I sit back in the chair and I look at the wall and I think about Gia on our wedding day. The control she had. The way she stood at that altar like she was deciding every second not to bolt, burning through some internal reserve I didn't understand the size of at the time. The specific way she flinched, barely, almost nothing, when her father put his hand on her arm. How she went very still.
I thought it was arrogance. The five years of refusals, the reputation for being untouchable, the woman who came back from Paris like she'd decided the whole world could wait. I thought she was difficult by choice.
She was nineteen years old in a dress at a table next to a man who hit her, and then the table became a war zone, and she survived it, and she's been surviving the version of it that lives in her head ever since.
I set the dossier on top of the stack and square the edges.
I'm not going to say anything to her. Not yet. Maybe not at all, because what would I say, Iread your file, I know about the bruises, I understand now?
Sound pathetic.
She'd hate that.
What I do instead is sit with it for a while, the specific recalibration of understanding someone differently than you understood them before. The weight of it. She didn't come into this marriage afraid because she thought she was too good for it. She came into it afraid because the last one nearly killed her, and she still stood at that altar and said yes because her sister needed her to.
I've known men who'd fall apart under less.
I stand up. It's late, later than I realized, the kind of late that becomes early if you wait long enough, and I haven't slept and I'm not going to sleep in the study. Water first. Then bed. Then tomorrow I'll look at her the same way I looked at her yesterday, like I don't know what I know, because she didn't give me that file and she doesn't owe me her history.
I leave the study, lock it, move down the corridor toward the kitchen. The house is quiet around me, the kind of stillness that belongs to a building when everyone inside it is finally where they're supposed to be.
I push the kitchen door open.
I freeze in my steps.
Because Gia is right inside the kitchen.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
GIA
The guilt is the worst part of this whole stupid arrangement.
Not the fear, not the logistics, not the specific mental gymnastics of living two lives inside the same skin. The guilt is the part that doesn't switch off no matter how hard I try. It sits in the base of my chest like something I swallowed wrong and can't shift, and it's been there since breakfast.
I give up on sleep at half past four.
Rafael is not here tonight and I have the feeling that he’s working and probably sleeping in his study.
The house is completely still when I come downstairs. I move through the corridor in bare feet, robe pulled over my nightdress, and I don't turn on the main lights, just the smallone above the range that Marco leaves on overnight. It gives the kitchen a low amber glow. Warm. Private.
I fill the kettle, set it on the hob and lean against the counter while I wait.
This is the reality of what I'm doing. Not the version my father frames as duty, not the version I frame as survival, the actual version, stripped of justification. I am inside this man's house. I sleep next to him and I smile at his staff and I am building a map of everything he has so I can hand it to the person who wants to use it against him.
And Rafael Caruso, who walked out of a bathroom rather than touch me without permission, who told me to be careful in his kitchen like it mattered to him whether I was safe, who took a stack of linens from an old man's arms without making it a thing, he doesn't know any of it.
If he finds out, I'm dead. I'm not being dramatic. That's not fear talking, that's just the arithmetic of this world and I have known it since I was old enough to understand what my father did for a living. There is no version of Rafael discovering a spy in his bed that ends with a conversation. Men like him don't negotiate with betrayal.
So forget the bathroom,forget what he looked like in the shower. Forget the feel of his chest under your hands. Forget all of it, because the alternative is a shallow grave in the grounds of a very beautiful estate and Laura grows up without you.
The kettle starts to whistle. I make the tea, wrap both hands around the mug, and sit at the island.
The nightdress under my robe is thin, a slip of ivory silk. It's not designed for anyone's benefit but mine, just fabric and lace at the hem and straps too narrow to be practical.
The kitchen is warm from the residual heat of the range. The robe is suddenly too much. Everyone is asleep, the house completely quiet, so I shrug it off my shoulders and let it drop onto the stool beside me.
The cool air hits my skin and I close my eyes and just breathe for a moment.
