Chapter Twenty #3
Taddeo tasted the broth and added salt. “Approval wasn’t especially relevant.”
“That sounds bleak.”
“It was their marriage.”
“Did she love him?”
He considered the question. “Yes.”
“And stayed anyway.”
“She stayed because she loved him and because leaving was not simple once everybody knew whose wife she was.” His gaze lowered toward the simmering pot. “She also had me.”
“You say that like you were a complication.”
“I was.”
“You were a child.”
“Children are complications.”
“That may be the least sentimental thing anyone has ever said about being loved.”
A faint smile touched his mouth.
“What happened to her?”
“Cancer. I was nineteen.”
The quietness of it hurt.
“I’m sorry.”
Taddeo nodded.
“And your father?”
“Two years later.”
“How?”
“Shot.”
Isolde did not ask who pulled the trigger.
“Bellandi business?”
“Yes.”
“Were you already involved?”
“Enough.”
He stirred the pot once before continuing, and Isolde understood the continuation itself was a choice.
“My father worked enforcement and collections for Cesare before Cesare became boss. They were close. When Marcello died, there were men who assumed his protection died with him.”
“Cesare stopped that.”
“Yes.” Taddeo set the spoon aside and leaned both hands against the counter. “He made it clear that anything my father had left behind remained mine. He put me under his protection and gave me work nobody could take from me because somebody decided I no longer had backing.”
“How old were you?”
“Twenty-one.”
Isolde remembered being twenty-one after her mother died, barely able to understand why the world still required paperwork and groceries and phone calls when grief had rendered all of those things absurd.
Corwin had been there then, only three years older, making decisions for both of them because somebody had to keep moving.
Taddeo had lost both parents by that age and found Cesare Bellandi where stability used to be.
“So when you’re loyal to him,” she said slowly, “it isn’t really about rank.”
Taddeo looked at her.
“He gave you somewhere to stand when everything else disappeared.”
For several seconds he did not respond.
Then, quietly, “Yes.”
The admission changed something.
Corwin’s warning remained in her mind. Bellandi leadership might be compromised. Taddeo’s loyalty to Cesare was powerful enough that Isolde had already seen where it could override everything else. Understanding where that loyalty came from did not make it less dangerous.
It made it harder to dismiss.
“You would do almost anything for him.”
Taddeo’s gaze held hers. “I have.”
Not I would.
I have.
The difference settled somewhere uncomfortable.
He ladled pasta into two bowls and slid one toward her. “Eat.”
Isolde looked down. “I didn’t say I was hungry.”
“You’ve been standing here smelling dinner for twenty minutes.”
“That does not constitute informed consent to pasta.”
Taddeo stared at her.
She smiled. “I’m joking.”
“Poorly.”
She took the bowl.
Their knees brushed once beneath the island after she sat beside him, then again several minutes later. Neither commented. The first time, Taddeo glanced toward her mouth with enough heat to make the ordinary kitchen suddenly feel considerably less ordinary.
Isolde looked back at her food. “Don’t.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You don’t need words anymore. Your face has become obscene.”
“That sounds efficient.”
His mouth curved.
For a few minutes, the kitchen became comfortable.
Not safe in the uncomplicated sense.
Not normal.
Comfortable anyway.
That was exactly why the phone vibrating in Isolde’s pocket felt so violent.
Her spoon stopped halfway to her mouth.
Taddeo’s expression changed instantly. “Corwin?”
Isolde set down the spoon and pulled out the temporary handset.
The message began with coordinates.
Latitude and longitude precise enough that her pulse accelerated before she reached the words beneath them.
Taddeo stayed on the opposite side of the island.
He did not move toward the screen.
That restraint made her more aware of what the message contained.
Private freight yard west of Crownport. I can get you out whenever you’re ready.
Isolde read it twice.
Then she locked the screen.
“What did he say?” Taddeo asked.
She looked across the island at the man who had expanded the distance she could walk that morning, returned pieces of her life, given Linnea privacy, and spent the last hour explaining why Cesare Bellandi occupied a place in him deeper than obedience.
Then she remembered the gates.
The guard calling Taddeo if she crossed the wrong invisible line.
The coordinates burning inside the phone in her hand.
“He gave me something to think about.”
Taddeo’s eyes narrowed slightly.
He did not ask again.
Isolde returned the phone to her pocket and picked up her spoon even though hunger had disappeared completely.
Corwin had given her a place.
A real one.
For the first time since the storm, leaving Northglass no longer required defeating Taddeo’s security alone.
The road was no longer abstract.
It had coordinates.
What Isolde still did not have was an answer.