CHAPTER FIVE: CASTELMARE NEVER SLEEPS

MATTEO

Rocco doesn't knock. He never has, not since we were boys and knocking was a formality reserved for people who didn’t already know they’d be let in, and tonight he doesn’t bother pretending otherwise, shoving my study door open hard enough that it cracks against the wall.

“Ferrara’s dead.”

I don’t look up from the ledger in front of me right away, because in this family you learn early that the first reaction is the one people remember, and mine needs to look like control even when it isn’t. “When.”

“Last night. His housekeeper found him this morning. Single shot, close range, back of the skull. No forced entry, no witnesses, no prints — which means whoever did it walked into a house with three men on the payroll to guard it and walked back out again without any of them noticing until they were already cleaning blood off a Caravaggio.”

I set the pen down. My hand stays steady. It has to. “That makes eight.”

“Fifteen, if you count the ones we didn’t bury with the family name on the stone,” Rocco says, and the correction lands the way it’s meant to — a reminder that I’ve been undercounting my own losses on purpose, because the real number is harder to sit with than the smaller one.

Fifteen. Nine years since the first one, though it took me most of them to understand there was a pattern at all instead of just bad luck wearing a very patient face.

“Same signature?” I ask, though I already know the answer.

“Same everything. Clean. Quiet. No message left behind, no ransom, nothing taken but a second ledger from his safe — which means whoever did this didn’t just know Ferrara had one. They knew exactly where.”

I stand and walk to the window, because sitting still while Rocco talks has never once helped me think clearly, and tonight I need to think more clearly than I have in months. Below the study, the vineyard rows run dark toward the cliff edge, and past them, Castelmare’s harbor lights blink against a black sea like something keeping watch.

Five families hold this city between them, have held it for three generations, ever since the Accord was signed on cliffside stone and everyone agreed it was easier to divide the ports than bleed for all of them. It has held, mostly. It has held long enough that men like Draven Kessler have started calling it outdated instead of hard-won, which is its own kind of danger, though not the one currently standing in my study.

“Who else knows,” I ask.

“Only us, for now. I want to keep it that way until we understand what we’re dealing with.”

“We know what we’re dealing with,” I say. “We’ve known for years. Somebody’s working through this family one name at a time, and we still don’t have a single lead on who.”

Rocco crosses the room and pours two glasses of something dark, hands me one without asking whether I want it, which is its own kind of old friendship — knowing someone long enough that you stop asking and start simply providing. “There’s a pattern to the names, at least. Every one of them touched the Concordo shipments at some point. Lawyers, brokers, a customs officer two years back. Nobody who ever pulled a trigger for this family. Only the ones who made the money clean enough to spend.

“So whoever’s doing this isn’t after the family,” I say slowly, turning the thought over the way I turn over every piece of information that arrives without an obvious shape yet. “They’re after the money. Or what the money was covering for.

“Or they think we did something to deserve it,” Rocco says, quieter, and there’s something careful in the way he says it, like he’s been sitting on the thought longer than tonight.

“Meaning.”

“Meaning I’ve pulled every file we have going back fifteen years, looking for anything this family did that would justify someone spending nine of them getting even for it. There’s a fire, Matteo. Nine years back. A house two streets from the harbor, a family with no connection to any of the five houses that anyone’s ever documented — except the report lists Romano crest coats at the scene.”

The glass in my hand goes very still. “We don’t burn houses. My father never burned houses.”

“I know that. You know that.” Rocco holds my gaze, steady, the way he’s held it through every crisis this family has survived since our fathers ran it together. “But somebody out there might not.”

My grip tightens around the glass hard enough that I feel the cut crystal bite into my palm. I set it down before it can do more than that. “If word of a fire with our crest on the scene gets to Kessler before we understand it ourselves, he won’t wait for proof. He’s spent a year telling every family at the Accord table that we’re a liability. A dead lawyer and a nine-year-old fire is exactly the kind of story that turns whispers into votes.”

“Draven doesn’t need proof,” Rocco says. “He needs an excuse. You know that better than I do — you’ve been sitting across from him at that table since you were twenty-four.”

“Then we find whoever’s doing this before he finds a reason to use it,” I say, and even as I say it I hear how thin the plan sounds against nine years of a killer nobody’s so much as glimpsed.

Before I can answer, the door opens again — softer this time, though not by much — and my sister walks in already mid-sentence, the way she does everything, like the rest of the world is simply expected to catch up to wherever her mind already is.

“—and before either of you says anything, no, I didn’t knock, and no, I don’t care that it’s past eleven,” Isolde says, dropping into the chair across from my desk like she owns it, which, in the ways that matter to her, she does. “Ferrara. I heard from the kitchen staff before either of you bothered to tell me.”

“The kitchen staff shouldn’t know,” I say.

“The kitchen staff always knows,” she says. “That’s the first thing you should have learned running this family, and the thing you’ve never once bothered to. Servants hear everything. Nobody watches what they say around the people pouring the wine.”

Rocco huffs something close to a laugh into his glass. I don’t. I’m too busy watching my sister’s face for the thing underneath her sharpness, because Isolde has never once walked into a room this fast without a reason worse than gossip.

“What else,” I say.

She hesitates — a half-second, barely visible, the kind of pause only someone who grew up in the same house as her would catch at all. “The eastern perimeter radio’s gone quiet. Twenty minutes now. Cato says it’s probably just the storm coming in off the water, interference, nothing worth waking you for.”

“But you woke me anyway.”

“Because the last three times something in this family went quiet right before it went wrong,” Isolde says, and there’s no sharpness left in her voice at all now, just something older and more tired than twenty-three should sound, “we didn’t find out until someone was already dead.”

For a moment, nobody speaks. Outside, past the vineyard rows, thunder rolls in low over the water, the first real storm the coast has seen in weeks, and for one absurd second I find myself thinking that even the sky has chosen tonight to stop pretending everything is fine.

“Double the gate,” I say finally. “Quietly. I don’t want the staff seeing extra men and deciding to talk about that too.”

Rocco is already moving toward the door, radio in hand, calling for Cato before he’s fully through it. Isolde stays a moment longer, watching me with the particular directness she’s never learned to soften, the same directness that used to get her in trouble with our father and now, more and more, reminds me of him.

“You think it’s finally coming for you,” she says. Not a question either. Everyone in this family has stopped asking me questions tonight and started simply stating the things they already know I’m afraid of.

“Fifteen names, Isolde. Every one of them closer to me than the last. Lawyers. Brokers. Men who never held a gun for this family in their lives.” I look past her, toward the window, toward the dark where the vineyard ends and the cliff begins. “There’s only one name left on whatever list this is. I’d have to be a fool not to know whose.”

She doesn’t argue with me. That, more than anything else tonight, is what finally makes my chest go cold — because Isolde has never once failed to argue with me when she thought I was wrong.

“Then don’t be alone tonight,” she says quietly, and leaves to help Rocco with the gate before I can tell her I already intend to be exactly that, because a man waiting to find out if he’s about to die has never once wanted witnesses to how he does it.

I pour myself a second glass I don’t finish and stand at the window a long time, watching lightning stitch itself across a sky that used to feel like it belonged to my family and lately feels like it’s only on loan. Somewhere out past the vineyard, past the black iron gate, past a perimeter radio that has now been silent for twenty-five minutes, something is moving toward Villa Corvo that no amount of doubled guards is going to stop, and some old, quiet part of me — the part that’s survived eight years of running this family by trusting its instincts over its comfort — already knows exactly what.