Chapter Ten
Isolde
By the time they returned to Northglass, Isolde had spent most of the drive trying not to look at Taddeo's hands.
It was a ridiculous place for her attention to settle after what he'd admitted in the car, but perhaps that was precisely why her mind kept returning there.
His hands had passed bread across Cesare Bellandi's dinner table, lifted a coffee cup while somebody's aunt complained about a nephew's grades, and rested loosely against his knee while the car carried them away from a house full of people who laughed, argued about football, chased children through hallways, and apparently ordered deaths between ordinary family obligations.
Those same hands had killed for them. More than once.
Taddeo hadn't offered a number, and Isolde hadn't asked because there had been something about the quiet certainty of the answer that made further questions feel less like gathering information and more like deliberately opening a door she wasn't certain she wanted to see through.
He hadn't looked proud when he told her.
He hadn't looked ashamed either.
That was more difficult to understand.
The car stopped beneath the Northglass portico a little after eleven.
Moisture still shone across the stone from the earlier rain, and cold air came hard off the Atlantic when Luca opened the rear door.
Isolde stepped out and pulled her coat more tightly around herself while Taddeo followed, exchanging a few quiet words with Luca about the morning before dismissing him.
His voice sounded exactly as it had at dinner—controlled, unhurried, almost ordinary.
Nothing about the man standing beneath the warm portico light suggested he'd spent the drive beside a woman who had just asked how many people he had killed for his family.
Isolde remained near the bottom step instead of immediately going inside.
Taddeo noticed after several seconds. He always noticed.
“Something wrong?” he asked.
She looked at him. “That's a surprisingly broad question.”
His gaze rested on her for a moment before he opened the front door. “Come inside. It's cold.”
There were moments when he used language so naturally that the captivity vanished from it.
Come inside. As though they had arrived home together after dinner.
As though she'd chosen where they'd spent the evening, chosen the car, chosen the house waiting beyond the door, chosen him standing beside her while wind moved through the trees.
Isolde walked past him without answering.
Northglass felt almost unnaturally quiet after Cesare's crowded house.
Lamps along the entrance hall cast warm pools of light across the floor, and somewhere in the eastern wing a clock marked the quarter hour with a muted chime.
Elettra had apparently gone to bed. Security existed mostly beyond the glass now, reduced to the occasional movement of a man crossing the drive or the passing beam of a patrol vehicle between the trees.
Taddeo removed his overcoat as they crossed the hall and headed toward the western side of the house.
Isolde followed.
He glanced back. “You're not going upstairs?”
“Not yet.”
“That sounded ominous.”
“You'll survive.”
“Probably.”
The exchange came too easily.
That bothered her almost as much as the attraction did.
The library was dark except for a lamp left burning near the sofa and the pale spill of exterior light through the windows.
Taddeo crossed to the sideboard, set down his phone and keys, and shrugged out of his suit jacket.
Isolde closed the door behind them without deciding whether she wanted privacy or simply didn't want another member of the household accidentally wandering into whatever conversation she was apparently determined to have at eleven-thirty at night.
Then she saw the gun.
The holster sat fitted close against Taddeo's side beneath the clothes he'd worn throughout dinner, dark metal visible at the grip.
Isolde knew he carried weapons. There were armed men throughout Northglass, and Taddeo moved through the world with the physical awareness of someone who had never expected safety to exist simply because a room looked civilized.
Knowing was still different from seeing it.
The gun had been there at Cesare's table.
Less than two feet from her while Taddeo passed cake.
While his knee touched hers beneath the tablecloth.
While he almost smiled because she told an elderly Bellandi woman that furniture polish did not belong anywhere near an oil painting.
Taddeo followed her attention. “What?”
“Do you always carry that?”
He glanced down. “Usually.”
“At family dinner?”
“Yes.”
“Was tonight dangerous?”
“No.”
“Then why?”
Taddeo laid his jacket over the back of a chair. “Because knowing somewhere should be safe isn't the same as knowing it will stay that way.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It becomes habit.”
There was no drama in the answer. No suggestion that she should be impressed by the danger surrounding him. He unfastened the holster with practiced movements, crossed to a locked drawer in the sideboard, and secured the weapon inside.
Isolde watched his hands again.
He noticed that too.
