Dead Men

Rafael Conti died in a boating accident off the Amalfi Coast seven years ago.

Survived by his sister, Elara. Private funeral. No body recovered.

I read the article four times. Then I found the obituary in an Italian paper and ran it through a translator and read that too. Same story. Same details. Same photograph  younger, but the same jaw, the same set of the shoulders as the man in Aleksei's photo.

No body recovered.

I put the laptop on the bed and pressed both hands over my face.

Someone was walking around using a dead man's name. Running the legal arm of one of Europe's largest fashion conglomerates. Structuring the merger that had just tied Viktor's company to the Conti Group for the next twenty years.

And Elara knew.

R.C.  not who he says he is. Elara knows.

Viktor was either part of it or he was walking straight into it. Neither option was good.

I didn't sleep. Sky outside went grey and I was still on the floor.

I found a charger in the kitchen. Stood in the dark. Forty-eight hours. I kept turning that over.

Burn it. Walk away.

I thought about the zeros in that account. I thought about the thirty-day window. I thought about a man who was supposed to be dead sitting in a glass building in Milan signing documents under a borrowed name.

I thought about the thing I was not thinking about, which was the reason I couldn't burn anything and walk anywhere, which was that I was seven weeks pregnant and completely alone and the father was about to announce his engagement to a woman whose family was built on a lie.

My phone had enough charge. I made a call.

She picked up on the second ring, which meant she hadn't been sleeping either.

"Natalia."

"You read it."

"Who else knows you gave this to me."

A long pause. "Nobody."

"Someone texted me twenty minutes after I left that bar. Different number from yours. They knew what you'd given me."

Silence on her end.

"Natalia."

"I wasn't followed," she said. But her voice had changed.

"Did you tell anyone you were meeting me."

Nothing.

"Did you tell Viktor."

"No." Fast. Too fast. "No, I would never"

"Who else."

Another pause, longer this time. When she spoke again her voice was smaller. "I spoke to our lawyer. Two days ago. I needed to understand the legal language in the file before I came to you. I didn't tell him your name, I just"

"What's his name."

"Mara"

"The lawyer. What's his name."

She told me.

I searched it while she was still talking. Website, firm profile, headshot.

The jaw. The set of the shoulders.

Different hair. Different glasses. Different name on the letterhead.

Same man as the photograph.

I set the phone against my shoulder and stood very still in the dark kitchen. Three years. Viktor had set this up three years ago.

Which meant Rafael had been inside the Volkov family's legal affairs for three years  reading correspondence, attending to private matters, sitting across from Natalia while she told him things she trusted no one else with. Including, two days ago, the existence of a file with my name in it.

"Natalia," I said. "Your lawyer. How long have you been using him."

"Viktor set it up. About three years ago. Why"

"Don't call him," I said. "Don't go near him. Don't tell him anything."

"Mara, what"

"I'll explain when I can. Right now just don't."

I hung up.

Stood in Camille's dark kitchen with the charger in my hand and my heart going very fast and very loud.

Viktor's lawyer was Rafael Conti.

Viktor had put a dead man in charge of his mother's legal affairs.

Either Viktor knew exactly who this man was.

Or someone had gotten very close to the Volkov family on purpose and had been there for three years waiting.

I went back to the guest room and found the page with the account number. Thirty days to claim it. Terms: unmarried, no active legal dispute with Volkov Industries.

I kept thinking about the merger. The announcement. What pulling one thread does to everything attached to it.

And if I did nothing  burned it, walked away  that man still knew about the clinic. That didn't disappear just because I did.

I put it all back in the envelope. Held it for a second. Put it down.

I needed a lawyer. Not Viktor's. Not Natalia's. Someone whose name appeared nowhere in this file. I wrote it on a scrap of paper and folded it into my pocket. Small thing. First thing.

I turned the light off and sat with the dark and the decision I hadn't made yet and the one I was starting to understand I already had.

Then something shifted.

A sound I almost missed. The front door. Slow. Someone working to be quiet about it.

The dog didn't make a sound. He barked at everything.

Footsteps in the hall. They stopped at my door and just  stayed there.

I looked at the envelope on the bed. The strip of light under the door had one shadow in it that hadn't been there before.

A knock. Three times. Slow.

Then a voice I had not heard in three weeks.

Low. Certain. Like rooms owed him their attention.

"Mara. Open the door."

Viktor.

I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark with the envelope in my lap and seven weeks of a secret I had sworn to keep, and I did not move.