CHAPTER 56: EYES EVERYWHERE

CHAPTER 56: EYES EVERYWHERE
Isabella read the message three times before she put the phone face down on the bed.
"Pregnancy looks really good on you. Hope you enjoyed shopping?"
She sat completely still for a moment, keeping her breathing even and her face completely blank in case anyone was watching. And that was the whole point now, wasn't it? Someone was watching. Someone had been watching close enough to see her at that boutique today, close enough to report back to Dante in real time, close enough to know exactly what she looked like in a maternity dress standing next to Luca Moretti while a frightened attendant wrapped a two hundred thousand dollar necklace with shaking hands.
She picked up the phone again and deleted the message, then stood up from the bed and walked to the window as casually as she could manage. Outside, the estate grounds were quiet. Guards moved in their usual rotation, unhurried and professional. The garden was still… Nothing looked wrong. Nothing looked different. And that was exactly what frightened her, because whoever Dante had placed near her was good enough to be invisible inside a house full of trained men.
She turned away from the window and began to think.
The message confirmed two things. First, Dante had eyes on her that were close enough to be inside the estate or positioned somewhere with a direct line of sight to her movements. Second, he wanted her to know it. He had sent the message not just as information but as a reminder and a signal. He was telling her without saying it directly that she was never truly alone, that whatever warmth she had allowed herself to feel in that boutique today, whatever softness had crept into her chest when Luca spent two hundred thousand dollars without blinking because someone had spoken to her rudely, none of it was private. He had seen all of it. And he was watching to see what she would do next.
Isabella walked to her bathroom and turned on the shower, then sat on the edge of the tub and allowed herself thirty seconds of genuine panic before she shut it down and started working the problem properly.
The spy had to be someone with regular access to her movements. That narrowed it considerably. The full household staff had been in place before she arrived, chosen by Luca's people, and she doubted that Dante had managed to plant someone inside the estate itself in the short time since she had agreed to return with Luca. Which meant the eyes were probably external… Someone positioned outside with enough visibility to track her comings and goings, or someone she interacted with regularly outside the estate walls.
She thought about the shopping trip, from the route they had taken to the boutique itself. The attendants, the other customers, the man who held the door, the valet who had been standing outside when they arrived.
Then she thought about Sofia.
Sofia was one of the younger maids, assigned primarily to the east wing where Isabella's suite was located. She had been quiet in a way that read as either genuine professionalism or very careful performance. Isabella had noticed her twice in places she didn't quite need to be, once near the sitting room when Isabella had been on the phone with Dante, and once in the corridor outside the bedroom very early in the morning, folding clothes that had already been folded. Small things. The kind of things you only noticed if you were already looking.
Isabella carefully put Sofia away as a priority and turned her attention to the larger problem. She needed to sweep the suite without making it obvious that she was sweeping the suite, and she needed to do it in a way that looked like ordinary movement, ordinary living, because if Dante's person reported back that Isabella had suddenly started examining the walls and checking behind furniture, the information would reach Dante within the hour and whatever advantage she had in knowing about the surveillance would be gone immediately.
She turned off the shower, dried her face with a towel, and went back into the bedroom. She moved around the room slowly, picking up clothes from the chair and refolding them, straightening items on the dresser, adjusting the curtains on the far window. She kept her movements natural and unhurried as she checked the obvious places first, because the obvious was where amateurs started. Nothing under the bed. Nothing behind the mirror. Nothing inside the lamp base.
She was pulling the curtain back from the window nearest the garden when her fingers found it.
It was small enough to sit comfortably between her thumb and index finger, a flat circular device no larger than a coat button, attached to the underside of the window ledge where the frame met the wall. She would have missed it entirely if she hadn't been running her fingers along the wood with deliberate attention. She stood looking at it for a moment without touching it, taking in the angle of the window, the direct line of sight from that position to most of the bedroom, the way anyone who entered or left the room would move within range of it.
Audio. Possibly visual if the lens was small enough, which it likely was given the size of the device.
