Chapter 77
Chapter 77
The mansion is sleepless, and so are its inheritors. The clock in the entrance hall tolls two, but none of the Romanos are in bed. Instead, they converge on the library—a crypt for the family’s paper trail, a labyrinth of ledgers, manifestos, and photo albums arranged with obsessive, near-paranoid precision.
Dante, even in chaos, clings to the process. He starts at the main desk, spreading the documents from the informant on a fresh sheet of oilcloth. Every few minutes, he cross-references a date or a name, darting between the central ledger and a battered laptop that has seen the inside of more safehouses than most people see in a lifetime. Occasionally he mumbles, “Doesn’t add up,” then scribbles something on a legal pad with a pen that matches his tie.
Bell works the shelves. She moves like she’s searching for a weapon, fingers flicking over spines, then dragging whole tomes down and laying them open on the table. Old photographs slip free—sepia and Polaroid, generations of Romanos lined up in the same sunlit courtyard or candlelit dining room, always with the same sense of a world on the verge of explosion. She lines up the photos in a single row, eyes darting between her own face and those of the men she’s been told were her ancestors.
At first, the similarities are subtle: an angle of the jaw, a flicker in the gaze. But the deeper she digs, the less deniable the pattern. Giovanni’s eyes, not her supposed father’s. Giovanni’s sly, crooked smile, down to the crinkle at one corner. By the time she hits the bottom of the pile, she has to swallow down something sharp and bitter.
Luca is nowhere to be seen at first, but then he appears, rolling a battered office chair behind him with one foot, a mug of espresso in hand. “Old housekeeper says Giovanni used to take phone calls in the yellow salon at three in the morning. Always locked the door. Says he once had Bell’s mother in there for hours, screaming and then laughing.” He sips, then winks at Bell. “The more things change, huh?”
Bell ignores him, but only outwardly. “What else?”
“Apparently Giovanni kept all his real records in the study, but never left them in the safe.” Luca grins, revealing the wolf. “I asked her why, and she said he didn’t trust safes—they were too honest. He hid things where nobody would look.”
Dante stands, tension coiled in his neck. “So we look where nobody would.”
The three migrate to the study. It’s a museum piece: walls paneled in walnut, every shelf loaded with medals, awards, and the kind of trophies that don’t show up in the record books. The main painting—a stormy, oil-on-canvas portrait of Giovanni himself—glares down from above the fireplace.
Luca studies it, then snaps his fingers. “In the old movies, the painting always hides the good stuff.”
Bell rolls her eyes, but Dante nods and says, “Try it.”
Luca steps onto the hearth, grabs the frame, and swings it out. Behind, instead of the expected safe or wall cavity, there’s a shallow niche lined with red velvet. In the niche: a wooden cigar box, battered and unmarked.
Luca hands it down to Bell, who cradles it in her palms before opening the lid. Inside: a bundle of letters, neatly tied with black silk, and beneath them, a single envelope—heavy, official, and stamped with an ancient hospital’s letterhead.
Bell unties the bundle. The first letter is written in a looping, old-fashioned script. She reads aloud:
My Dearest,
You are the secret that will outlast all my crimes. When this city burns, let them know you were the only thing I ever did right. I will die before letting them take you, or her, from me.
G.
The rest are more of the same—love, regret, the language of a man who only allowed himself to be human when nobody else could see. By the last letter, Bell’s hands are shaking so badly that she can barely hold the page.
She opens the hospital envelope. Inside is a birth certificate, the ink faded but still legible. It lists the child—her, Isabella—as “Mother: \[her mother’s name\],” “Father: \[blank\].” But scrawled in the corner, in the same script as the letters, are two words: “You know.”
Luca runs a hand through his hair, then says, “No offense, but this is starting to get Biblical.”
Dante is silent. His face is a mask, but his hands betray him; they’re clenched so tightly that his knuckles shine like ivory.
Bell drops the documents onto the desk, where they land next to the last photo from the library. She picks it up, and for a second, she stops breathing.
It’s her mother, eight months pregnant, standing beside Giovanni in the garden. He’s not just near her—he’s behind her, arms wrapped around her waist, hand splayed across the curve of her belly. Both are smiling, unguarded, as if the photographer had caught them in a joke meant for two.
On the back, in the same pen, a date: exactly nine months before Bell’s birthday.
Bell traces the outline of Giovanni’s hand, then sets the photo down. She is careful, deliberate, but inside her head, every wall is crumbling.
Dante, finally, speaks. “We know.”
Luca shrugs. “We always did, I think. Just didn’t want to admit it.”
They stand in the ruined calm of the study, the old man’s secrets stacked in front of them, and realize that for the first time in a generation, there is nobody left to lie to.
Outside, the rain intensifies, drumming a war rhythm against the glass.