Chapter 6
The question left Ermanno Santoro’s mouth low and quiet, the way a blade leaves a sheath – no
lourish, no warning. He stood in the center of the sitting room on the second floor of the estate,
ind the two soldiers flanking the doorway behind him had already gone still, their breathing
hallow, their eyes fixed on the middle distance. They had served the Don long enough to
ecognize the particular quality of silence that preceded destruction. This was it. The air in the
oom had changed the way air changes before a storm cell touches down – a pressure drop, a
vrongness in the atmosphere that made the skin prickle and the chest tighten.
Catarina Ferro stood near the window, the late-afternoon light catching the edge of her
collarbone, her fingers rising to touch the hollow of her throat with two delicate fingertips. The
jesture looked like vulnerability. It was not. She bit her lip, her dark eyes wide, the portrait of
vounded innocence rendered in oil and candlelight.
Ermanno, I didn’t do anything.” Her voice trembled with precisely the right frequency – not too
nuch, not too little. Coached. Calibrated. “Your wife summoned me herself. She said she was
joing to arrange for you to take me as your second woman to bring me into the household
roperly, to give me a place-”
–
Something moved behind Ermanno’s eyes. Not anger. Not yet. Something older and colder,
something that lived in the basement of his chest where he kept the things he could not afford
o feel during business hours. A dread unlike anything he had ever known clawed up through
im, hooking into the soft tissue beneath his ribs and pulling.
Gioia… she knows?”
The words came out fractured. The soldiers by the door exchanged the briefest glance a
flicker, nothing more – because they had never heard the Don’s voice break on a name before.
1/2
11:26 C
After I Learned His Love Was a Lie, I Disappeared
Not during the Ferrante sit-down when three men died. Not during the dockworkers’ strike when
he Feds had wiretaps on every phone in the territory. Not once.
Gioia… where is Gioia?”
He did not wait for Katarina to answer. He was already moving, already tearing through the
esidence like a man possessed, his footsteps cracking against the obsidian marble of the
allway with the force of a man who had forgotten he owned the house and remembered only
hat he had lost something inside it. The master bedroom – empty. Her vanity – cleared. The
Iressing room where her clothes had hung in neat, color-ordered rows – bare hangers swaying
ike the ribs of something gutted. The private sitting room where she read in the evenings, curled
nto the leather chair by the fire with a blanket over her knees – the chair was there, the blanket
vas there, but the impression of her body was already fading from the cushion, and the book
she had been reading was gone from the side table.
–
The figure that haunted his every waking thought was nowhere to be found.
He searched the east wing. The west wing. The kitchen, where the household staff pressed
hemselves against the counters as he passed, their faces blank with the particular blankness
of people who have already heard the news and are waiting to see who will be punished for it. He
searched the garden room, the wine cellar, the chapel alcove where Gioia lit candles on Sundays
or a child she had never been able to conceive. The candles were cold. The kneeler was pushed
›ack. The small icon of the Madonna that Gioia kept on the altar shelf was gone – taken, not
allen.
