Chapter Seventeen
Isolde
By midmorning, Isolde had decided that Northglass was becoming dangerous in a way the gates and armed guards had never managed.
Those things were obvious. She could look through a window and see the cameras, notice the patrol vehicle crossing the lower drive, or reach the edge of the property and find exactly where Taddeo's authority became physical.
She knew how to resent a locked gate. She knew how to argue with a man who decided that danger gave him the right to determine where she went and who stood beside her while she did it.
What she had considerably less practice handling was sitting at one end of the library table beneath a spill of late-morning sunlight while Taddeo worked at the other, each of them occupied with separate pieces of the same investigation, and realizing that for almost an hour neither of them had needed to speak.
The arrangement had happened without discussion.
Isolde had arrived after breakfast carrying three fraudulent harbor records and the notes she'd made the previous evening, discovered Taddeo already installed with his laptop, two phones, Mauro Corsi's newly surrendered account files, and enough coffee to suggest sleep had once again become optional, and decided she wasn't surrendering the best worktable in the house merely because he had reached it first. Taddeo had glanced at the material beneath her arm, moved his coffee far enough away from the historical documents to satisfy the conservation standards she had apparently trained into him, and returned to a conversation about missing freight manifests.
There had been no request for permission and no suggestion that she needed one.
By eleven, Isolde had spread documents across nearly half the table while Taddeo had gradually shifted his own folders to accommodate her.
That shouldn't have mattered.
It did.
She bent closer to a high-resolution scan of a municipal approval and traced a pencil along the edge of a signature block without touching the image itself.
The investigation had accumulated enough evidence now to support a pattern without providing the clean answer everyone wanted.
Mauro's companies appeared throughout the financial chain, and Peter Ansel's access to Keystone Heritage gave him opportunity to manipulate the preservation paperwork, but too many of the suspicious links had begun looking almost deliberately convenient.
Lelio had arrived with precisely the right information to reinforce Mauro and Serevin involvement.
Silas Venn's research pointed toward the same outside freight structures.
Every new discovery seemed to narrow the story instead of complicating it, and after a week spent examining documents designed to look authentic, Isolde had developed an instinctive dislike of anything that became more convincing the harder somebody looked.
She enlarged the signature block.
Compression noise haloed the letters.
“Taddeo.”
He continued typing. “What?”
“I need the earlier version of the Halstead certificate.”
His fingers stopped. “Which earlier version?”
“The one Orsino sent yesterday morning. Before the city archive produced the high-resolution file.”
Taddeo found the folder without asking why and slid the printed copy across the center of the table. Isolde pulled it closer, compared the images, and frowned.
“What?” he asked.
“The signature was inserted after the document was scanned.”
Taddeo closed his laptop halfway. “You can tell that from compression?”
“I can tell the pixels around the signature behave differently from the rest of the page.
I wouldn't testify to the exact editing sequence from this alone, but whoever assembled this wasn't simply copying an entire old record and changing the parcel number. Some elements were being added individually.”
“So more deliberate work.”
“Yes, which makes the mistakes stranger.” Isolde tapped her pencil against the margin. “Someone capable of compositing a signature this cleanly should have known enough to remove the copied physical damage.”
“Unless the person editing the files wasn't the person who understood the history.”
She looked up.
Taddeo had already reached for his notebook.
“That,” she said, “is actually useful.”
His eyebrows lifted. “I'm touched.”
“Don't get used to it.”
“I wouldn't dare.”
His attention returned to the page, but the corner of his mouth shifted.
Isolde tried not to smile back.
Music began playing through the built-in library speakers a few minutes later, low strings and piano filling the room with a tasteful, melancholy arrangement that sounded as though it had been selected by an expensive hotel trying to convince guests that silence was a luxury service.
Isolde looked toward the ceiling.
Taddeo did not.
“What is this?”
“Music.”
“I recognized the general concept.”
“Then we're making progress.”
She stared at him across the table. “Did you select it?”
“I told the system to play something quiet.”
“This isn't quiet. It's aggressively tasteful.”
