All Chapters of The Devil Who Bought Me : Chapter 91 - Chapter 96

By eleven that night, the house had gone quiet. Lorenzo was still upstairs, buried in calls. Natalie sat alone at the kitchen table with Anita's file open in front of her and a cup of tea she had forgotten to drink. The first thing she found was her name. Not hers. Irina. Irina Volkov before she became Irina Roman. Natalie read slowly. Forty-one when she died. Breast cancer. Officially. A clean death. Almost too clean. She went back to the page. The diagnosis had come six weeks after Irina found Matteo. Natalie stopped. Six weeks. She circled the date. Then she kept reading. --- Irina had been a teacher when she met Viktor. No money. No powerful family. No reason to belong anywhere near the Roman empire. She was twenty-eight. They met at a gallery opening. Viktor had been there for reasons she never knew. He charmed her, married her within a year, and slowly changed the shape of her life. She stopped teaching six years into the marriage. But she never gave up the

The letter took forty minutes to read. Not because it was long , two pages, front and back, the handwriting small and unhurried , but because certain things needed to be set down and picked back up again. Certain sentences required the particular attention that you gave to things written by people who knew they were running out of time and had chosen to spend what remained of it on you specifically. When they finished Lorenzo had taken the letter and folded it back exactly as Irina had folded it and placed it inside the notebook and closed the cover. He had done it with a care that struck Natalie as one of the most quietly reverent things she had ever watched another person do. Neither of them spoke for a while after. The morning had moved on around them, the light in the kitchen shifting from early grey into something warmer, the sounds of the house staff beginning their day filtering through from other rooms. Ordinary life, proceeding as it did. "She named names," Lorenzo said

The tracker was now in the back of a delivery van. Lorenzo's people had arranged it within two hours, a nondescript vehicle making a genuine route across the city, moving at the pace of ordinary commerce, stopping at the intervals that ordinary deliveries stopped at. If her aunt was monitoring its signal, what she would see was a tracker travelling through the city in a pattern that suggested someone was running errands. Going somewhere unremarkable. Living an unremarkable life. Natalie watched the van's progress on the screen in the study for a few minutes and then stopped watching because there were more important things and because there was a particular satisfaction in it that she didn't entirely trust herself to sit with for too long. Satisfaction like that had a way of making you careless. She was reviewing supplier contracts at her desk when the call came in. Not Isabella. Not her aunt. Not any of the numbers she had grown accustomed to monitoring. Isolde. She stared at