Of course he did.
“You've been doing that since we left Cesare's.”
She looked up. “Doing what?”
“Looking at my hands.”
Heat touched her face before she could prevent it. “Don't sound pleased with yourself.”
“I don't.”
“You do a little.”
Taddeo leaned one hip against the sideboard. “Why my hands?”
Isolde could have avoided the question. She probably should have. Instead, she slipped off her coat and laid it across the sofa arm. “Because you told me you've killed people, and apparently my brain decided the useful response was to remember you passing potatoes at dinner.”
His expression became unreadable.
“That's an unusual connection.”
“I've had an unusual week.”
“Fair.”
She looked toward the drawer where he'd put the gun. “Does it bother you?”
“Killing people?”
“Yes.”
Taddeo did not answer immediately.
That alone made her pay closer attention.
“It depends.”
“On what?”
“Who. Why. Whether there was another option.” He folded his arms loosely. “Sometimes afterward. Sometimes not as much as it should.”
There were easier answers he could have given. A lie about necessity. Some grim declaration that every man deserved it. A performance of guilt that asked Isolde to absolve him or a performance of cruelty intended to scare her.
Taddeo offered neither.
“You're not going to tell me they were all bad men.”
“No.”
“Were they?”
“Some.”
“And the others?”
His jaw shifted once. “More complicated.”
Isolde absorbed that. “That's not very comforting.”
“I wasn't trying to comfort you.”
“No. You almost never are.”
“Apparently I'm remarkably consistent.”
The callback to the first night should not have made her smile.
It nearly did.
She moved farther into the library and stopped beside the sofa instead. “Cesare's house made all of this worse.”
Taddeo watched her. “How?”
“They were normal.”
“They are normal.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do.”
Isolde folded her arms, trying to find language for something that had bothered her since dinner. “If everybody had been terrifying, this would be easier. If Cesare sat in a dark room petting a cat while people whispered about murder, I could put all of you in one box and be finished.”
Taddeo's mouth moved faintly. “Cesare doesn't like cats.”
“That's the part you took from that?”
“I was trying to help with accuracy.”
“You have a deeply irritating relationship with accuracy.”
“So I've been told.”
She looked toward the windows. “Mauro fixes children's bracelets. Orsino gets scolded by old women. Cesare's aunt apparently commits crimes against paintings. And you sit there with a gun under your jacket while people ask whether you want more pasta.”
“Those things don't contradict each other.”
“I know.” Isolde looked back at him. “That's what bothers me.”
Something shifted in his expression, not defensiveness exactly. Recognition.
He understood the contradiction because he had never considered it one.
Isolde let the silence stretch. “I don't approve of what you do.”
“I know.”
“Stop saying that.”
His brows drew together slightly. “Why?”
“Because you keep using it like a period at the end of an argument. I know. As if the fact that you understand my objection means we don't have to sit with it.”
Taddeo was quiet for a moment. “All right.”
The answer surprised her enough that she almost lost her train of thought.
“That's it?”
“You asked me to stop saying it.”
“I expected more resistance.”
“You get disappointed when I agree with you too?”
“Sometimes. It's disorienting.”
That earned an actual, brief smile.
Isolde looked away because she didn't want to examine the effect it had on his face.
The problem was not that Taddeo had suddenly become safe. He hadn't. He remained the man who'd ordered her taken from Mercer Street, the man whose rules decided whether she crossed the gates, the man who could describe murder without pretending it had transformed him into someone else.
The problem was that knowing those things had not killed the attraction.
She had expected it to.
Instead, the attraction had become more difficult precisely because it now existed beside knowledge rather than fantasy.
Taddeo crossed toward the drinks cabinet. “Do you want something?”
“Water.”
He poured a glass and handed it to her.
Their fingers brushed.
Neither moved immediately.
There was no logical reason the contact should have mattered after the accidental closeness in the kitchen, the brief touch beneath Cesare's table, or the much more significant memory of Taddeo physically pulling her from a car on Mercer Street.
Yet Isolde felt the contact travel farther than it should have.
She took the glass.
Taddeo released it.
His attention stayed on her face.
“You're staring now,” she said.
“Yes.”
At least he wasn't pretending.
Isolde took a drink and set the glass on the table beside her. “Why?”
“You know why.”