CHAPTER NINE: ALONE IN THE STUDY

VIENNA

I freeze.

Not because of the words themselves — I’ve heard men bargain, beg, threaten, offer me money that could buy this entire vineyard twice over, and none of it has ever once slowed my hand. I freeze because he’s right, and some part of me that’s been standing here counting his heartbeat already knew he was right before he said it out loud.

“Turn around,” I say. My voice comes out steadier than I feel, which is its own small mercy.

He does, slow, unhurried, hands loose and open at his sides the way a man moves when he’s decided sudden isn’t going to save him and has stopped bothering to try. Up close he’s exactly what the surveillance photograph promised and somehow also nothing like it — black hair damp at the temples, a scar cutting through one eyebrow that no file ever mentioned, eyes so dark they read almost black in the low lamplight, fixed on me instead of the gun, like the gun is the least interesting part of what just walked into his study.

There’s a stillness in the way he holds himself that photographs never capture — the particular economy of movement in a man who has learned, the hard way, that every gesture in a room like this one gets read as a threat or a surrender. He gives me neither. He just stands, weight even on both feet, watching me the way you’d watch a storm you’d already decided you couldn’t outrun.

“You’re younger than I expected,” he says.

“You’re calmer than you should be.”

“I’ve had fifteen years to practice.” Something moves behind his eyes, quick, gone before I can name it. “You’re the one who’s been working through my family. Nine years. Fifteen names, if my count’s right.”

My hand tightens on the gun. “How do you know that.”

“Because I’ve buried fifteen people I couldn’t explain, and I stopped believing in coincidence a long time before tonight.” He doesn’t move toward me. Doesn’t move away either. Just stands there, weight balanced, watching me the way you’d watch weather you couldn’t outrun even if you tried. “What’s my crime. Whatever they told you I did. I’d like to hear it from the person about to collect on it.”

I don’t answer right away. Some old instinct in me wants to make him work harder for it, wants to hold this last piece of leverage the way I’ve held everything else about myself for nine years — close, guarded, never handed over cheap. But there’s something in the specific way he’s waiting, patient, not pushing, that makes the guarding feel suddenly, uselessly heavy.

“You know what you did.”

“Tell me anyway.”

There’s something almost gentle in the way he says it — not pleading, not the careful, wheedling tone I’ve heard from every other name on my list in the seconds before the end. Just a request, plain, like he genuinely wants the answer more than he wants to survive the next five minutes. It unsettles me more than a weapon would have.

“My family,” I say, and my voice cracks on the second word, a hairline fracture I hate myself for immediately, because nine years of training were supposed to have sanded that particular weakness smooth. “Nine years ago. A house near the harbor. Your men burned it to the ground with my parents still inside it, and I watched, and I have spent every single day since deciding exactly how I was going to make you pay for it.”

For the first time since he turned around, something genuine crosses his face — not fear, not the calculation I expected from a man who’s survived eight years running this family. Confusion. Real, unguarded confusion, the kind I don’t think a person can fake convincingly with a gun three feet from their skull.

“I’ve never ordered a house burned in my life,” he says, slow, like he’s testing each word before he lets it out. “Not once. My father wouldn’t have either — he thought fire was sloppy, said it drew questions from every direction at once. Whoever told you that lied to you.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not.” His jaw tightens. “I don’t lie with a gun against my head, Signorina. There’s no version of tonight where lying to you buys me anything at all.”

“Everyone lies when it’s the only card left,” I say, though even as it leaves my mouth I hear how thin it sounds against the particular steadiness in his voice — not defiance, not the practiced calm of a man performing bravery for an audience. Something closer to certainty, the kind that doesn’t need volume to hold its shape.

“Then shoot me,” he says, and doesn’t flinch saying it. “If you’re certain, if nothing I say is going to change what you already believe, then there’s no reason to keep standing here talking. Finish it.”

I don’t move. That’s the problem — that’s been the problem since the moment he turned around — and he watches me not move with an expression I can’t fully read, something between relief and grief, like a man watching a verdict get delayed instead of overturned.

The gun doesn’t waver, but something inside my chest does — a slow, sickening tilt, the specific vertigo of standing on ground you were promised was solid and feeling it shift anyway. Nine years. Fifteen names. One truth I never once let myself question, because questioning it would have meant admitting the only person who ever knelt beside me on those cobblestones might have handed me a debt that was never really owed.

“Prove it,” I say, because demanding proof is easier than admitting how badly I need him to have one.

His eyes stay on mine, steady, and for a moment neither of us moves, the gun still raised, the rain still hammering the glass behind him, two strangers standing in the wreckage of a story I’ve spent nine years believing with my whole chest.

“The date,” he says. “Give me the exact date. I keep records of everything this family has ever ordered — every debt, every collection, every job with a Romano crest anywhere near it. If we did this, it’s written down somewhere in this house. If it isn’t written down, then it never happened, whatever you were told.”

I give him the date. It leaves my mouth before I’ve fully decided to trust him with it, nine years of memorized grief finally spoken out loud to someone besides Voss for the first time in my adult life.

Saying it out loud does something strange to the date itself — it stops being only mine the moment it leaves my mouth, becomes a fact sitting in the air between two strangers instead of a wound I’ve kept sealed and private for nine years. I don’t know yet whether that’s relief or just a different kind of exposure.

He doesn’t reach for anything. Doesn’t move at all, in fact, except for something small and tired settling into his shoulders, the look of a man doing math he doesn’t like the answer to. “That’s eleven days before I took over this family,” he says quietly. “My father was still alive then. Sick, but alive. If an order like that went out, it went out over his signature, not mine — and I’ve read every order he ever signed in his last year, because I had to clean up after most of them.”

“Then who,” I say, and hate how small it sounds.

He doesn’t answer right away, and in the silence that follows I feel the whole shape of the last nine years tilt on an axis I didn’t know it had — not gone, not undone, just suddenly, terribly uncertain, the way a floor feels uncertain the instant after you learn it isn’t load-bearing after all.