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His eyelids don’t want to stay closed at first, but I press them until they do. Then I pull the sheet back up to his chin.

“Rest, Dino,” I tell him quietly. “I’ve got it from here. Ana and the baby will want for nothing. I can promise you that.”

I turn to Luca.

“Move Seraphina,” I order him, my mind racing as I work through my thoughts. “Tonight. Not the tertiary house. Pick something Dino didn’t know about. Pick something none of them knew about. New caretakers. New route. New comms. I want it small—you, me, one driver, one nurse. That’s it. Nobody outside those four people knows where she is. Not the crew that moves her. Not the guy who cleans the property. Nobody. If it’s not one of us four, they don’t get to know.”

“Understood.” He hesitates for a moment. “And where does Dr. Sokolov fit in all this?”

That’s the question I have been not asking myself since Luca called.

Because the whole point—the whole point—of the setup with Katerina has been that she gets a video every three days so she knows Seraphina is alive.

She’s already going to be furious at me this morning, for reasons that have nothing to do with any of this.

If I move Seraphina and if the next scheduled video doesn’t come, she is going to conclude that Seraphina is dead.

If I tell her, I am handing her a piece of intelligence about my operation that she absolutely should not have.

If Russo’s people get to her, which will happen over my dead body, she becomes a leverage point that has actual information behind her.

But if I don’t tell her, she thinks I have started hurting Seraphina, and everything I have been trying to build with her ends.

There’s no good answer.

There’s only the wrong one and the worse one.

I already know which one that is.

“She doesn’t need to know any of this,” I tell Luca. “None of it. Not Russo, not Dino, not the move. Nothing.”

Luca doesn’t say anything for a second, his green eyes skeptical. He sighs. “The next video isn’t going to happen on schedule, Nico.”

I’m aware of this. “I know.”

Luca raises an eyebrow, as if surprised by my flat effect. “She’s going to notice.”

There’s a spike of irritation at Luca’s continued words, but I stamp it down. “I know that too.”

He doesn’t push, but then again he never does when I get like this. That’s what happens when you grow up in the same house with somebody.

I pull my coat on and walk out of the morgue. I don’t look back at Dino, because if I look back at Dino I’m going to feel something I don’t have room for today.

The estate is quiet when I get back.

I take the west entrance because it doesn’t cut through the main hall, and I don’t want to run into anyone.

I want to get to my office, shut the door, and sit with what I know for an hour before I have to be a person again.

The west corridor is the long way around, but it drops me at the back of the house without cutting through the main hall, and right now I’ll take any detour I can get.

The problem with the west corridor is that it passes the library. I glance in as I walk by. I don’t mean to.

I do it automatically, the same way I always check a room I’m walking past, and I stop dead in the corridor.

Katerina’s in there.

She’s just inside the doorway, standing at one of the tall windows. Her back is to me and I can only see one of her hands from this angle.