CHAPTER FIVE

Chapter Five

Alessia POV

I didn't sleep.

Well, the truth was I couldn't sleep.

I lay in the dark on my side of the enormous bed, and I stared at the ceiling, listening to the house breathe around me.

The tick of the radiator. The distant footfall of a night guard on the floor below.

So many sounds, but not enough noise either. By five in the morning, I gave up pretending I was ever going to fall asleep.

I dressed without turning on a light, moving by what I could feel and memory from the night before.

Old habit.

I slipped out of the suite and into the corridor and stood very still for a moment, listening.

Nothing.

Everyone was asleep, or doing a very good job of feigning it.

Taking a deep breath, I walked to Isabella's room.

---

The door opened without resistance.

I don't know what I expected.

The same stillness, maybe.

The horrible, sweet smell of spilled wine mixed with something underneath it.

I hadn't let myself think about it, but now I knew that sickening copper scent was blood.

I expected the evidence of what I had walked into yesterday morning to still be present, waiting for me.

But the room was empty, and Isabella’s body was gone.

The floor was clean. The dark stain spreading across the ivory tile — gone.

The vanity had been cleared and wiped, the bed had been made with fresh linens, turned down at the corner with the mechanical precision of a hotel room waiting for a new guest.

Even the air was different. It smelled of lemon and bleach, like it had been scrubbed violently.

I stood in the doorway and felt the floor shift beneath me.

This had to be Matteo's doing; he had likely arranged it after he left the room yesterday.

Between last night and this morning, someone had erased all evidence that my sister had been here or died here.

I was about to leave when the light caught it.

The windowsill facing the east side of the estate was letting in sunlight, and that light fell on something, causing it to glint.

I made myself walk inside toward the window, my hand reaching for the shiny object.

Isabella's bracelet.

I picked it up very gently, trying to identify what exactly I was holding.

It was a thin gold chain with a single charm — a small crescent moon, tarnished at the curve from years of wear.

Our mother had pressed it into Isabella's hand at the airport the last time we had all been in the same room together, before the illness had taken her ability to travel.

I had a similar bracelet, with a star charm dangling at its edge. It was in my purse somewhere, but unlike me, Isabella had never taken it off.

Not once, in all the years since.

I tried to recall if I had seen it on her wrist the morning I found her, but I couldn't remember.

It had not been on the windowsill yesterday. I was certain of that.

Which meant someone had placed it after I left.

I closed my fingers around it and pressed my fist against my sternum and stood very still until the shaking passed.

The bracelet was here, but Isabella's coat and key chain were gone.

I was still standing in that room, trying to understand why someone would take her things away, when one of the younger maids appeared at the far end of the hall.

She stopped when she saw me, bobbed slightly in that uncomfortable half-curtsy the staff seemed to default to when they weren't sure how to behave, and cleared her throat.

"Mrs. Ricci," she said.

"Your father is here. He's waiting in the main sitting room."

---

I smelled his cologne before I reached the doorway.

Cedarwood and something darker underneath — sandalwood, or smoke, or simply the particular scent of my father's displeasure, which I had been cataloguing since childhood and which had its own distinct atmosphere.

Vittorio DeLuca filled a room the way weather filled a room. You felt him before you saw him.

He was standing at the window when I entered, his back to me, hands clasped behind him. He did not turn around immediately.

That was his way — making you wait, so you felt the weight of his attention even when it wasn't directed at you, reminding you of the power differential before a single word had been exchanged.

"Papa," I said.

He turned.

I didn’t step back. I never had.

The slap came before I had finished processing the movement — open-handed, with the full force of a man who had never in his life considered restraint an option.

His palm caught me across the mouth, snapping my head sideways, and I tasted blood immediately, sharp and copper, where my lip had split against my teeth.

He grabbed my wrist before I had fully straightened, his fingers crushing, and pulled me toward him.

"Who asked you?" he hissed quietly.

"Who told you to make that decision? To walk down that aisle, to put yourself in that room, to attach yourself to that family without my authorisation?"

I stared at him.

My lip bleeding, my wrist already bruising, my father standing in front of me with rage contorting his face — and not once,

not in any question he had just asked me, nor the ones I could see gathering behind his eyes, had he mentioned Isabella.

I wiped the blood from the edge of my lip with my thumb as I looked up at him.

“You didn’t come here for this,” I said quietly.

“Tell me what you want.”