19. Dante
DANTE
T he silence Gianna leaves behind tastes like ash in my mouth.
She doesn’t answer my question.
Not with words.
Just that look, the one that says she has already started choosing.
I don’t know which way the scale is tipping, and I don’t know if I want to.
After she disappears into the south wing, I stand there too long.
Her nails left marks on my chest.
My shoulder still throbs from where she bit down.
I can’t stop replaying her voice from minutes ago—sharp, furious, ragged with heat—and the way she went silent when it mattered.
That night, I don’t sleep in her bedroom, and perhaps that is why sleep refuses to come.
I lie in bed with my eyes open, watching the thin line of light slip through the curtain and stretch across the floor like a blade waiting to be drawn.
I can’t make myself close them.
Every time I do, I see her face the way it looked when I first brought her back here.
Hollowed.
Haunted.
And underneath it, something older.
That silent war between two loyalties she hasn’t yet named aloud.
By morning, I’m already on the phone.
I don’t use the Trieste line often.
It was one of the old Rossi fallback routes—secure, buried under a different family’s telecom infrastructure, sealed after the Adriatic trade collapsed.
Only a handful of people knew it still existed.
We were never supposed to need it again.
But nothing about this is supposed to be happening.
The man who answers doesn’t say his name.
I don’t offer mine.
That’s how this works.
Our silence is mutual, practiced, and therefore protective.
I give him the Rossi code fragments we extracted from the burner phone—hex-spliced keys, leftover from a legacy shell company on the southern routes.
He says he’ll verify the trace against the old, dead ledger.
Then tells me he’ll respond the usual way.
Four hours.
No trace.
No return.
Just a folded envelope.
Delivered by hand, at a particular location.
Instead of waiting at the estate, I get out.
The staff is tense.
The guards keep looking over their shoulders.
Even the girls have gone quiet.
Before getting into the car, I look to the south wing window and see Arietta watching me.
She doesn’t blink.
She’s starting to read the silence the way we used to read tension in the streets.
The next few hours, I don’t do much else except drive, eat lunch, and then drive some more.
Finally, I stop at an old storefront near the Salerno docks, one we used to move paperwork through back when the Rossi coastal lines still ran clean.
It’s been shuttered since the border agents started sniffing too close to the ferry routes.
In the gutter pipe, sealed in plastic, the envelope waits.
No name.
No marking.
Just three stapled pages and a clipped photograph.
I read them against the bricks, my back to the alley mouth.
The code doesn’t point to Rafaelle Rossi.
The burner was registered to a shell company—long-defunct—embedded in the Rossi food distribution network.
One of the older firms that handled cross-border logistics before the marriage alliance.
Its last operational handler was a man named Silvano D’Alba.
I remember him.
Southern manifest prep.
Clean.
Quiet.
The kind of man who followed orders because they gave him shape.
He vanished two months ago.
Told his girlfriend it was a family emergency.
Left behind a dog-eared note and an apartment key that no one came back to collect.
Silvano was loyal.
Not creative.
Not clever enough to scheme—but loyal enough to be used.
The photo is timestamped forty-eight hours after he disappeared.
Salerno Port.
He’s boarding a private ferry.
But he isn’t alone.
The man beside him is half-turned.
His build is lean, tall, wrong in that subtle way people are when you’ve seen them before, but not in the daylight.
Scar on the right hand.
Knuckles worn.
A shape I almost recognize, but can’t quite place.
I fold the pages.
Slide them into my jacket.
I light a cigarette I won’t smoke, and let the match burn too long before flicking it into the oil-slick gutter.
Something is bleeding through the bones of this city, using our old roads, our dead names, our retired networks.
When I return to the estate, the east gate opens slowly.
One of the newer guards stands at the post.
He’s young.
Tries too hard not to look nervous.
Nods when I pass.
I don’t return it.
Luca is already waiting just inside.
He doesn’t speak until the doors shut behind me.
