I followed her inside.
She moved through the entrance hall the way people moved through places that surprised them — slowly, taking it in, her eyes traveling up the staircase and across the high ceilings and along the dark wood paneling with an expression thatwasn't quite envy and wasn't quite admiration. Something more complicated than either.
"Wow," she said quietly, almost to herself.
"Constantine, who is that?" My mother appeared from the direction of the kitchen, drying her hands on a cloth, and stopped when she saw Cecilia. Her eyes moved from the young woman to me with the particular efficiency of a woman who had spent forty years reading rooms.
"Cecilia Avola." I ran a hand through my hair, which was damp from the rain.
My mother went very still. "Excuse me?"
"Cecilia Avola. There's reason to believe she ran away from Italy and there's trouble brewing." I held my mother's gaze. "She needed somewhere safe."
"Don't tell your father." She pointed at me, her voice dropping.
"Not unless absolutely necessary."
She held my eyes for a moment longer — the look of a woman weighing the situation and arriving at her own conclusions at considerable speed — and then she turned to Cecilia with a smile that was genuine rather than performed. My mother had never held anyone's family against them. She had too much experience with being held responsible for her own.
"Cecilia, I'd like to introduce my mother, Lucia Venosa."
Cecilia stepped forward and there was nothing tentative about it. "Mrs. Venosa, it's a pleasure to meet you. Your home is magnificent." Her voice was warm and her posture was perfect and she looked my mother directly in the eye, and I watched my mother decide something in the space of about three seconds.
"It's very nice to meet you, my dear." She took Cecilia's hand in both of hers briefly, then looked at me. "I'll have lunch brought to your office." She smiled and left the room with thepurposeful quiet of a woman who had decided to give people space to talk.
Cecilia watched her go, then turned to look at me. Something had shifted in her expression — a fraction less guarded, a fraction more present.
"She's not what I expected," she said.
"No," I agreed. "She rarely is."
I gestured toward the hallway. "Follow me."
She sat across from my desk with her hands folded and her back straight and looked like a woman who was holding herself together through sheer force of character. Whatever she was feeling — and I suspected it was considerable — she wasn't going to let it run loose in a room she didn't yet feel safe in.
I respected that more than I could have explained.
Emilio arrived minutes later, slightly breathless, file in hand, and set it in front of me with the expression he wore when the information wasn't good. "Last minute intel," he said. "I'm sorry for the delay."
"Thank you, Emilio." I looked at Cecilia. Her eyes were on the file with the focused dread of someone who suspected what was inside it and was bracing.
"Ms. Avola," I said. "You're in a lot of trouble."
CHAPTER 5
CECELIA
Constantine Venosa's office felt like the inside of a fortress.
Dark wood paneling, floor to ceiling bookshelves, a desk that could have served as a dining table for six. The windows were enormous but the glass was thick, the kind that didn't rattle in wind, and the view they offered of the grounds below felt less like a vista and more like surveillance. Everything in this room had been chosen to communicate the same thing — that the man who occupied it was not temporary, not provisional, not someone who could be moved.
I sat in the chair across from his desk and tried to look like I wasn't cataloguing every exit.
The man Emilio — smaller than Constantine, quieter, with eyes that missed nothing and gave away less — had taken the seat beside me rather than across from me, which I noticed. Beside implied something different than across. It implied management rather than confrontation. I wasn't sure yet whether that was reassuring.
Constantine stood at the window with his back to both of us, looking down at the grounds. He'd barely spoken since we came inside, and the silence wasn't uncomfortable exactly — itwas purposeful, the silence of a man who was thinking rather than performing. I'd grown up around men who used silence as a weapon, who let it stretch and sharpen until the person on the receiving end started filling it with confessions just to make it stop.
This didn't feel like that. It felt like he was genuinely deciding something.
