Chapter Twenty-Three
Taddeo
Isolde was hiding something from him, and Taddeo knew it before she finished her first cup of coffee.
The knowledge did not come from anything as obvious as nervousness.
Isolde did not avoid his eyes or offer unnecessary explanations about what she had done the previous afternoon after he left her in the library with Corwin’s temporary phone.
If anything, she behaved with greater ease than usual, arriving at breakfast in dark trousers and a cream blouse with her mother’s green scarf loose around her throat, complaining to Elettra that grapefruit had been mislabeled as breakfast food for generations and spreading jam across toast while an article from the museum lay open beside her plate.
The difference was smaller and more familiar to Taddeo because he had spent years across tables from men trained to conceal information.
Isolde was allocating attention. She was deciding which parts of herself could remain visible while another stayed deliberately guarded.
Taddeo let her eat.
That decision required more effort than it should have.
He had spent part of the night staring at Northglass’s security map and confronting the fact that Isolde’s submission in his bed mattered because she could revoke it while almost every other form of control he exercised over her worked precisely because she could not.
By morning, the realization remained uncomfortable enough that he had made no changes to the security system rather than risk mistaking discomfort for progress.
The gates remained closed. The movement restrictions remained.
Marco still received alerts if she crossed certain boundaries, and none of those facts had changed because Taddeo had finally learned how ugly they looked from the other side.
Across the table, Isolde looked up from her article. “You’re staring.”
“I am.”
“Should I be concerned?”
“Probably not.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “You’ve become very reassuring.”
Taddeo returned to the financial report beside his coffee. “You slept?”
“That is generally what people do at night.”
“You were awake after two.”
She paused with her cup halfway to her mouth. “Were you outside my room?”
“No. I saw the light when I went downstairs.”
“That is significantly less sinister, although Northglass has lowered the standard.”
“You were thinking.”
“I do that occasionally.”
“About Corwin?”
Her eyes settled on him for a fraction longer than normal.
There.
Taddeo hated the satisfaction of recognizing it.
“Yes,” she said. “Among other things.”
He could have asked which things.
He did not.
Isolde seemed to notice the absence of the next question. Her gaze rested on him for several seconds before she took another drink. “You’re behaving strangely.”
“I’m eating breakfast.”
“You’re not interrogating me.”
“I can start if it would make the morning feel more familiar.”
“That sounded almost wounded.”
“It wasn’t.”
A faint smile touched her mouth, and for a moment the guardedness eased enough that his attention moved toward the green scarf.
He had seen it several times since her belongings arrived, but today it was tied loosely, exposing the delicate hollow at the base of her throat.
His mind supplied memories from two nights earlier with enough precision that he set down his coffee.
Isolde caught the shift immediately. “Don’t.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You looked at the scarf.”
“I was thinking about removing it.”
Color rose beneath her skin.
Taddeo allowed himself half a second of satisfaction before adding, “Without damaging it.”
“That did not improve the sentence.”
“It wasn’t intended to.”
Her blush deepened, but the amusement vanished when her attention moved toward the temporary phone beside her plate.
Taddeo saw it.
He also recognized the exact point at which desire became secondary to whatever occupied her thoughts.
The rational arguments for asking arrived immediately.
Corwin possessed unrecovered evidence. Someone had nearly found him.
An internal leak remained unidentified. Mauro’s guilt in the larger scheme had become increasingly doubtful, Lelio continued providing information at suspiciously convenient moments, and Silas Venn had now produced multiple Serevin connections that looked useful enough to deserve distrust. Anything Corwin told Isolde could alter the investigation or place her in danger.
Every one of those arguments was real.
Every one also made intrusion convenient.
Taddeo picked up his report. “Orsino is bringing the Keystone source files at ten. You wanted them before he takes the originals back.”
Isolde watched him as though waiting for the question anyway.
It never came.
She reached for her toast. “You are definitely behaving strangely.”
“Eat.”
Her eyes warmed slightly at the tone. “Careful. We established where you’re allowed to sound like that.”
“You established that you like it.”
For a second, she lost the ability to answer.
Taddeo felt the private memory move between them and almost smiled.