Taddeo's eyes finally lifted. “I don't think music can be aggressively tasteful.”
“This can. It sounds like a private medical office where they don't tell you what anything costs until after you've signed paperwork.”
For several seconds he listened as though giving the accusation genuine consideration. “Change it.”
“How?”
“Voice command.”
Isolde leaned back slowly. “You should not have given me that information.”
“I realized that immediately.”
“Play Fleetwood Mac.”
The library obeyed.
Taddeo looked up before the opening bars had finished.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“I am working.”
“So am I.”
“This is distracting.”
“You were listening to instrumental music written for wealthy divorces.”
“That isn't a genre.”
“It should be.”
His expression suggested he was considering overriding her choice on principle. Instead, he returned to his laptop.
Isolde smiled and resumed examining the certificate.
He lasted through the first song without comment. During the second, she noticed his fingers tapping almost imperceptibly against the side of his coffee mug.
She stopped reading.
Taddeo felt her attention almost immediately. “What?”
“You know this song.”
“I've heard it.”
“You're tapping along.”
“I have rhythm.”
The defense was so unexpected that Isolde laughed before she could contain it.
Not the restrained amusement he occasionally pulled from her with some dry remark, but a real laugh that bent her forward over the table and forced her to put down the pencil because suddenly the image of Taddeo Malfatti being defensive about his knowledge of popular music was considerably funnier than it deserved to be.
When she finally looked up, he was no longer working.
Taddeo watched her from the other side of the table with an expression she could not immediately place.
The laughter faded.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“That was obviously something.”
His gaze stayed on her face. “You laugh more now.”
The simple observation made her aware of too many things at once: Northglass, the first morning she'd eaten breakfast with Elettra, the storm, the museum attack, the hours she now spent working beside a man she'd once considered only an obstacle between herself and freedom.
“I was busy being kidnapped the first few days.”
“I remember.”
“I'd hope so. It seems like the sort of event both people should retain.”
The humor disappeared from his face. “I haven't forgotten.”
Isolde believed him.
That was part of the problem.
She looked back at the certificate. “You can stop staring.”
“I can.”
“You aren't.”
“No.”
Heat moved into her face.
Taddeo noticed immediately, and something warmer entered his expression.
Isolde pointed her pencil at him. “Don't.”
“I didn't say anything.”
“You were thinking something.”
“I usually am.”
“I know exactly what you're thinking.”
His voice lowered slightly. “Do you?”
The shift was subtle, but her body recognized it before her mind caught up.
Isolde returned to the page with exaggerated concentration. “We were discussing forged municipal records.”
“You changed the subject.”
“That appears to have been poor judgment.”
“Probably.”
He let her retreat.
That was becoming one of the things she found most difficult about him.
He could push when she invited it, irritate her deliberately, and make a quiet sentence sound indecent without using a single explicit word, but the moment she stepped away, he stopped following.
The restraint had been easier to interpret when she believed it was temporary.
Now she understood he was making an effort not to let intimacy become another entitlement created by captivity.
Knowing that did very little to make her want him less.
By late afternoon they had established two more connections between fraudulent preservation records and Mauro-linked companies without finding anything strong enough to turn suspicion into proof.
Orsino called twice. Marco came through once with an update on the museum attackers, none of whom had yet produced a useful explanation for who hired them.
Through all of it, Isolde worked beside Taddeo with a professional ease that had formed faster than she trusted.
When she told him an interpretation went beyond the physical evidence, he backed the financial investigators away from it.
When he asked a question she couldn't answer, she said so without feeling pressured to manufacture certainty simply because the Bellandis wanted it.
That respect was becoming its own kind of intimacy.
Physical desire she understood.
The pleasure of being listened to was more dangerous.
Shortly before seven, Taddeo closed his laptop.
“We're done.”
Isolde remained bent over a comparison scan. “You may be.”
“Your eyes are red.”
“They're attached to me. I'll manage them.”
“You've been looking through magnification for most of the day.”
“And you've been staring at financial records for longer.”
“I don't have to enlarge mine until the pixels become abstract art.”