Chapter Twenty-Five
Taddeo
Taddeo had slept alone for most of his adult life without ever thinking there was anything remarkable about the arrangement, yet sometime after three in the morning he woke reaching toward the empty side of the bed and discovered that less than a week had been enough to change the dimensions of the room.
His hand stopped before it reached the untouched sheet.
Isolde's pillow remained where she'd left it, a faint indentation still visible from the nights she'd slept there, and the black shirt she'd worn the previous evening sat folded at the foot of the bed after she returned it with the rest of the small belongings that had gradually migrated into his room.
None of those things should have mattered beside the problems waiting outside the bedroom, but pretending they didn't would have been another kind of dishonesty, and Taddeo had managed enough of that for one night.
There were legitimate reasons he had wanted Corwin's messages.
Someone had nearly reached Corwin before he moved.
A second cache of physical evidence existed somewhere outside Bellandi control.
The freight-yard coordinates pointed toward an industrial district already touched by Serevin-adjacent companies, while Mauro's apparent involvement in the larger theft had begun to look increasingly constructed and Lelio continued volunteering information with suspicious precision.
The threats were real, the coordinates were dangerous, and if Isolde announced tomorrow that she intended to walk into that freight yard alone, Taddeo would still consider the decision reckless enough to terrify him.
None of that altered what he had done after she said no.
That was the part his mind kept trying to complicate because the simpler version was worse.
He had understood her.
Isolde had not been vague, emotional enough to confuse refusal with fear, or unaware of what she was withholding.
She had looked directly at him and told him not to read her messages.
Taddeo had recognized the boundary, recognized that crossing it would violate a promise he had made deliberately, and ordered Marco to break through it anyway because Taddeo believed his judgment mattered more than hers.
The problem was not that he'd been wrong about the danger.
The problem was believing that being right about the danger made the decision his.
He closed his eyes and remembered Isolde in his office two nights earlier, explaining why surrendering control to him sexually felt safe.
She could revoke it. Every instruction meant something because refusal remained available, and Taddeo had understood that with perfect clarity while the consequences stayed inside a room where her choice happened to align with what he wanted.
Then she had said no somewhere that frightened him, and he had demonstrated exactly how conditional his understanding remained.
Taddeo pushed out of bed before dawn because continuing to lie there had become another form of self-indulgence.
He showered, dressed, and shaved in a bathroom that still contained Isolde's shampoo beside his because neither of them had thought to move it, though her toothbrush was gone from the ceramic holder.
The empty slot where it had been irritated him with an efficiency he would have found absurd under any other circumstances.
He picked up the folded black shirt before leaving.
Her perfume lingered faintly in the fabric, along with enough memory to make his body respond before his mind could stop it. Taddeo folded the shirt once more and put it in the drawer, refusing to let desire turn into evidence that anything between them remained available to him.
At six-forty, he found Isolde in the kitchen.
She stood near the kettle in her own dark blue sweater and jeans, damp hair tied low at the nape of her neck while steam rose from the mug between her hands.
Nothing in the ordinary scene acknowledged the argument from a few hours earlier, which only made the distance more apparent.
Taddeo stopped near the doorway instead of crossing automatically toward her the way he had begun doing over the previous days.
“Morning,” Isolde said. Her voice was neutral, though her attention remained on the tea rather than him.
“Morning,” Taddeo answered. He crossed to the opposite counter and reached for a coffee cup, leaving enough room between them that neither could mistake proximity for habit.
They nearly reached for the same silverware drawer a minute later.
Isolde withdrew first.
The movement was small enough that another man might not have noticed. Taddeo felt it like a hand against his chest.
“Sorry,” he said, stepping aside.
Her eyes lifted. “You don't have to apologize for reaching for a spoon.”
“I know.” Taddeo closed the drawer after she took what she needed. “That wasn't really what I was apologizing for.”
Her expression tightened.
“Then don't do it indirectly.”
He understood immediately. An apology offered in fragments could become another attempt to relieve his own discomfort without giving her anything useful.
“All right.”
