Chapter Twenty-Five #2
Taddeo looked toward him.
Cesare tapped one finger against the folder. “What else are you withholding?”
“Corwin says another evidence cache exists.”
Orsino's attention sharpened.
Cesare sat forward. “Where?”
“I don't know.”
“What kind of evidence?”
“Another drive. Physical records. Possibly originals rather than copies.”
“And how do you know this?”
Taddeo paused.
Cesare's eyes narrowed. “There it is.”
“I obtained part of the information through a privacy violation involving Isolde.”
Orsino became very still.
Cesare stared at Taddeo for several seconds. “You violated her privacy.”
“Yes.”
“And now you're withholding the result from me because you feel guilty.”
“No.” Taddeo kept his voice even. “I'm withholding a detail I had no right to obtain and that you do not currently need.”
Cesare laughed once without humor. “I do not care whether Isolde considers the information private when it involves stolen Bellandi money and a traitor inside my organization.”
“I know.”
“Then why should you?”
“Because I gave her my word.”
Cesare's expression changed.
“And then broke it,” Taddeo added before the other man could ask.
Silence settled across the office.
Orsino removed his glasses and rubbed briefly at the bridge of his nose. “That explains breakfast.”
Taddeo looked at him. “What does that mean?”
“Elettra texted me to ask whether she should begin purchasing two kinds of coffee because apparently nobody is speaking normally.”
“This is not the time.”
“No,” Orsino agreed. “It rarely is.”
Cesare ignored him. “Isolde has compromised you.”
“No.”
“Taddeo.”
“My judgment about the leak was correct.”
“That is not what I said.” Cesare closed the folder.
“You withheld evidence from me, altered security protocols around her, gave her private communication with the man who stole from us, broke your own rule when fear finally outweighed whatever principle you were trying to practice, and now you're correcting the violation by refusing to use information relevant to the Family. You are making Bellandi decisions through the lens of what happens between you and this woman.”
The accusation was harder to dismiss because parts of it were true.
Taddeo sat back. “She has changed how I think about one category of authority. That does not mean she controls my judgment.”
Cesare gave him an almost tired look. “Your father used to say the same thing whenever your mother changed his mind.”
Taddeo's body went cold. “Don't use them.”
“I am not using Marcello or Lucia against you.”
“It sounds very much like you are.”
Cesare's face softened by a degree. “Then listen to the point instead of preparing to resent it. Your father trusted me before you were old enough to know what any of this was. Your mother trusted me when Marcello vanished for work and she needed someone to tell her whether he was coming home. When they were gone, you trusted me because I had already proven what that word meant to your family.”
Taddeo remembered the rest without Cesare narrating it.
Twenty-one years old.
Both parents dead.
Men at his father's funeral calculating what Marcello's death made available before the body was buried.
Cesare had ended those calculations with several conversations nobody had mistaken for requests.
Taddeo had spent years earning the authority that followed.
The first protection had been given.
“I haven't forgotten,” he said.
“I know.” Cesare leaned forward. “What you haven't learned is that eventually loyalty to one person collides with loyalty to another and rank doesn't make the collision disappear.”
The statement reached deeper than Taddeo wanted.
Cesare continued. “She isn't Bellandi.”
“No.”
“She isn't your wife.”
“No.”
“She is living in your house because you took her there.”
Taddeo's jaw tightened. “I am aware.”
“And yet the thought of losing her is already affecting you more than the thought of disobeying me.”
Taddeo said nothing.
Orsino looked toward the window.
Cesare's expression changed with recognition that made denial pointless.
“That deep,” he said.
“This is not useful.”
“It may become extremely useful if I need to understand whether my underboss will follow an order.”
Taddeo stood. “I follow orders.”
“Usually.”
The single word would have been harmless from almost anyone else.
From Cesare, it was warning.
Taddeo remained standing while Cesare opened the file containing Corwin's known movement data.
“You have forty-eight hours,” Cesare said.
“For what?”
“Give me Corwin.”
Taddeo's expression hardened. “We have tower overlap covering half the western industrial district, multiple devices, and no stable pattern. Moving on bad information can drive him deeper or walk us into whoever is already looking for him.”
“Then use the forty-eight hours intelligently.”
“And if I don't have a location?”
Cesare closed the folder.
“I remove Isolde from your responsibility.”
