CHAPTER 57: THE MOLE

CHAPTER 57: THE MOLE
The next morning Isabella woke up with a plan already formed in her head, which was how she knew she hadn't really slept at all.
She lay still for a few minutes, listening to the sounds of the household coming to life around her. She got up, washed her face, and dressed slowly. When she was ready she walked to the window and pulled the curtain back, letting the morning light into the room. She stood there for a moment, one hand resting on the window ledge a few inches from where the device was fixed to the underside of the frame, and she spoke to herself in a quiet but audible voice.
"I need to ask Luca about the east wing security schedule," she said to no one. "He mentioned they were changing the rotation this week."
There was no east wing security schedule change, and Luca had mentioned no such thing. But whoever was listening to the device didn't know that, and if that information reached Dante, he would spend time trying to verify something that didn't exist. Small and simple, but it was a start.
She let the curtain fall and went downstairs for breakfast.
She had decided the night before that the device would stay exactly where it was, because a working device was useful in a way a removed one never could be. Every carefully chosen word she said within range of it was a message she controlled completely. Dante thought he had eyes inside her world, but what he actually had was a channel she could use to feed him whatever she wanted him to believe. The only condition was that she had to be consistent... She couldn't suddenly start performing for the device and then forget about it the next day.
Which meant she also had to find out exactly how much the device could pick up. Audio was certain, but visual was something she still wasn't sure about. She needed to behave as though it could do both until she knew otherwise.
She found the kitchen quieter than usual at that hour, with only two members of the household staff moving between the counters preparing the morning meal. Rosa and Sofia.
Isabella sat at the small table near the window and accepted the tea Rosa brought her without being asked. She watched Sofia from the corner of her eye while appearing to look at nothing in particular. Sofia was perhaps twenty-two, with a careful and quiet manner that most people would read as shyness. She kept her eyes on her work, and her movements were mostly efficient and small… Nothing obviously wrong about any of it.
But when Isabella shifted in her chair and reached for a piece of fruit from the bowl on the table, Sofia's eyes moved to her and then away again, just a little too fast. It was clearly not the glance of someone startled by movement, rather it was the glance of someone who had been watching and needed to stop.
Isabella noted it and said nothing.
She spent the rest of breakfast being exactly the kind of woman she wanted both Sofia and the device to report back. Calm, settled, and slightly bored. A pregnant woman eating fruit and drinking tea in a large house, thoroughly unbothered by the world around her.
After breakfast, she moved through the ground floor of the estate at a slow and purposeful pace, stopping in the rooms she had legitimate reasons to be in and taking careful stock of the staff she encountered in each one. There were eleven people on the household staff not counting the kitchen team, and she had interacted with most of them at least briefly since arriving. She was looking for the same thing she had seen in Sofia… That extra bit of attention, and that half second of watchfulness that didn't belong to someone who was simply doing their job.
She found it in Sofia twice more before noon, and nowhere else.
By the time she went back upstairs she was as certain as she could reasonably be without direct evidence. Sofia was Dante's person inside the house, and the device in the bedroom and Sofia's observations were probably operating together, feeding Dante a combined picture of her daily movements and conversations.
She was sitting with her thoughts when she heard raised voices from somewhere in the lower part of the house. It wasn't exactly the sharp explosion of a fight, it was more of the controlled and pointed exchange of men who were trying to keep their argument from becoming one. She recognized Riccardo's voice. The other two she placed after a moment as Marco Gentile and Paulo Ricci, two of Luca's senior lieutenants who had been with the organization for over a decade.
She moved quietly into the corridor and stood near the top of the stairs where the voices carried up clearly enough.
"I'm not telling you what to think," Riccardo was saying, with that careful and reasonable tone that she recognized as his most dangerous weapon. "I'm telling you what I've seen. She was on the phone for twenty minutes in a corridor at midnight, and she panicked when Luca nearly walked in on her. And when I asked her about it, she shut it down before I could get two words in."
"She's a pregnant woman in a house full of armed men," Marco said, sounding unimpressed. "She doesn't owe you an explanation for a phone call."
"I know that," Riccardo said. "And I'm not asking her to. I'm asking you to think about what she was doing here before Luca brought her back. Two years in Rome under a false name, a whole constructed identity, and we don't actually know who she was talking to during those two years, or what arrangements she may have made."
There was silence. Isabella stood very still at the top of the stairs.
"Are you suggesting that she came here with an agenda," Paulo said slowly.
"I'm suggesting we don't know enough to be sure she didn't," Riccardo said. "That's all I'm saying. I'm not asking anyone to act on it… I'm asking you to keep your eyes open."
Another silence followed, longer this time
"Luca trusts her," Marco said finally.
"Luca is in love with her," Riccardo replied. "That's not the same thing.”
Isabella heard the conversation end with the sound of chairs moving and footsteps dispersing. She went back to the studio and closed the door quietly behind her and stood in the middle of the room with her heart beating fast.
Riccardo was planting doubt with the two men most likely to influence Luca's inner circle if the doubt grew large enough. He wasn't moving recklessly. He was moving carefully, the way someone moved when they had a plan and enough patience to let it develop.
She picked up the brush again and this time she actually painted.
She needed to move faster.