Isolde carried her tea toward the breakfast table and sat without inviting him to join her. Taddeo remained by the counter with his coffee for several seconds before taking the chair farthest from her rather than the one beside it.
“Are you going to Bellandi House?” she asked.
“Yes. Cesare wants the full archive briefing.”
Her attention sharpened. “Including the second cache?”
“I'll tell him Corwin indicated additional evidence exists.”
“And 0617?”
Taddeo looked at her over the rim of his cup. “No.”
Surprise crossed her face before suspicion replaced it. “Why?”
“Because I learned it by breaking my word to you.” He set the coffee down. “I won't use that detail unless someone's life makes withholding it impossible.”
Isolde gave a quiet, humorless breath. “That's an interesting moral boundary to discover after you've already read it.”
“Yes.”
“You still know what it says.”
“Yes.”
“You can't unread it.”
“No.”
Taddeo let each answer stand without explanation.
He could tell her that Marco had reconfigured the clean handset overnight so another remote recovery required a physical authorization token, or promise again that he would not access anything else.
Both actions mattered operationally. Neither restored the thing Isolde had lost.
She studied him for several seconds. “I don't know what I'm supposed to do with an apology you haven't actually made.”
“I haven't apologized yet.”
“I noticed.”
“I could tell you I'm sorry because I hate waking up without you and want things back the way they were.” Taddeo held her gaze. “That would make the apology about getting something from you.”
Some of the anger in her expression altered.
“So you're waiting until when?”
“Until I can say it without attaching an expectation to what you do afterward.”
The kitchen remained quiet for several seconds.
Isolde looked down at her tea. “That may be the first intelligent decision you've made since last night.”
“Probably.”
The corner of her mouth almost moved, then didn't.
Taddeo hated how much he missed the smile anyway.
She stood a few minutes later and gathered the folder she'd brought down with her. “I have work in the library.”
“Orsino will be at Bellandi House most of the day.”
Isolde stopped.
Taddeo immediately heard how the statement sounded.
“I wasn't saying you needed him here.”
“No?”
“No.” He forced himself not to fill the silence with explanation. “You know what you're doing.”
Her expression became unreadable. “Do you believe that only when I'm looking at historical documents?”
The question landed exactly where it should.
Taddeo met her gaze. “I'm trying to make the answer no.”
“That isn't the same thing.”
“No.”
Isolde nodded once and left.
He did not follow.
Bellandi House was already active when Taddeo arrived shortly after eight, its respectable exterior doing what it always did best and concealing almost everything important beneath ordinary domestic movement.
A florist unloaded boxes near the side entrance for some charity event Cesare's sister-in-law was arranging, an accountant from one of the construction companies waited in the hall clutching a briefcase like it contained his own sentencing paperwork, and two soldiers carried wine toward the cellar while discussing a football match.
Marco accompanied Taddeo through the first floor until Orsino appeared outside Cesare's office and lifted one hand.
“He wants you alone,” Orsino said, then glanced back toward the room. “By which he means with me there, because apparently consigliere no longer counts.”
Under other circumstances Taddeo might have responded. Marco wisely disappeared down the corridor before either of them could involve him.
Cesare sat behind his desk with three folders arranged in front of him.
Taddeo recognized Corwin's financial summary and Mauro's books.
The third belonged to Silas Venn.
That irritated him immediately.
“Sit,” Cesare said.
Taddeo did.
Orsino took the chair near the window while Cesare opened the first folder.
“Twenty-four point eight million,” Cesare said. “You knew the number before you told me calculations were still incomplete.”
“Yes.”
“You confirmed Corwin moved the eight point four before telling me you were still separating what he discovered from what he stole.”
“Yes.”
Cesare leaned back. “At least we've stopped bothering with technical language.”
“I restricted distribution because someone inside Bellandi channels compromised the museum operation.”
“You restricted me.”
“Yes.”
The room tightened.
Cesare's expression hardened, though his voice remained controlled. “Do you understand why the boss of this Family does not enjoy discovering that his underboss has decided he belongs on a need-to-know list?”
“Yes.”
“Then we're making remarkable progress this morning.”
“The decision was correct at the time.”
“That sentence is becoming dangerous for you.”