.

“I’d like you to look into the Moretti boy. Lorenzo. I have reason to believe he may already be involved in this, and if he is, I need to understand how, and how much he knows.”

Something in Viktor went carefully still.

“Why would the Moretti heir concern himself with a Romano matter?”

“An old promise, possibly. Salvatore Moretti and Marco Romano had history that predates the massacre—a debt of sorts, the kind men in our world sometimes carry for decades without ever discharging.”

Alessandro’s tone remained even, almost idle, but Viktor had learned to listen for the places where Alessandro’s carefully constructed calm strained slightly at the seams, and he heard it now, faint but present.

“If Lorenzo has taken an interest in the girl, it complicates things considerably. I need to know the shape of that complication before we decide how to proceed.”

“I’ll look into it.”

“Carefully, Viktor. The Morettis are not people to provoke without cause, and I have no wish to start a war over a girl who may, in the end, turn out to be nothing more than an unfortunate resemblance and a family heirloom passed down through channels neither of us has traced yet.”

Viktor said nothing to that, though something in him—some old, uneasy instinct he’d learned, over the years, not to entirely trust and not to entirely ignore either—noted the particular carefulness with which Alessandro kept describing the girl as an open question, a possibly, an unfortunate resemblance, even now, days after Viktor had shown him a photograph and a pendant that matched it stitch for stitch.

“I’ll have something on the Moretti boy within the week,” Viktor said.

“Take whatever time you need to do it properly. This isn’t a matter for haste.”

A pause, and then, almost gently:

“You’ve always been careful, Viktor. It’s why I trust you with things I wouldn’t trust to anyone else. Don’t let this particular matter change that about you.”

The call ended, and Viktor sat for a long moment in the quiet of the rented room, the court filing still open in front of him, Alessandro’s voice still settling strangely in his chest. Take whatever time you need. This isn’t a matter for haste. It was, Viktor thought, the most patient he had ever heard Alessandro Vescari discuss anything that concerned a threat to the balance of power in this city—and in Viktor’s considerable experience, Alessandro’s patience was never idle. It was always, without exception, in service of something being built quietly enough that no one noticed the shape of it until it was already finished. He gathered the papers on the table, tucked the court filing into his coat, and began, methodically, to plan how he would look into Lorenzo Moretti without either man realizing exactly how carefully he was being watched in return.