Chapter Nineteen
Taddeo
Taddeo knew Isolde had been crying before she opened the bedroom door, and the knowledge produced an immediate urge to do something despite there being nothing useful he was entitled to do.
He had remained in the corridor for twenty-three minutes while Marco monitored routing data from downstairs, obeying the privacy agreement exactly as they had negotiated it even though every instinct trained into him over fifteen years of Bellandi work insisted that an unknown device communicating with a woman inside a compromised investigation should be monitored completely.
Corwin Dacre was alive. He was almost certainly on the other end of the connection, and Taddeo had deliberately chosen not to know what passed between them because Isolde had drawn a boundary and Taddeo had finally understood that respecting a boundary only when it cost him nothing was simply another form of control.
Understanding the principle had done very little to make standing outside the door easier.
Once, there had been a muffled sound that might have been laughter or a sob, and Taddeo had almost knocked before stopping himself.
Corwin possessed an emotional access Taddeo could neither demand nor compete with, built from a lifetime of shared history rather than proximity, power, or fear.
Isolde could hate what her brother had done, know that he had stolen from the Bellandis and hidden evidence with her without permission, and still hear one private memory from childhood and become, for a moment, the girl who had trusted him before either of them understood how complicated love could become.
Taddeo resented Corwin for that access.
The resentment was irrational.
Knowing that changed nothing.
When the door finally opened, Isolde stood barefoot in the shirt she had put on after Marco's knock, her hair disordered from sleep and from repeatedly pushing her fingers through it.
Her eyes were red, faint tear tracks dried unevenly along her cheeks, and she still held the clean handset tightly enough that the tendons showed along her wrist.
Taddeo's first instinct was to reach for her.
He kept his hands at his sides instead.
“It's him,” she said.
Taddeo watched her face rather than the phone. “You're sure?”
“Yes. He told me something nobody else knows.” Isolde swallowed and leaned one shoulder against the doorframe, exhaustion showing beneath the anger and relief competing across her expression. “He's alive.”
The relief Taddeo felt was more complicated than it should have been.
Corwin being alive meant answers, the possibility of recovering Bellandi money, and a living witness to whatever conspiracy sat beneath the forged records.
It also meant the man who had made Isolde useful as leverage now existed somewhere outside Northglass with every reason to pull her away from it.
“Did he tell you where he is?” Taddeo asked.
Her gaze sharpened immediately. “No.”
“Did he say whether anyone is with him?”
“No.”
“Who helped him disappear?”
“I don't know.”
Taddeo heard the change in her answers by the third question. The first had been information. The others had become a defense.
He stopped.
Isolde noticed. “That was almost impressive.”
“What was?”
“You realizing you were interrogating me before I had to tell you.”
“I was asking questions.”
“You've built an entire career around pretending those aren't the same thing.”
Despite himself, Taddeo almost smiled. “Are you all right?”
Her expression changed, and the hand around the phone loosened slightly.
“I don't know yet. I'm relieved. I'm angry enough that I may not be able to speak to him without wanting to throw something. He admitted he moved the eight point four himself, which I already knew but apparently needed to hear from him anyway.” She looked down at the screen, then added more quietly, “He said he thought he could force whoever was stealing the larger amount to react.”
“That fits the note in the archive.”
“Yes, which unfortunately means his catastrophic decision had an internal logic.”
“Most catastrophic decisions do.”
Isolde glanced at him. “That sounds like experience.”
“It is.”
A silence settled between them before she looked away.
Taddeo knew there was more.
Not because Marco had given him content; Marco had not. The relay remained exactly as promised. But Isolde had a particular stillness when she had reached a conclusion she wasn't ready to share, and he had seen it before she admitted remembering the Harbor Pilot.
He could ask.
He had agreed not to demand.
Those were not the same thing.
“Did he tell you to leave?” Taddeo asked.
Isolde's eyes came back to him.
Her expression gave him the answer before her silence did.
Something unpleasant and primitive settled beneath Taddeo's ribs. “He offered to get you out.”
“That isn't a question.”
“No.”
