Chapter 44

Cecelia's POV

After Lina left, I stood in the bathroom for a long time.

I reached out and slowly turned on the faucet at the sink. Water gushed out, rushing over my hands. That cold sensation traveled from my fingertips all the way to my wrist. I involuntarily shivered.

The girl in the mirror had red, swollen eyes, an abnormally red nose tip, and undried tear droplets still hanging on her eyelashes. She looked especially pitiful, except the audience had already left.

I pulled out a tissue and wiped the tear tracks from my face clean.

The tissue was crumpled into a ball and thrown into the trash can, hitting the metal wall with a light sound.

I looked at those amber-colored eyes in the mirror. They were slowly shedding that carefully calibrated layer of fragility from just now, returning to their original calm and detached appearance.

Lina's reaction just now was within my expectations and also matched the character assessment report about her that Dmitri had provided.

She scored almost zero in the emotional assessment section, seeming to have a natural immunity to any form of showing weakness.

In her eyes, all people were divided into only two categories: one that could be killed, and another that temporarily couldn't be killed.

I suppose I probably belong to the latter.

My confrontation with Lina on the field appeared on the surface to be an impulsive exposure of my identity, but in reality, the exposure itself was also within Dmitri's contingency plans.

The exposure wasn't aimed at Lina, but at Luca.

"Lina won't believe your show of weakness, but Luca will. Luca has a soft spot for anyone with a coerced background."

Dmitri had calculated this point about Luca too, though based on what I've observed so far, I actually had some doubts about whether Luca would develop such compassion.

Although when I was in Italy, I had heard some things about Luca—about how he sheltered those defectors expelled by families, how he arranged places for people with nowhere to go.

Some said this was his weakness; others said it was his method of winning people's hearts.

But clearly, regardless of which it was, Dmitri planned to exploit it.

According to Dmitri's reasoning, after learning of my identity, Luca shouldn't directly put me in the "can be killed" column like Lina did.

He would first observe, first assess, first try to find a third solution from this situation.

So my current position wasn't too bad: in Lina's eyes, I was an enemy she had exposed, temporarily posing no threat; in Luca's eyes, I was a variable that needed to be handled cautiously.

I needed to make myself look more like the latter than the former during this window period when their information was asymmetric.

I put my phone back in my pocket and reorganized my hair in front of the mirror.

The fishtail braid had come loose in a few strands during the earlier fight. I tucked the stray hairs behind my ears with my fingertips, then dabbed some cold water to pat around my eyes, making the redness look lighter.

Then I took a deep breath, my lips curved slightly upward, and I resumed being that sweet and well-behaved Cecelia, stepping out of the bathroom.

The dismissal bell had rung long ago. The hallway was already empty, with only a few boys holding basketballs running toward the gymnasium, their sneakers scraping sharp echoes on the floor.

Sunlight streamed through the glass window at the end of the hallway, stretching my shadow very long.

My pace was neither hurried nor slow, no different from any ordinary student who had just finished regular coursework and was preparing to go home.

As I approached the school gate, my peripheral vision caught a figure.

The person leaned against a pillar by the bulletin board, wearing a dark blue hoodie with an ear piercing in the right ear.

He was the person who had been walking back and forth in the cafeteria before, also the young heir of the Verona family, Alessandro.

I knew who he was, but he didn't know who I was.

Dmitri only told Verona's side "we have someone at the school who will cooperate with you when necessary," but didn't say that person was me.

This feeling was very strange.

Standing before you is an ally who should be coordinating with you. You each harbor unspeakable secrets, yet can never converse, never acknowledge each other, and can't even exchange a knowing glance when passing by.

I felt a bit regretful that I couldn't play out such a scene. I withdrew my peripheral vision, no longer looking at him, and continued walking toward the school gate.

Back at the apartment, I pushed open the door, changed into slippers in the entrance hall, placed my backpack on the chair, walked to the vanity and turned on that small night light.

The warm orange glow spread across the desk surface, illuminating the wood grain warmly.

I pulled open the bottom drawer, lightly pressed on the edge of the bottom board with my finger, opened that hidden compartment. The black flip phone was still in its original place.

I took the phone out and flipped it over in my palm. The screen was pitch black, no missed calls, no new messages.

Dmitri's orders hadn't come yet. This was what truly made me uneasy.

If he wasn't sending orders, either he had discovered something unusual and was reassessing the situation, or he was deliberately remaining silent, waiting for me to make my own judgment.

Dmitri never urged. He only waited—waited for prey to walk to the center of the trap on its own, waited for chess pieces to complete their final move themselves, waited for an ending he had long foreseen to naturally occur. This was more spine-chilling than him giving direct orders.

I put the phone back in the compartment, closed the drawer, walked to the window and lifted a corner of the curtain.

Below by the streetlight was a man in a dark coat leaning against a car reading a newspaper. He had been standing there for three days, never concealing his presence.

He was Luca's man, like a living watchtower, wrapping the entire apartment building in the Moretti family's security layer.

If Raven wanted to make a move over the weekend, they would either have to break through from the inside or find a loophole in this security system.

Dmitri sent me as the internal breakthrough response, and according to his habits, he should also have a backup plan. It just depended on whether he would send orders to notify me.

I let the curtain fall and sat on the edge of the bed, starting to rehearse in my mind what I needed to do tonight.

Lina would definitely tell Luca everything tonight. There was no doubt about this.

And after Luca heard it all, what would he do?

He would first hold his position and wait for Dmitri's next order to be intercepted.

Luca's intelligence team should have already decrypted part of Raven's encrypted communications. Dmitri might not be unaware of this.

He was just gambling, gambling like me on the width of the window period, gambling that we could make our move in those few seconds before Luca closed the net.

So I needed to make Luca believe before that that I wasn't willing, that I needed to repeat to Luca what I had said to Lina in the bathroom.

Tonight, just tonight. I couldn't wait any longer.