Chapter Sixteen #3
“I didn't say it was.”
“You were thinking too loudly.”
Taddeo almost smiled as he uncovered the plate and sat. The food was ordinary—roasted chicken, potatoes, vegetables—and the fact that she had thought about when he would arrive affected him considerably more than it should have.
Isolde pushed a glass of water toward him. “How guilty is Mauro?”
“Very.”
Her eyebrows rose.
“Possibly not of the twenty-four point eight.”
“That sounds inconvenient.”
“He admitted skimming about nine hundred thousand last year.”
Isolde stared at him. “And that's not the theft you're worried about.”
“No.”
“I would like it entered into the record that living with you has severely damaged my sense of financial scale.”
“Mauro is a criminal.”
“So are you.”
“Yes.”
Her mouth curved faintly. “You do make certain conversations difficult.”
Taddeo ate several bites before continuing. “Mauro's ordinary theft stays inside Bellandi structures. The larger diversion was designed to move money into a system Cesare couldn't see or control.”
“So one kind of stealing is tolerated because it doesn't challenge the hierarchy.”
“Yes.”
“That may be the clearest explanation of organized crime you've given me.”
“It isn't complicated.”
“It is if you come from a workplace where taking a stapler home produces an email from administration.”
He laughed before he could stop himself.
Isolde's expression softened.
Taddeo looked back at his plate.
“Lelio came by,” he said.
The softness disappeared. “Why?”
“He brought information connecting one of Mauro's people to Serevin gambling interests and reinforced the freight connections.”
“Helpful.”
“Very.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly. “You don't sound pleased.”
“I wasn't.”
“Because he knew too much?”
“Because he knew exactly enough.” Taddeo set down the fork. “Mauro gives me reasons his companies could have been used to frame him. Fifteen minutes later, Lelio appears with information making Mauro look worse. Then Silas traces the same companies and finds another Serevin connection.”
Isolde considered that. “Any of those things could still be true.”
“Yes.”
“But together they feel tidy.”
Taddeo looked at her.
That was the word.
“Tidy,” he repeated.
She nodded. “You've spent the last week teaching me your records don't behave properly when they're too clean. Maybe that applies to suspects too.”
Something in his chest shifted at the easy we implicit in the observation, the way her conservation logic had become part of how they worked through his world without either of them needing to announce it.
Taddeo picked up his glass. “You're becoming inconveniently useful.”
“I've been useful the entire time. You're becoming better at noticing.”
“That's probably true.”
She looked briefly surprised by the concession.
Taddeo finished eating while she returned to the document beside her.
The silence that followed was not empty, and that was becoming its own problem.
Northglass had been his home for years without ever requiring anyone else to be awake when he returned, without warm food waiting because somebody had listened for his car, and without another person's papers spreading gradually across his kitchen because she had stopped treating every room as territory belonging entirely to him.
He knew better than to call that normal.
Normal implied permanence.
He was not entitled to imagine permanence while the gates still opened because he allowed them to.
When he stood, Isolde looked toward the plate. “You ate everything.”
“I was hungry.”
“You are terrible at admitting gratitude.”
Taddeo carried the plate toward the sink. “Thank you.”
She blinked.
He glanced back. “You wanted gratitude.”
“I wasn't prepared for compliance.”
“That appears to happen to you often.”
Isolde smiled as she gathered her document and slid from the stool. When she passed him, her fingers touched the inside of his wrist, light enough that she could have pretended it was accidental if either of them had wanted the protection of pretending.
Neither did.
“Good night, Taddeo.”
He turned his hand just enough that his fingers brushed hers before she moved away. “Good night.”
Isolde left the kitchen and disappeared toward the stairs.
Taddeo remained beside the sink for a few seconds longer than the empty plate required.
Then his phone vibrated in his pocket.
Marco.
The first message contained Mauro's internal account files.
The second contained the name of the reviewer Lelio had promised to identify.
Peter Ansel.
Taddeo stared at it.
The same man Mauro had already named.
The same man with the Serevin-connected brother-in-law.
The same man whose signature appeared on documents Isolde believed someone else had manufactured.
Every new piece continued pointing in the same direction.
Mauro.
Ansel.
Serevin.
Too clean.
Taddeo looked toward the dark hallway where Isolde had disappeared, hearing her words again.
Maybe suspects behaved like records.
Sometimes the version designed to look most convincing was the one somebody had spent the most effort constructing.