Chapter Twenty
Isolde
The first indication that something had changed at Northglass came shortly after lunch, when Isolde pushed through the western terrace doors and nobody stopped her.
She had not been trying to escape, and the distinction mattered enough that she repeated it to herself as cold coastal air moved across her face and the heavy doors settled quietly behind her.
A week earlier, every exterior threshold had immediately become an equation: distance to the road, guard placement, cameras, weather, how long it would take someone to notice she was missing, and whether whatever waited beyond the Bellandi property could possibly be worse than remaining inside it.
This afternoon she had wanted nothing more complicated than air after several hours spent refusing to reread Corwin’s messages, yet habit still made her expect a guard to appear before she crossed the terrace.
None did.
A man stationed near the lower garden glanced toward her and touched the earpiece beneath his collar, but he did not move into her path.
Isolde went down the steps, crossed the damp stone near the fountain, and followed the gravel path far enough that the lack of resistance became more suspicious than intervention would have been.
She stopped near a clipped hedge and looked toward the guard. “Did someone forget I’m not supposed to wander around?”
He hesitated, visibly measuring how much information he was permitted to give her. “Your access changed this morning.”
The word made her mouth tighten. “My access.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Please don’t make it worse with ma’am.” She glanced toward the path leading north. “How far can I go?”
He pointed toward the tree line. “Western lawn, north garden, greenhouse, lower terrace, cliff walk as far as the second gate. Not the service drive, vehicle court, east security wing, or outer perimeter.”
Isolde stared at him. “Did Taddeo actually make a map?”
The guard’s mouth twitched. “Security has one.”
“Of course you do.”
There was something so relentlessly Taddeo about responding to a question of autonomy with a territorial diagram that annoyance and reluctant amusement arrived together.
He had apparently taken the argument seriously, which did not mean he understood it completely.
The invisible line had simply moved farther away.
Somewhere beyond the gardens remained another boundary he had decided she could not cross.
“If I go past the cleared area?” she asked.
“We ask you to come back.”
“And if I don’t?”
The guard looked uncomfortable.
Isolde raised her eyebrows.
“He gets notified.”
“Taddeo.”
“Yes.”
There it was.
Not freedom.
Permission expanded by the person who still controlled the larger structure.
Isolde had grown tired of pretending two truths could not coexist merely because they irritated each other. She was still captive at Northglass. She also now had enough space to walk outside without another person shadowing every step.
Both mattered.
She continued toward the cliff walk.
The path curved along a low stone retaining wall before opening onto a broad overlook where the Atlantic spread dark beneath a pale autumn sky.
Wind moved hard enough off the water to pull loose strands of hair across her face, and far below, waves struck the rocks in white bursts before dragging themselves back into gray.
Crownport existed in the distance as little more than shapes through haze—harbor cranes, industrial stacks, the suggestion of buildings clustered along the waterfront—but Isolde knew exactly what lay inside that blur.
The museum.
Her apartment.
Linnea.
Marcus.
A bookstore where nobody cared where she went after leaving.
Her own car, assuming somebody had not done something irreparable with it after abandoning it on Mercer Street.
Corwin, somewhere.
The temporary phone in her pocket felt suddenly heavier.
She pulled it out.
His last question still waited unanswered.
Do you want me to get you out?
Isolde stared at it with the same frustration she had felt that morning.
A week ago, she would have answered before he finished typing.
She had walked into a storm and tried to reach a dark road with nothing but stubbornness and a half-formed plan because the fact of escape had been enough.
Now Corwin was alive and offering what she had risked herself to obtain, yet she still had not written yes.
That should have terrified her.
Instead it mostly made her angry.
Wanting freedom had not changed.
Wanting to leave Taddeo had.
Those were no longer identical things, and Isolde had no idea what to do with the distinction.
She locked the phone and returned it to her pocket before the silence of the cliff could make her sentimental.
Nearly an hour later, she returned to the east guest suite and found three large boxes outside the bedroom door.
Elettra was already inside directing a younger housekeeper who had opened the first one and begun placing books on the shelves beside the sitting area. Isolde stopped in the doorway because recognition arrived so fast that for a second she thought she had walked into the wrong room.
Those were her books.
