All Chapters of The Devil's Possession : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

130 Chapters

Chapter Eleven: The Woman In Red

ElenaShe was beautiful.That was the first thing I thought when Sofia Moretti walked into the dining room, which was deeply unhelpful and something I immediately resented.She was tall and dark-haired and wore red the way women wear it in films, like the colour had been invented specifically for her. She moved like someone who had never once in her life wondered if she was allowed to be somewhere.I found out who she was from the way Alessandro stood when she entered.He did not stand for anyone. I had observed four days of meetings and dinners and corridor encounters, and he moved through all of it like gravity did not apply to him. He sat when he wanted. He rose when it suited him.He stood for her.I looked down at my plate and stayed there for the rest of the meal.The morning after, I was in the corridor outside the east wing when she found me.I had been on my way to the morning meeting. Eight o'clock. Alessandro's instruction. I had decided the night before that I would comply

Chapter Twelve: What The Dark Knows

AlessandroI had three rules about the pills.One, Matteo kept them. Not me. If I kept them, I would take them too often, and if I took them too often, I would need more of them, and needing things was a luxury I had not permitted myself since I was fourteen years old.Two, I asked for them once. Never twice. A man who asked twice was a man who was afraid, and I had decided a long time ago that whatever I was, I was not afraid.Three, nobody knew.Not Matteo. Not Lucas. Not the doctor who prescribed them under a name that was not mine through a clinic that did not officially exist.The pills were small and white and they did one thing. They kept the dark from becoming something with teeth.I had not needed them in eleven days.On the twelfth day, the power went out.It started at half past ten.The storm had been building since morning. I had watched it from my office window, the sky going darker by degrees, the kind of slow accumulation that looks manageable until it is not. By ten t

Chapter Thirteen: Pages

ElenaI had fourteen pages in the notebook.Not all of them made sense. Some were lists. Observations. Things I noticed about the house and the rhythms of it, about the way the staff moved differently depending on which room Alessandro was in. On page six I had written a single line and underlined it twice.He is afraid of something.I had written it three days ago, before the blackout.I knew what it was now.I had not meant to find his study. The dark had come down all at once, the kind of absolute black that erases everything, and I had stood in the east wing corridor with my heart going too fast, running my hand along the wall until I found the shelf where I had noticed, two days ago, a box of spare candles.I lit one from the fireplace embers. And then I walked, because standing still in the dark was something I had not been able to do since I was nine years old.His door was open.I saw the candlelight reach inside before I did, and I looked in, and he was standing behind the de

Chapter Fourteen: Behind Closed Doors

AlessandroSofia left on a Tuesday.She did not say goodbye. She sent Matteo a message at six in the morning, had her three cases loaded before eight, and was gone before anyone who mattered had come downstairs. A clean departure. Efficient. Sofia had always understood the value of an exit.I was in my study when she left. I heard the cars from the window. I did not go down.Her last words to me had been through a closed door the previous night, sharp and precise and designed to land."You humiliated me in my own corridor over a ward."I had not answered."She is nobody, Alessandro. She came from nothing and she will go back to nothing. And you stood in that corridor and chose her."I had still not answered.A long pause. Then her heels on the stone, moving away.I sat at my desk and listened to her go and felt nothing in particular. Which was, I supposed, its own kind of answer.Matteo arrived at eight with coffee and his morning expression, which was the expression of a man who had

Chapter Fifteen: Small Things

ElenaSofia left on a Tuesday.I knew because the house changed. Not loudly. Not all at once. But the way a room changes when a window you did not know was open finally closes, the draught gone, the air settling.I did not ask where she had gone. I heard the cars at eight in the morning from the east wing window, and I watched them until they disappeared through the gate, and then I sat on the edge of the bed and breathed.I did not go down for breakfast that morning. I was not summoned, so I stayed where I was and ate the tray Agatha brought without speaking much."How long will she be gone?" I asked eventually.Agatha arranged the cups on the tray with her usual precision. "The signora comes and goes as she pleases," she said. Which was not an answer. But her mouth had the shape of someone trying not to smile.I looked down at my tea.The days after Sofia left had a different quality.They were not easier, exactly. Alessandro was still Alessandro. Cold, distant, unreachable in every