The answer produced a refusal before Taddeo had time to make it strategic.
“No.”
Cesare went still.
So did Orsino.
Taddeo heard what he had said only after the word existed and found he did not regret it.
Cesare's voice became quieter. “Excuse me?”
“She stays at Northglass.”
“If you cannot separate your judgment from her, she will not remain under your authority.”
“No other Bellandi team takes custody of her.”
The phrase takes custody sounded ugly as soon as it entered the room.
That did not make the alternative more acceptable.
Taddeo imagined Isolde moved to another safehouse with guards she did not know, another capo deciding whether she could call Linnea or walk outside, another group of men treating her first as leverage and only afterward as a woman whose consent complicated their procedures.
The hostility the image produced was immediate and violent.
Cesare watched him understand himself.
“You realize,” he said, “that you just refused an order I haven't given yet.”
“Yes.”
“That should concern you.”
“It does.”
“You don't sound concerned.”
“I am not transferring her to another team.”
Cesare stood again. “You told me thirty minutes ago that being correct does not give you the right to make every decision. Apparently that revelation has not reached Bellandi House.”
Taddeo's mouth tightened.
The criticism was deserved in a way Cesare probably did not fully understand.
He had spent the night recognizing that Isolde should not belong under his authority simply because he believed he could protect her better.
Now he was refusing to let anyone else hold the same authority.
The contradiction was obvious.
What Taddeo wanted was not another custodian.
He wanted the structure itself to stop treating her like something that passed between men depending upon whose judgment currently outranked whose.
“I don't want anyone else controlling her,” he said.
Cesare's eyebrows lifted. “Because you want to?”
“No.”
The answer came more slowly than Taddeo liked.
He corrected it before Cesare could.
“Because I'm starting to understand that none of us should.”
The office became very quiet.
Orsino looked toward him.
Cesare's expression hardened rather than softened. “That is a philosophical position you can explore after we identify the people shooting at museums.”
“I know.”
“And until then?”
Taddeo thought of Isolde telling him the previous night that danger did not erase her right to choose.
He thought of the freight-yard coordinates, the locked gates, the fact that he had spent days using real threats to defend restrictions that also protected him from discovering whether Isolde would leave if she could.
“I don't have a clean answer yet.”
“Then find one quickly.”
Cesare pushed the Corwin file toward him.
“Forty-eight hours. Find Corwin or give me enough actionable intelligence to justify leaving this arrangement where it is. If you cannot, we discuss removing you from the decision entirely.”
Taddeo picked up the folder.
Orsino finally spoke. “Forty-eight hours is not much.”
“No.”
“And you cannot solve that problem by making Isolde easier to control.”
Taddeo looked toward him.
The night before, the warning might have irritated him.
Now it sounded obvious.
“I know.”
This time he understood the words well enough to hate how often he had used them before understanding anything.
Taddeo left Bellandi House with the Corwin file beneath one arm and the deadline already running.
Outside, Crownport had settled into a cold gray afternoon, traffic moving beyond the walls while men came and went through the Bellandi courtyard as though nothing inside the house had changed. Taddeo paused beside the sedan while Marco approached from the security office.
“How bad?”
“Forty-eight hours to produce Corwin.”
Marco's expression tightened. “And if we don't?”
“Cesare removes Isolde from my responsibility.”
Marco waited.
Taddeo looked toward him. “Don't.”
“I didn't say anything.”
“You were about to.”
“I was going to ask whether she knows.”
“No.”
“Are you telling her?”
Taddeo looked toward the city.
A day earlier, his first instinct would have been to withhold the ultimatum because telling Isolde might frighten her, influence her choices, or give Corwin leverage if she repeated it. Every one of those considerations still existed.
So did the fact that the decision concerned her life more directly than anyone else's.
“Yes,” Taddeo said. “When I get back.”
Marco nodded and opened the rear door.
Taddeo did not get inside immediately.
For years, responsibility had meant making the difficult decision before anyone else had time to hesitate and accepting the consequences afterward. That definition had served him well because most people under his authority had already agreed to the structure in which he operated.
Isolde had never agreed to any of it.
He had broken his word because he confused fear with permission.
He could not undo that.
He could not make her trust him because he'd finally understood why she shouldn't.
All he could do now was decide what his word meant the next time keeping it cost him something.
Taddeo got into the car.
Forty-eight hours had begun.