Pia slips her fingers into mine without a word.
I don’t pull away.
We walk deeper into the ruins together — two survivors picking through the bones of a kingdom that devoured its own —
And I know, with the sick certainty of a man about to bleed truth:
Nothing in this house is going to let us leave clean.
Giovanni’s Office: Where Lies Were Written
Giovanni’s office waits at the back of the house like a bad memory that never learned how to die.
We move down the side corridor past walls stained with smoke and time. My hand glides along the paneling out of habit, counting grooves I used to trace when I was small and trying not to exist. The air back here is colder. Heavier. The rest of the mansion rotted loudly. This part learned how to rot in silence.
His library door is gone — ripped clean off, maybe the night everything burned. Inside, the shelves are mostly hollow. A few ruined books lean sideways, spines warped by water and ash. Once, this room smelled like leather and ink and my father’s cologne. Now it stinks of plaster and mold and the aftertaste of ghosts.
At the far end, the office door is still there.Heavy oak.Thick enough to stop bullets.
Still scarred near the handle where someone tried to kick it in and failed.
“The lock used to be unbreakable,” I say.
Pia studies the gouges. “Looks like someone disagreed.”
“They disagreed with the man behind it.” My fingers curl around the knob.
The lock turns without resistance.
Figures.
Even his defenses gave up once he was gone.
I push inside.
The room hits like a body blow.
The desk lies on its side, gutted and overturned. Drawers torn open, their contents spilled and abandoned. Papers have melted into the floor, ink bled out into shapeless bruises. The chair that once supported his arrogance split down the middle, with stuffing bursting out like organs. The liquor cabinet stands open and empty — bottles gone, glass frame left standing like bare ribs.
It looks like a crime scene after the body’s been dragged away.
“Someone really hated him,” Pia murmurs.
I step over a shattered decanter. Glass sighs under my boot. “He earned it.”
And still my chest tightens.
Because for all the destruction, the room hasn’t released him. The layout. The light. The way dust floats into the same shapes it always did when I was seventeen and hiding under that desk, listening to him decide who lived and who bled.
“Someone tried to erase the King,” Pia says.
I breathe out something almost like a laugh. “He never believed he could be.”
She crosses to the shelves, fingers brushing warped spines and empty spaces. One sags in the middle from weight it no longer carries.
“He had a safe in the wall,” I tell her quietly. “He thought no one knew.”
Her head turns. “You did.”