Then he looks up from the tablet in his hands and says, without preamble, "Valentina’s isolated the access strings. Half of them route to junk—cut protocols. The others connect to a decommissioned Rossi logistics shell. One that stopped reporting activity four years ago."
I hand him the photograph.
He takes it.
Studies the faces.
Doesn’t speak—until he sees the scarred man behind Silvano.
He straightens.
"We’ve seen him," I say. Luca nods. "He used to run interference for Arditi. Small jobs. Background noise."
"And now he’s pulling our old men out of hiding," Luca doesn’t argue. "Silvano didn’t build this. He followed someone in."
He taps the corner of the photo.
"That man’s not just running interference anymore. He’s the link. He’s connecting the old network to the new one."
A beat.
"He’s building Il Sangue Nero from the bones."
I run a hand through my hair and sit down hard on the bench under the west window.
The light here is soft.
It makes everything look gentler than it is.
I stare through it without seeing anything.
The edges of my mind are fraying, and I know it’s not from the enemy.
It’s from the doubt.
"Your brother-in-law had access. Legacy access. He helped broker the marriage. He restored those supply lines, even if only on paper."
I don’t answer right away.
I let the words hang.
"He also had reason to want control," Luca adds. "The old Rossi name never fully recovered after the southern purges. But a new structure—quiet, off-grid, loyal to him?—"
"Would make him untouchable," I finish.
Gianna said nothing.
And now I don’t know if that silence was loyalty or guilt.
Luca folds the pages carefully. "Do we take him alive?"
"If we can."
"And if we can’t?"
I look up. "Then we bury what’s left and follow the trail back. Every time."
We don’t say anything else.
We don’t need to.
This is what we do.
We follow blood until it leads us to the knife.
We don't flinch when it’s our own hands that held it once.
Later that night, I pass by the guesthouse.
The light in the far window is on.
Gianna isn’t inside.
She’s in the courtyard, curled on the bench beneath the olive tree where her mother used to read.
Her hair is unbound.
She doesn’t see me.
Or if she does, she doesn’t look up.
I almost walk past her.
I almost go inside and pretend this is someone else’s problem.
But I don’t.
I stand behind her for a long time, watching the way her shoulders rise and fall.
The night is quiet.
Too quiet.
It doesn’t feel like peace.
It feels like a pause.
Like something waiting to erupt.
When she finally speaks, it’s so soft I almost miss it.
"I thought I knew who he was. I thought I’d always know."
I step closer. "And now?"
She doesn’t turn around. "Now I don’t know if I ever did."
I sit beside her.
She doesn’t flinch.
Doesn’t lean away.
We stare out at the darkness.
She doesn’t ask where I was today.
I don’t offer it.
Her eyes are on the horizon, but I know she isn’t seeing anything.
Not the silhouette of the cypress trees.
Not the stars dimming above the old guesthouse roof.
She’s somewhere else entirely.
Somewhere years ago, before she came back to this house, before I laid claim to what had always been broken.
"I used to think I’d never have to choose," she says, voice low. "That loyalty could exist without fracture."
I don’t speak.
Because I know what she means.
And it’s not about me. Not tonight.
"You look at someone your whole life," she continues, barely above a whisper, "and you think—he’d never hurt me. Not the real kind. Not the kind that makes you bleed slow and silent."
The breeze catches a strand of her hair and lifts it across her cheek.
I reach out before I think about it, pushing it behind her ear.
She doesn’t react.
But she doesn’t pull away either.
I shouldn’t touch her when I’m still angry.
Not at her, never at her.
At myself.
For letting the cracks form.
For failing to seal them before they let the rot in.
"You haven’t told me everything," I murmur.
"No." Her mouth slackens, and her lips tremble. "I suppose I haven’t."
"And I haven’t earned it."
Her head turns.
Just slightly.
I can feel her watching me now.
"No," she says again, softer this time. "But I still want to."