She let the curtain fall back into place and stepped away from the window, then she went to the mirror and pretended to fix her hair, staring at her own reflection while she thought about what to do next.
She could remove it. That was the instinctive response and it was also the wrong one. Removing it would tell Dante immediately that she had found it, and the next device he planted would be better hidden. More importantly it would tell him that she was actively looking, which would tell him that she knew more than he thought she did, which would make him dangerous in a way he currently was not.
She left the device exactly where it was and sat down on the bed, opened her phone, and began scrolling through her contacts with the bored expression of a woman with nothing particular to do. But her mind was moving very fast.
She had a surveillance device in her bedroom and a likely spy in the household. She had Dante watching her close enough to comment on her shopping trips, and she had Riccardo, who she was increasingly convinced had his own separate agenda that was not entirely about protecting Luca.
As if her thoughts had summoned him, she heard voices downstairs, and one of them was Riccardo's. She got up and moved to the doorway, listening. The voices drifted up from the entrance hall below, Riccardo talking to one of the guards about something routine, his tone steady and ordinary. Too steady, she thought. Too carefully ordinary for a man who had left the estate several hours ago without telling anyone where he was going and had only now returned.
She had noticed his absence during dinner because Luca had noticed it and said nothing, which was itself notable. Luca noticed everything about his household. The fact that he had not commented on Riccardo's absence either meant he hadn't registered it, which was unlikely, or he had registered it and chosen not to address it yet, which told her something about how Luca managed information he wasn't sure about.
She heard Riccardo's footsteps crossing the hall below and then climbing the stairs. She moved back into her room and sat at the small desk near the window, picking up a book and opening it somewhere in the middle. When Riccardo appeared in the doorway a moment later, she was reading…or appearing to read. She looked up at him with an expression of mild irritation at being interrupted.
"Where is Luca?" Riccardo asked. He kept his voice neutral but she could hear the tension running underneath it like a wire pulled too tight.
"In his office I think," she said, and returned her eyes to the book.
Riccardo stood in the doorway for a moment, and she could feel his attention moving around the room, over her, and past her. He looked like a man looking for something specific and trying not to show it.
"Good trip today?" he asked.
She turned a page. "Productive."
"I heard about the boutique," he said. "Luca spent a lot."
"He tends to," she replied without looking up.
Another pause. Riccardo was watching her in a way she could feel on the side of her face. She kept her eyes on the page. Whatever he had gone to do this afternoon, whatever meeting or conversation or arrangement he had been part of, he had come back here looking to read her, and definitely looking to check whether anything had changed. She gave him nothing to work with however and soon turned another page.
"Well," he finally said, in the flat and unimpressed voice he always used when she refused to engage with him, "goodnight then."
"Goodnight, Riccardo," she said pleasantly.
His footsteps moved away down the corridor.
Isabella closed the book and put it down on the desk and sat there in the quiet of the room. She looked at the curtain near the window, at the place where the small device was sitting in the dark beneath the window ledge, listening to everything.
She thought about what she had just said. Productive. Good trip. She had given Dante, through his device, an image of a woman who was calm, settled, and unalarmed. She had given Riccardo nothing to carry back to whoever he was carrying things to. And she had found what needed to be found without anyone knowing she had found it.
She got up from the desk and went to the door, looking down the corridor in the direction of Luca's office. The light was on under the door. She could hear the low sound of him talking on the phone, one of the endless calls that ran through his evenings like a second heartbeat.
She went back into her room, changed into her nightclothes, and got into bed. She reached over and turned off the lamp. In the dark she lay with her eyes open, one hand resting on her stomach where the baby moved occasionally in the slow rhythms of a child who knew nothing yet about the world waiting for him.
The device was behind the curtain, ten feet away, listening.
She closed her eyes and kept her breathing steady and even.
She would deal with all of it. But she would deal with it carefully and she would deal with it on her own terms. That was the only way she had ever survived anything.