Not replacements selected from a list and purchased because someone had researched what she might like.
The actual copies from her apartment were stacked inside the box: the battered graduate-school text on maritime paper with a coffee stain across the bottom edge, conservation manuals swollen with sticky tabs and handwritten notes, two art-history books that had belonged to her mother, and a crime novel Linnea gave her last Christmas after writing an insult across the title page about Isolde pretending thrillers were beneath her.
Isolde stepped farther inside. “What is all this?”
“The rest of the personal things Taddeo authorized from your apartment,” Elettra said.
The word authorized should have ruined the gesture.
It nearly did.
Then Isolde saw the dark green silk folded near the top of the second box.
She crossed the room before consciously deciding to move.
“Careful with that,” she said when the housekeeper reached toward it, then softened immediately when the younger woman pulled back. “Sorry. You didn’t do anything. I’ll take it.”
Elettra dismissed the housekeeper with a quiet thank-you and waited until the door closed.
Isolde lifted the scarf from the box.
Dark green silk patterned with small gold leaves, softened by years of wear.
One corner still carried the tiny repaired tear Isolde had stitched at nineteen after her mother caught it on a drawer pull and insisted it did not need replacing because “things should be allowed evidence that they were used.”
Her mother’s scarf.
The silk no longer smelled like Marianne Dacre.
Eleven years had removed that kind of evidence, no matter what memory tried to insist. Still, the feel of it between Isolde’s fingers brought back her mother standing in front of the hallway mirror fastening an earring, the scarf loose around her neck because she wanted to look put together without appearing to have tried.
Elettra sat quietly on the edge of the armchair. “She wore it often?”
“My mother.” Isolde unfolded it across her hands. “She had others, but this was the one she wore when she wanted to look elegant without admitting she’d planned it.”
“Did it work?”
“She was beautiful enough that everything worked.”
Elettra smiled. “Those women are exhausting.”
A laugh escaped Isolde, softer than she expected.
She looked around the room again and noticed the silver laptop sitting on the desk.
“My computer?”
“Yours.”
“Actually mine?”
Elettra’s expression became pragmatic. “Physically.”
“There’s the Bellandi qualification.”
“You’ve learned quickly.”
Isolde crossed toward the desk and opened it. The familiar wallpaper appeared, along with folders she had not touched since before Mercer Street. “What can I access?”
“Museum databases, professional references, news, streaming, ordinary websites. Messaging and personal email are still filtered until the Corwin situation is clearer.”
“So somebody returned my laptop while making sure it behaves like theirs.”
“That is one way to phrase it.”
“It is the accurate way.”
Elettra did not disagree.
Isolde looked toward the books, the laptop, the boxes of clothing and objects that belonged to a life outside Northglass. “When did he decide to do this?”
“This morning.”
“Before or after he went to Cesare?”
Elettra’s face changed almost imperceptibly.
Isolde caught it.
“You know he did.”
“You should ask Taddeo about Taddeo.”
“Everyone here uses that sentence whenever I ask something interesting.”
“It remains efficient.”
Isolde lifted the scarf again and ran her thumb gently across the repaired corner. “Does he always do this?”
“Bring captives their childhood belongings?”
Isolde gave her a look.
Elettra smiled faintly. “No.”
“I mean solve emotional problems with objects.”
“That?” Elettra rose and began folding the discarded packing tissue.
“Frequently. Taddeo understands practical needs very well. If someone is cold, he buys a coat. If something is broken, he replaces it. If a person is upset because their life has been stripped away, he retrieves pieces of the life and hopes the problem will become more manageable.”
“That sounds almost generous when you phrase it like that.”
“It can be generous.” Elettra tucked the tissue into an empty box. “It can also be a very expensive answer to the wrong question.”
Isolde looked around the room.
Her books.
Her laptop.
Her mother’s scarf.
Things she wanted.
Things she had not been able to retrieve herself because Taddeo still controlled the distance between Northglass and her apartment.
“He understands objects better than people,” Isolde said.
Elettra considered that. “Objects generally remain where he puts them.”
The accuracy of it struck hard enough that Isolde laughed again, though there was less humor in it this time.
“That may be the best explanation of him anyone has given me.”
Elettra left her to unpack.