“Taddeo.”
“What did you tell him?”
Her exhaustion disappeared beneath immediate irritation. “That's private.”
His jaw tightened. “Did you agree?”
“You don't get to do this.”
“Do what?”
“Stand outside the door for twenty minutes proving you understand privacy and then decide that because you guessed part of the conversation, I suddenly owe you the rest.” Isolde stepped completely into the corridor now, the phone lowered beside her.
“That's just violating the same boundary with better manners.”
“This isn't curiosity.” Taddeo kept his voice low because raising it would accomplish nothing except make his fear easier to disguise as authority.
“If Corwin intends to move you using people he refuses to identify, I need to know.
The museum operation was compromised from inside information.
We still haven't identified everyone involved, and your brother has already demonstrated that his judgment becomes questionable when he decides a risk is necessary.”
“And yours doesn't?”
The question landed exactly where she intended.
Isolde stepped closer, anger sharpening her despite the tears still visible on her face.
“Your judgment put me in a car against my will. Your judgment decided Northglass was where I should stay until Corwin appeared. Your judgment took me to the museum with seven men, and people still got inside because somebody around you leaked the route.” She paused, drawing a shaky breath before continuing.
“So don't stand there talking to me as if Corwin is the only man whose decisions have put me in danger.”
Taddeo could have argued scale, intention, intelligence, probability.
He could have explained why the museum security had been sound before betrayal compromised it and why unidentified people arriving at Northglass represented an objectively different threat from Isolde having a private conversation with her brother.
None of that changed the facts she had named.
“I am not saying my decisions haven't endangered you.”
“No. Usually you tell me they were necessary.”
“Some were.”
“So does Corwin.”
The comparison angered him more than it should have.
Taddeo looked toward the windows at the end of the hall and forced one hand to relax at his side.
“Your brother hid evidence inside your workplace without warning you, disappeared after deliberately taking money from us, and now wants to arrange some kind of extraction using people he won't identify.”
“And you want to stop him before you know who those people are.”
“Yes.”
“Because anything outside your control automatically becomes dangerous.”
“Because someone came into your museum with a gun and called you by name.”
“After you had already taken me.”
The words entered him cleanly.
Isolde's anger became quieter before she continued, and Taddeo had learned enough about her to know quiet usually meant the argument mattered more.
“This is what Corwin said about you. I hated him for reducing everything to the kidnapping because it's more complicated now, and I told him that.
You protected me at the museum. You gave me privacy this morning when you hated every second of it.
You take my work seriously, and when I tell you no about something physical, you don't reinterpret it.” Her mouth tightened.
“But none of that changes how this started.
Every time you're afraid and decide the answer is to tighten your grip again, you make his version of you easier to believe.”
Taddeo felt the accusation somewhere deeper than anger.
“What exactly did he say?”
“I am not giving you the conversation.”
“The part about me.”
“You already know the part about you.”
“I want to hear it.”
Isolde studied him, perhaps deciding whether the request itself crossed the boundary. Eventually she said, “He said you're not protecting me. You're using me to get to him.”
Taddeo had no defense because once there had been none.
“Yes.”
She blinked. “Yes?”
“That was true.”
“At the beginning.”
“Yes.”
“And now?”
The answer should have been straightforward.
Isolde mattered to the investigation independently of Corwin now.
Someone had targeted her at the museum. Her expertise had authenticated evidence the Bellandis could not have understood without her, and her safety had become operationally significant for reasons that no longer depended on using her to manipulate her brother.
Every one of those answers was true.
None was what she had asked.
Taddeo looked at her and thought of the library table gradually becoming half hers, her handwriting on his legal pads, Fleetwood Mac playing through speakers he had never cared about before she arrived.
He thought of coming home to find dinner warm because she'd heard when his car would reach the house, of waking with her beside him that morning, and of the irrational relief that had gone through him when she remained in his bed after realizing she was free to cross the hall to her own.
“Now I want you alive,” he said.
Isolde's expression softened and hardened at the same time. “That isn't the whole answer.”
“No.”
She waited.