Chapter Eighteen
Isolde
For several seconds after Marco read the message through Taddeo’s bedroom door, Isolde heard nothing except the rush of blood in her ears and the name Corwin had used for her since childhood repeating somewhere inside her with enough force to erase almost everything else.
Izzy. It’s me. Don’t trust them. She pushed herself upright too quickly and nearly caught one foot in the sheet before finding the floor, while beside her Taddeo was already moving, the loose warmth of sleep disappearing beneath the hard concentration she had watched settle over him in the museum.
He reached for his trousers while Isolde dragged on the sleep pants she'd abandoned several hours earlier, and the absurd normalcy of getting dressed beside him after waking in his bed collided painfully with the knowledge that her brother, whom she had spent days imagining injured, imprisoned, or dead, might be somewhere in Crownport trying to reach her.
“Open the door,” she said, shoving her hair away from her face with one hand.
Taddeo glanced toward her long enough to make sure she was dressed before crossing the room. “Marco is outside.”
“I gathered that from the part where he knocked.”
His mouth tightened faintly, but he opened the door.
Marco stood several feet back from the threshold holding a dark phone that did not belong to her.
His expression was carefully neutral, which Isolde had learned generally meant he was trying not to stand visibly inside an argument between her and Taddeo.
She held out her hand before he could begin explaining.
“Show me.”
Marco's eyes moved automatically toward Taddeo.
The glance lasted less than a second.
It was enough.
“Don't look at him,” Isolde said. “It's my brother.”
Marco's attention returned to her. “Your original phone is still downstairs. This is the security flag.”
He handed her the device.
The message looked almost insultingly ordinary against the pale screen.
Izzy. It's me. Don't trust them.
Isolde read it twice. Then a third time, because apparently repetition could make four words become proof if she wanted badly enough.
Her fingers began to shake.
Taddeo saw. He did not reach for her.
“How long ago?” he asked Marco.
“Seven minutes. Routing only gives us Crownport metro so far. Could be bounced.”
“Any second message?”
“No.”
Isolde lowered the phone. “I want to answer.”
Taddeo's expression changed before he spoke, and she knew immediately she was not going to like the answer.
“Not on your original device.”
“No.”
“Isolde.”
“No.” She gave Marco's phone back because gripping it harder was not going to produce Corwin. “You do not get to make me wait while your security people decide whether my brother is sufficiently convenient to talk to.”
“This isn't about convenience.”
“It never is.”
Taddeo reached for the clean shirt hanging over the chair and pulled it on.
“Your original phone is still isolated because we don't know how Corwin contacted it, whether he's using a compromised service, or whether anyone is tracing him.
I'm not reconnecting it directly to anything around this estate until we know more.”
“He sent a text.”
“A text can become something else in the next message.”
“He called me Izzy.” The words came out sharper than she intended. “Nobody outside my family calls me that.”
Something softened briefly in Taddeo's eyes. “Then he'll be able to prove who he is.”
“By talking to me.”
“Yes.”
Isolde blinked.
The agreement arrived unexpectedly enough to interrupt the argument she had already prepared.
Taddeo looked toward Marco. “Clean handset.”
“We have one downstairs.”
“Bring it up.”
Marco nodded, but Isolde had learned enough about Bellandi security to hear the part nobody had yet said.
“What does clean mean?”
Taddeo looked at her.
“That face means I am going to hate the answer.”
Marco cleared his throat. “It routes through our secure relay so we can analyze origin data.”
“And read the conversation.”
Neither man answered quickly enough.
Isolde laughed without humor. “Absolutely not.”
“We need technical visibility,” Taddeo said.
“You can have technical visibility. You do not get my conversation with my brother.”
“If he gives you information connected to the museum attack—”
“Then I can tell you.”
“If he gives you a location?”
“I can decide whether I tell you that too.”
Taddeo's jaw tightened.
There it was.
The real boundary.
For one exhausting second, Isolde considered simply screaming at him. It might have felt good. It would also have changed nothing, and she was tired of spending energy proving that anger existed when Taddeo already knew perfectly well why she was angry.
She drew a breath instead. “You understood this last night.”
His expression changed immediately.
“You understood that wanting access to me didn't mean you got it. You understood that if something mattered because I chose to give it, taking it would destroy the meaning of the choice.” She looked at the half-buttoned shirt, the bed behind him, the room where only a few hours earlier he had made her say yes clearly because he refused to interpret desire on her behalf.