Chapter Sixteen: The Man Who Smiled

AlessandroHis name was Corso.Mid-level Ivano enforcer. Two priors for aggravated assault, one for weapons possession, none that resulted in meaningful time because the Ivano family had lawyers the same way other men had bodyguards. He had been picked up at the south perimeter at half past eight, attempting to cross through a section of the wall where the ivy had grown thick enough to look like a handhold.One of my newer guards had brought him down. The older ones would have been quieter about it.I stood in the basement room where they had put him and looked at the damage. Split lip. One eye going purple. His jacket was torn at the shoulder. He was sitting in the chair with his wrists zip-tied behind him and his ankles bound to the legs, and he was still, unbelievably, attempting a smile."Corso," I said.He looked at me. The smile widened slightly, which took effort given the state of his mouth."Don Alessandro," he said. "Big house."Matteo stood to my left. Two guards stood behi

Chapter Seventeen: What His Eyes Said

ElenaI did not sleep.I lay in the too-wide bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about the man in the entrance hall. The blood on his face. The guards holding both his arms. Matteo's voice going sharp and low.None of that was what stayed with me.What stayed was the smile.He had been bleeding from the mouth and his hands were bound and he had looked across the entrance hall, found my face in the dining room doorway, and smiled.Not at anyone else. At me. Like he had been looking for me and was satisfied with what he found.I pulled the blanket up and stared at the ceiling until the light came.Agatha brought breakfast at seven.She set the tray down and took one look at my face."You saw him," she said."Who is he?" I asked.She pressed her lips together. "I cannot say.""Agatha.""Elena." She said my name gently, with a weight behind it. "There are things in this house that are not mine to explain.""He looked at me," I said. "He was smiling. At me. Specifically. People do no

Chapter Eighteen: The Timeline

AlessandroI found out about the knife at seven in the morning.Matteo came to my study before I had finished my first coffee, which was never a good sign. He had his neutral face on. The one he wore when the news was either very bad or very complicated or both."There is a small matter," he said.I set down my cup. "Small matters do not come to me before eight."He hesitated. One beat. "The girl spoke to me last night."I looked at him."She came to find me after dinner. She said Agatha had found something." He paused. "A knife. In the private kitchen off the east corridor. Behind the second cabinet. Wrapped in cloth."I said nothing."There was blood on it," Matteo said. "Old. Dried. But visible."The private kitchen was mine. Not the main kitchen where the staff worked. A small room off the east corridor that I used when I did not want company, which was most evenings. It connected directly to my study through a side passage. The staff cleaned it twice a week. Nobody else went in.

Chapter Nineteen: The Bloodstained Knife

ElenaWhat Agatha showed me was worse than anything I was expecting. A knife. She had found it behind the second cabinet in the private kitchen off the east corridor, the small one that connected to his study, the one the staff cleaned on Tuesdays and Fridays but otherwise left alone.She had been putting away cleaning cloths when her hand found the bundle at the back of the shelf. She had unwrapped it before she understood what it was.The blade was long. Dark handle. And along one edge, dried and brown and unmistakable, a stain that had soaked into the metal the way blood does when it has been there long enough.She held it out to me in the doorway of my room with her hands shaking slightly."I did not know what to do," she whispered.I looked at the knife.I thought about the man named Corso with the split lip and the smile. I thought about the circled name in a file I had never seen. I thought about all the things in this house that lived behind closed doors and moved through corr

Chapter Twenty: I Always Bring Back What Is Mine

AlessandroThe alarm went off at twelve seventeen.Not a sound alarm. A silent one. A pressure sensor on the east wing window that Matteo had installed three days ago without telling the girl, without telling the guards, without telling anyone except me.My phone vibrated once on the desk.I was already on my feet before the second vibration.I did not run. Running in a house like mine meant panic, and panic spread. I moved fast and quiet down the corridor, two guards falling in behind me without a word because they knew my pace and what it meant.The east wing door was open.I went through it.Her room was at the end. The door was ajar. The lamp was off. Through the window the curtain moved in the cold air.The window was open.I crossed the room in four steps and looked out.The east wall dropped to the garden below. A rope, knotted and dark, hung from the window ledge down to the courtyard stones. At the base of the wall, two figures. Moving fast toward the south gate.One of them

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