Chapter 25 The Studio

Chapter 25 The Studio
The studio looked the same as it always had.

Worktable. Fabric rolls. The dress form by the window with whatever was pinned to it last… a half-finished piece she had started before the gala and never returned to, still waiting with the patience of inanimate things. Ivy's portfolio on the corner of the worktable where she had left it the day she found the note.

She sat down across from it.

Marco took the chair on the other side and pulled the laptop toward him and they worked — her on the design trail, him on the financial trail — the way they had learned to work across months of operating in rooms where the information mattered and the speed of finding it mattered more.

The designs being sold under Elena Russo were not copies.

She understood this within four minutes of pulling up the submission records. Not imitations. Not someone studying her aesthetic and approximating it. The actual designs — original construction notes in her handwriting, original measurements, the source files she had built across three years of late nights in this studio while the rest of the house slept.

Original files.

Which meant whoever had been selling them did not need to replicate her work.

They had it.

She sat with that for a moment.

Then she looked at the worktable. At Ivy's portfolio sitting on the corner exactly where she had left it. And something assembled itself in her chest that was not grief… grief had had months to soften into something she could carry… but the recalibration of understanding that the person who had the most access to her work, her files, her studio, her everything, was Ivy.

Ivy.

Who had a key to this room.

Who had sat at this worktable more times than she could count.

Who had handwriting in the margins of those portfolios that said this neckline needs to be braver and you are so much better than you let them see.

She looked at Marco.

He had already stopped typing.

He was looking at the financial records on the screen with the face of a man who had arrived at the same place from a different direction and was waiting to see if she had got there too.

She had.

Ivy built Elena Russo three years ago.

Not the Caruso platform. Not the trafficking front. Something completely separate — a clean account, a network presence, a submission infrastructure built from scratch by a woman who understood that Gia's work was exceptional and that the Lombardi family would never allow Gia to own it publicly under her own name.

She had built it as a safety net.

Three years ago. Quietly. Without asking permission. Without telling Gia — because telling Gia would have meant asking Gia to trust something she was not ready to trust yet, which was the idea that her work was worth protecting before she had decided to protect it herself.

So Ivy decided for her.

She set up the account. Made the first submissions to the underground network. Established the network presence. Made Elena Russo real enough to be believed and untraceable enough to be safe.

And then she died.

And Elena Russo kept running.

Because Ivy had built it to keep running. She had set the account up so that even if something happened to her — if something happens to me — Elena Russo would persist.

Eighteen months ago someone in the underground network found the dormant account. Recognised the quality of the work sitting in it. Began submitting pieces — believing Elena Russo was a ghost designer who had gone quiet, a talent who had stopped producing, someone whose existing work deserved to be seen.

Not theft.

Not conspiracy.

Someone who loved the work and wanted it seen.

The same reason Ivy had built the account in the first place.

Gia sat with Ivy's portfolio in her lap.

Not looking at it. Just holding it — the weight of it, the familiar worn edges of it, the handwriting in the margins she knew by heart.

You are so much better than you let them see.

Ivy had known three years ago. She had known before Gia knew herself. She had seen the work and understood what it was and built it a door into the world before Gia had decided the world was somewhere she was allowed to go.

She had not died for nothing.

She had built something that survived her. Elena Russo had survived Ivy's death and Caruso's operation and a federal investigation and a family imploding and a fireplace full of ash at three in the morning when Gia believed she was destroying the last evidence of her own escape.

She had not been destroying it.

Ivy had already saved it.

The designs Gia burned in that fireplace were copies she had made for the burning. The originals were already in Elena Russo's account. Out there. Waiting.

Ivy had known she might run. Had known she might panic. Had made sure that even the worst version of the night — Gia alone at three in the morning feeding paper into a fire — could not touch the real work.

She sat at the worktable and felt it move through her — not grief, not the sharp weight of loss she had been carrying since a copper dress on a ballroom floor — but something quieter and more permanent.

Gratitude. The kind that comes from understanding you were loved more carefully than you knew.

Marco did not speak.

He sat on the other side of the worktable and let her have it — the understanding, the weight of it, the full shape of what Ivy had done and what it meant. He did not offer comfort that had not been asked for. Did not reach across the worktable. Did not fill the silence with anything.

He was just there.

The way he had been there in this doorway once — standing in the entrance to this room while she turned pages in Ivy's portfolio and pressed her thumb against a line of handwriting and kept her face completely still. Understanding that some pain did not need fixing.

Just someone to witness it.

She looked up at him eventually.

He looked back.

That was all.

It was enough.

Her phone rang.

Not a message. A call. From a number she did not recognise — a Los Angeles area code, the kind of number that could belong to anyone.

She answered.

"I've been managing the Elena Russo submissions," a woman said. "For about eighteen months. I found the account after the original contact went quiet and I —" A breath. "The work was too good to just leave there." A pause. "I didn't know who created it. I didn't know it was a real person's name. I found your contact through the network after the FBI case and I think whoever Elena Russo really is — they should know what's happened."

"What's happened?" Gia said.

"They made an offer. A fashion house. Milan." A pause. The slight intake of breath of someone delivering something they understand is significant. "For the collection. The entire collection. The creative director has been following the submissions for eight months and they want to meet." Another pause. "They are flying to Los Angeles next week."

Gia looked at Marco across the worktable.

He was already looking at her.

She thought about a fireplace at three in the morning. Designs feeding into the flames one by one. Six months of dreaming about her real life gone in forty minutes.

She thought about Ivy building a door in the wall while Gia was burning everything she could reach.

She thought about twenty-one days that had burned down and rebuilt themselves into something she had not planned and could not have imagined.

Then she smiled.

Not the weaponised one. Not the performance she had worn for galas and family breakfasts and twenty-four years of a house that asked her to be less than she was. Not the thing she put on like armour.

The real one.

The one Ivy always said was worth seeing.

"Tell them," she said, "that Elena Russo will be there."