“Why is information suddenly different?”
“Because information can get you killed.”
“And there will always be something that can get me killed in your life.” Isolde folded her arms tightly.
“If danger automatically gives you authority, then I never get any privacy because you can always find another threat.
Someone's stealing. Someone's betraying Cesare.
Somebody shoots at the museum. Corwin disappears. There's always going to be a reason.”
Taddeo started to answer and stopped.
That silence mattered.
Isolde held his gaze. “So when doesn't danger override me?”
He looked away first.
The movement was small, one hand passing over the back of his neck while he considered the question with visible irritation. Taddeo did not enjoy reaching conclusions that restricted his own authority.
Eventually he said, “What do you want?”
“Privacy.”
“That isn't technical enough.”
“Then I'll make it technical. You can see timestamps, routing, cellular region, service information, whatever you need around the message without reading the actual words. No screen capture, no content archive, no recording something now so you can decide later that you're entitled to open it.”
“And links?”
“I don't open them.”
“Attachments?”
“Blocked.”
“If he gives you coordinates?”
“I decide whether I tell you.”
Taddeo went still.
Isolde waited.
Marco had become intensely interested in the hallway.
For several seconds Taddeo looked at her as if the decision itself might become safer if he examined it long enough. Then he turned toward Marco.
“Configure it metadata only. No content mirror, no archived message bodies, no screen capture. Block links and attachments.”
Marco's eyebrows rose slightly. “If he sends a location in plain text?”
Taddeo's eyes returned to Isolde.
She refused to look away.
“Then we don't see it unless she tells us.”
The concession cost him. She could see that clearly.
Marco nodded. “Give me ten minutes.”
When he left, Isolde sat on the edge of the bed because the adrenaline that had held her upright was beginning to loosen. Taddeo remained near the door, shirt still buttoned incorrectly near the middle from dressing too quickly.
“That was almost reasonable,” she said.
“Don't make it pleasant.”
Despite everything, a tired trace of amusement moved through her. “You probably already regret it.”
“I dislike it intensely.”
“That isn't the same thing.”
“No.” Taddeo looked toward the closed door. “I would rather know everything Corwin says. I would rather know where he is before you finish reading the sentence.”
“I know.”
His gaze shifted back to her. “But if I respect your choices only when they produce the answer I want, then I'm not actually respecting them.”
Isolde stared at him for a moment.
He looked annoyed by the statement.
That made her believe it more.
“Thank you.”
Taddeo's jaw shifted once. “You're welcome.”
Marco returned eleven minutes later with a clean handset and explained the arrangement more carefully than Isolde needed, probably because Taddeo had made the rules specific enough that nobody wanted to be responsible for accidentally breaking them.
The relay would collect connection data but not message content.
Links and attachments were disabled. When Isolde ended the session, she could erase the conversation from the handset herself.
“Who gets the metadata?” she asked.
“Me and Taddeo.”
“No one else?”
Taddeo answered. “If routing identifies an immediate security threat, whoever needs the information gets what they need to stop it. They don't get the conversation.”
It was not the unconditional answer she wanted.
It was at least honest.
“Fine.”
Marco left.
Taddeo did not.
Isolde looked toward him. “You too.”
His expression became very controlled.
“You asked for privacy.”
“Yes.”
“I know what the word means.”
“Then now would be an excellent time to demonstrate it.”
For a moment she thought he might argue simply because every instinct he possessed was probably screaming that leaving an unknown communication unobserved was professionally insane. Instead he nodded toward the phone.
“Twenty minutes. Then I check the relay from outside to make sure the connection remains clean.”
“Outside being the important part.”
“Yes.”
He left.
The door closed softly behind him.
Isolde sat alone on the edge of his bed with the clean handset in both hands, suddenly aware of the room in all the wrong ways.
Her sweater lay over the chair. Taddeo's watch sat beside the lamp.
One side of the bed remained rumpled where he had slept with his arm around her, and pale morning light reached across a floor inside an estate she still could not leave without his permission.
On the screen, Corwin's message remained unchanged.
Izzy. It's me. Don't trust them.
Her fingers trembled when she typed.
Prove it.
The response arrived less than a minute later.