Then Isolde’s gaze returned to the phone.
Whatever she was keeping from him returned with it.
By ten-thirty, Isolde and Orsino had taken over the library with two boxes of preservation records while Taddeo remained in his office with Marco and the metadata produced by Corwin’s approved communications.
He had kept the privacy arrangement exactly as promised.
No message bodies, screenshots, content archives, or deleted-thread recovery.
The reports showed only the information surrounding the conversation: timestamps, relay patterns, device changes, approximate cellular regions, and the communications services Corwin used to make himself difficult to locate.
It was still enough to be useful.
Corwin had changed devices repeatedly. He appeared to be moving through Crownport rather than sitting behind a single elaborate digital mask, with several signals brushing networks around the western freight district before shifting elsewhere.
None of that established a location tightly enough to send men after him without risking a false trail, and Taddeo had no intention of frightening Corwin into disappearing more effectively before they understood who else was looking for him.
“Cross-reference the tower overlaps with Bellandi property, Serevin facilities, Mauro’s companies, Lelio’s people, and every freight entity in the archive,” Taddeo said. “Nothing that requires opening content.”
Marco entered the filters into his tablet. “That is going to return half the industrial port.”
“Then look for recurring overlap.”
“You’re trying to identify who can reach Corwin.”
“I’m trying to identify who may already be reaching him.”
Marco nodded, but he did not immediately leave.
Taddeo recognized hesitation when he saw it. “What?”
“Do you want my professional answer or the answer that gets me out of the room faster?”
“Professional.”
Marco lowered the tablet. “I think Isolde knows more than she’s telling you.”
Taddeo’s expression cooled. “Why?”
“I don’t know that it’s operational. But she has changed how she uses the clean handset, and you’ve been trying not to ask her questions since breakfast.”
“I did not hire you for relationship analysis.”
“No. You hired me to notice when people around you behave differently after receiving restricted communications.”
Taddeo looked toward the closed office door.
“What has she done technically?”
“Nothing wrong. The handset is operating inside the agreement.”
“Then we have nothing.”
Marco studied him briefly. “You could know more.”
“Yes.”
“One order and we mirror the handset.”
“Yes.”
Marco waited.
Taddeo’s irritation increased because he understood what the other man was doing. Marco was not tempting him. He was making certain Taddeo understood that remaining ignorant had become a decision rather than a technical limitation.
“No content interception,” Taddeo said.
Marco nodded once. “Understood.”
After he left, Taddeo stared at the routing map for several minutes before closing it.
Restraint had been easier when it was hypothetical.
Now he knew Isolde carried information she had chosen not to give him, and the system could reveal it with one order.
He could know whether Corwin had given her another location, whether Isolde intended to leave, and whether the choice she had not yet made was changing without involving Taddeo at all.
He left the system closed.
That should have felt like progress.
Instead, it felt like standing beside an unlocked door and proving repeatedly that he was capable of not walking through it.
Silas Venn’s afternoon report did little to improve Taddeo’s patience.
The meeting at Bellandi House lasted less than an hour in the revised version Taddeo would have preferred and more than two in reality.
Silas had traced East Vey Development and Blue March Logistics into shipping networks that repeatedly overlapped companies servicing Serevin interests.
The pattern was meaningful but not decisive.
Too much legitimate freight passed through Serevin-associated warehouses for simple proximity to prove ownership, and the same network could just as easily have been selected by someone who wanted Bellandi investigators to discover Russian fingerprints once Mauro stopped being a convincing answer.
“Your evidence keeps getting more helpful,” Taddeo said when Silas finished.
Silas leaned back in his chair. “You say that as though it’s an accusation.”
“Sometimes it is.”
Cesare looked between them with visible impatience. “Do the Serevins touch the money or not?”
“They touch companies that touch the movement,” Silas answered. “That is not the same thing.”
“Good,” Taddeo said. “Keep remembering that.”
Silas’s faint smile revealed nothing. “I generally do.”
That was the problem with him. Silas rarely overclaimed, rarely made a factual mistake large enough to expose motive, and remained professionally reasonable even when the story forming around his evidence began looking too neat.