CHAPTER SEVEN: A GHOST AT THE GATE

MATTEO

“Go to bed, Isolde.”

“I’m not tired.” She’s still standing in my study doorway forty minutes after Rocco left to double the gate, arms crossed, refusing to be the first one to look away, which has always been the family trait we share and the one that makes arguing with her exhausting in a way arguing with anyone else never is.

“Then go be not-tired somewhere that isn’t hovering over me.”

“I told you not to be alone tonight.”

“And I heard you,” I say, softer than I mean to, because the truth is I don’t want her in this room if whatever’s coming actually arrives — I’ve buried enough people this family loved without adding my sister to the number over a decision I made to feel less afraid on my own. “Go check on the east gate yourself if it’ll make you feel useful. Rocco could use someone he doesn’t have to explain everything twice to.”

She doesn’t move right away. She studies me instead, the same unhurried, assessing look our father used to give men across a negotiating table, and I feel it land somewhere I don’t like being touched. “You’ve got that face on,” she says finally.

“What face.”

“The one you had the week Papa died. Like you’ve already decided something’s going to happen to you and you’re just waiting politely for the rest of us to catch up.”

I don’t answer that, because there’s no answer I can give her that isn’t either a lie or something worse than the truth. She holds my eyes a moment longer, long enough that I think she might actually refuse to leave this time, and then, something in her shoulders loosening, she looks away first — the one time tonight either of us manages it.

“If something’s coming,” she says, quieter now, all the sharpness gone out of it, “you tell me. You don’t get to carry this alone just because you’re the one with your name on the door.”

“I know.”

“You always say that. You never mean it.”

I don’t have an answer for that either, and she doesn’t wait for one.

It’s a lie built out of half a truth, and she knows it, and for once she lets me have it anyway — maybe because some old instinct in her, the same one that got her out of that doorway fast tonight, understands there are some nights you don’t argue with a brother who’s already decided how he wants to spend them.

She goes. The door clicks shut behind her, softer than Rocco ever manages it, and I’m alone with a glass I haven’t finished and a storm throwing itself against the windows hard enough to rattle the old lead seams.

I don’t sit. I haven’t been able to sit still in this room in fifteen years, not since my father died in it — not this exact room, but a study close enough in shape and silence that my body doesn’t know the difference most nights. I stand at the window instead, watching lightning fork out over black water, and think about fifteen names, and one left, and a radio that’s been dead for going on forty minutes now with no explanation Rocco’s found yet.

My phone sits face-up on the desk behind me, screen dark, no missed calls, which should be reassuring and somehow isn’t. Rocco would have called the second he found something, good or bad — that’s the deal we’ve had since we were boys running errands for our fathers, no silence longer than it takes to dial. Forty minutes of nothing means either the storm’s eaten the signal, or he hasn’t found anything yet worth the risk of a call, or he’s in the middle of something he can’t step away from long enough to make one.

None of those options sit easily in my chest.

I think, standing there, about the eleven attempts on my life in the years since I took this family over — the poisoned wine at a peace dinner in my second year, the car bomb that killed two guards and left me with nothing worse than a ringing ear, the sniper on a rooftop three streets from the Accord House who missed by the width of a hand because I bent to tie a shoe I didn’t need tying. I survived all eleven because I never once let myself believe I was safe long enough to stop watching the room. Tonight I catch myself wanting, badly, to be wrong about how dangerous this particular silence is, and wanting something is the first mistake my father ever taught me not to make.

He used to say that to me directly, more than once, in this exact room — a man who wants something badly enough has already told his enemy where to aim. I was fourteen the first time I heard it and didn’t understand it. I’m thirty-two now and I understand it perfectly, and it doesn’t make standing here with my back to an unlocked door any easier.

I pour a second glass I don’t intend to drink either, just to have something to do with my hands besides check my phone for a call that isn’t coming. My reflection in the dark window looks steadier than I feel — shoulders squared, jaw set, every inch the Don this family expects to see. It’s a mask I’ve worn long enough that most nights I forget it’s one. Tonight, waiting on a silence I can’t explain, I feel every seam of it.

Somewhere below, past the vineyard, past the eastern wall, I hear nothing at all — which is its own kind of sound, if you’ve spent as many years as I have learning to listen for the exact moment a house stops making its ordinary noise. Even the rain seems to be holding its breath, or maybe that’s just me, standing here waiting for a threat I can’t yet put a shape to.

The floor doesn’t creak when she reaches the second landing. I find that out later. I find out a lot of things later, about how close she got before anything in this house so much as noticed she was in it, and every time I think about it afterward, some old animal part of my brain still goes cold with how easily it could have ended differently.

If I’d let Isolde stay. If I’d called Rocco back up before he finished doubling the gate. If I’d done any of the dozen small, reasonable things a careful man does on a night that already smells wrong — none of it would have mattered, I understand later, because she was never going to be stopped by a gate or a second body in the room. She was always going to reach this door. The only real question, standing here with my back to a storm and no idea yet what’s behind me, was ever going to be what happened once she did.

What I notice, standing at that window with a storm doing its best to tear the glass out of its frame, is the study door easing open behind me — not thrown, not kicked, just opened, quiet as a held breath, the same quiet I imagine death itself would use if it ever bothered to knock first.

I don’t turn around right away. Fifteen years of running this family has taught me that the first reaction is the one that decides everything after it, and turning too fast, showing too much, has gotten better men than me killed in rooms exactly like this one.

“Rocco,” I say, to the glass, to the storm, to whoever it is standing in my doorway. “Tell me the radio’s fixed.”

Nobody answers.

That silence is the loudest thing I’ve heard all night.