“She’s sharper than you think,” he said as he turned to go.“And she knows when you’re lying.”
He left, the study door closing behind him.For a moment, the house held its breath again, that eerie, expectant silence returning like an old friend.
I sat the coin on the desk beside the photograph, both relics of the same war—a war I hadn’t started but would damn well finish.My secure line buzzed.Not the burner.Not the house.The line only three people knew about.I didn’t look at the screen.I answered.“Di Fiore.”
For a moment, only the soft hum of an open connection.Then a voice, distorted but cultured, slid through the wire like a knife wrapped in velvet.
“You were always your father’s best student.”
Every muscle in my back drew tight.“Say your name.”
A low chuckle, intimate as a whisper in a confessional.“You already know it.”
“I wondered when you would see it.We thought the crane on the balcony might be too poetic for your… practical sensibilities.”
My gaze flicked to the window on instinct.“You watch from a distance because you know what happens up close.”
“What happens up close,” the voice said, tone cooling, “is that the past takes what it’s owed.”
The line went dead.No taunt.No demand.
I sat the phone down without gentleness and left the study; the corridor swallowed me.Our bedroom stood open an inch.Mia slept on her side, the sheet tangled around her hips, my shirt loose on her frame.Beside her palm, an origami crane waited.
I crossed to it and lifted it carefully.The folds were precise—someone’s hands had known exactly where to press.Ink bled up through the whiteness in thin columns: numbers.At the bottom edge, half-hidden by a wing, a stamp smudged into a familiar crest—an old bank’s seal, one my father favored when he needed accounts the law would never learn the names of.
A memory bit down.
I was young, sent to fetch a ledger from a safe.My father’s pen moved like a slow blade across white fields while a man with winter in his hair watched from the other side of the desk.They argued without raising their voices.Gallo liked cranes.He folded them from cocktail napkins when he was bored, left them on the bar like stray thoughts.I turned the paper in my hands.The seal matched a set of offshore ledgers we’d burned after the funeral.Or thought we had.
This wasn’t random.It wasn’t theater.It was a map.
I set the crane down and turned.Mia hadn’t woken fully; she hovered on the thin edge of it, the way she had since the warehouse—one noise away from defense, one breath away from surrender.
“Enrico?”A question more than a name.
“I’m here.”
Her hand found mine without opening her eyes, fingers cool, pulse quick beneath the skin.I was suddenly, savagely grateful for the simple fact of it.For the way her grip tightened like a vow she didn’t need an altar for.
“You left the balcony door unlocked.”
Her lashes flickered.“I know.”
I leaned in and kissed the corner of her mouth, a brief, anchoring press, and then drew the sheet up over her shoulder.
“Did you see the crane?Do you know what it means?”
“Yes.”
“And Gallo?”
“His handwriting all over it.”Mia reached for the crane.I stopped her hand with two fingers, light but firm.“Let me photograph this first.I want the numbers before the paper turns to pulp.”
She nodded and settled back.I took out my phone and captured the stamps.When I finished, I slid the crane into a thin evidence sleeve I kept for habits like these and placed it in the drawer.
“Marco will have a team on the ledgers by sunrise.We’ll run the numbers against old holdings.Go back to sleep, my love.”
In the hallway, I texted Marco a photograph of the crane’s stamp and the narrow band of numbers beneath it.
