Chapter Twenty-Six
Isolde
The coordinates Corwin had sent looked harmless when written on paper, which Isolde decided was probably true of most dangerous things once they were stripped of context.
She had copied them onto the back of an old museum printout shortly after dawn and spent nearly forty minutes at the desk in her bedroom moving between satellite images, municipal property records, and the limited mapping functions Taddeo’s security had apparently not classified as a threat.
The point lay west of Crownport in the older industrial district, pressed between freight terminals and rail lines close enough to the harbor that the surrounding streets looked less like roads than narrow service corridors carved through warehouses, loading yards, fenced lots, and patches of neglected scrub that developers had not yet discovered how to describe as historic.
Corwin had called the location a private freight yard, and the map supported that much.
Two long warehouses sat behind perimeter fencing with a smaller third structure farther back near an abandoned siding, while access roads approached from both the north and west. The western road was narrow and partly concealed beneath trees before joining a larger state route several miles away, which meant a vehicle leaving the property could disappear into ordinary traffic quickly enough that pursuit would become difficult without also becoming conspicuous.
Isolde hated herself a little for recognizing any of that now.
A month ago, she would have looked at the same image and noticed parcel boundaries, development patterns, perhaps the awkward geometry created when a newer road crossed an older rail corridor.
Now she saw choke points, surveillance angles, places a second vehicle could wait unseen, and the problem of blocking two exits at once.
Taddeo had changed the way she read landscapes. That realization felt more intimate than she wanted it to.
She enlarged the satellite image until the outlines softened into pixels and traced one fingertip along the western road.
Reaching the freight yard required leaving Northglass first, and the estate no longer offered the same vulnerabilities she had exploited during the storm.
Patrols varied their routes. Cameras covered the blind spots she had once discovered through observation, exterior doors recorded movement, and the service corridor she had used during her escape now required an active credential after dark.
She could probably still find a way if she devoted herself to the problem long enough, because no security system designed by human beings remained perfect once familiarity replaced vigilance, but planning that escape now would mean exploiting privileges Taddeo had given her while attempting to learn how to trust her.
The thought made something inside her twist.
Not because leaving would be dangerous.
Because using his attempts at change against him felt different from escaping the man who had first brought her here.
Isolde leaned back and looked toward the bedroom door.
Taddeo had not crossed it since she moved out of his room, not even the previous evening when he returned from Bellandi House and stopped in the corridor to tell her about Cesare’s forty-eight-hour deadline.
He had remained outside while explaining that Cesare wanted Corwin located or enough actionable intelligence to justify leaving the current arrangement intact, and if Taddeo failed, Cesare intended to remove Isolde from his responsibility entirely.
The phrasing had infuriated her.
“My responsibility,” she had repeated from inside the room, one hand still on the half-open door. “Does anyone in your family understand how normal people hear sentences like that?”
Taddeo had looked tired rather than defensive. “Probably not.”
“And what does removing me from your responsibility mean?”
“Another Bellandi team. Another secure location. Possibly Bellandi House until Corwin is found.”
“So I become somebody else’s problem.”
His jaw had tightened. “I told Cesare I won’t allow that.”
Isolde had nearly laughed. “Do you hear yourself?”
“Yes.” Taddeo’s expression had turned grim. “That was part of the problem.”
She had waited because that answer was unusual enough to deserve another sentence.
“I don’t want another man controlling you because I’m starting to understand I shouldn’t either,” he had said. “I don’t have a clean solution yet, but you deserve to know the decision exists.”
That was all.
He had not entered the room, asked whether Corwin contacted her, or used Cesare’s ultimatum to demand information. He had told her what affected her and left when she said she wanted to think.
Respecting the boundary after violating the larger one did not repair what he had done.
Unfortunately, it also prevented her from dismissing him as incapable of learning.
Isolde closed the mapping window.
Corwin could get her out.
The words should have felt like oxygen. Instead they had become another decision somebody else wanted her to make before she understood what she wanted afterward.
She still wanted the gate opened with an intensity that had not diminished at all.
She wanted her own phone without a Bellandi relay around it, her own car, her apartment, her museum, a coffee with Linnea that did not begin with rules about what information could make her friend a target.
She wanted to take a wrong turn, stay late at work, buy groceries at midnight, and make bad decisions without discovering that somebody powerful had already decided the danger exceeded her right to make them.
What she could no longer honestly claim was that freedom required a life in which Taddeo did not exist.
She missed him.
The admission irritated her enough that she closed the laptop harder than necessary.
Missing him did not mean she forgave him.
That distinction had become important sometime around four in the morning, when Isolde woke alone after dreaming that his hand was around her waist and spent several confused seconds wondering why the bed felt wrong.
Her body remained humiliatingly uninterested in principle.
She could still remember his mouth, his hands, the weight of him beside her, and the ease with which she had begun sleeping when some part of him touched some part of her.
Desire had survived the privacy breach without requesting permission from her anger.
The deeper problem was considerably worse.
She was beginning to think she loved him.
That thought was unacceptable before coffee and remained unacceptable afterward, so shortly before noon Isolde abandoned the laptop entirely and went looking for Elettra.
She found her in the greenhouse cutting dead leaves from herbs growing along the south wall.
The greenhouse was smaller and more practical than most of Northglass, with rosemary, basil, thyme, winter lettuce, and several citrus trees arranged in large terracotta pots instead of exotic flowers selected for display.
Moisture gathered along the glass while pale winter sun turned the room warm enough that Isolde pulled off her sweater almost immediately.
Elettra glanced up from the basil. “If you are here because Taddeo has irritated you, counseling is billed separately.”
“I thought you were salaried.” Isolde draped the sweater over the back of a chair and wandered toward a lemon tree.
“I am. Emotional labor requires hazard pay.”
“Do I get a discount for repeat visits?”
“Your complexity has removed any possibility of discounts.” Elettra clipped another damaged stem and dropped it into a shallow basket. “You are welcome to help, however. Labor occasionally improves people.”
Isolde picked up a second pair of scissors and looked doubtfully at the rosemary. “I restore nineteenth-century paper. Plants have fewer treatment reports and therefore less protection from me.”
“Then hand me things.”
For several minutes, that was what she did.
Elettra worked through the herbs while Isolde passed baskets and collected cuttings, appreciating that the older woman did not immediately ask why she'd come.
Silence with Elettra felt different from silence with Taddeo.
There was no calculation inside it, no expectation that whatever remained unsaid would eventually become operationally relevant.
Eventually Isolde rubbed a rosemary leaf between her fingers. “He told you something happened.”
“Not exactly.” Elettra cut away a yellowed stem before answering. “He asked whether you had eaten yesterday and told me not to enter your bedroom without knocking.”
Isolde looked toward her. “That is suspiciously specific.”
“I have lived here long enough to recognize when two people stop sleeping together. The hallway becomes quieter, and both people become unpleasant.”
“I am not unpleasant.”
Elettra glanced at her. “You inspected the breakfast silver for corrosion because you were angry.”
“There was tarnish.”
“There was one small spot.”
“It was poorly polished.”
Elettra continued looking at her until Isolde sighed.
“Fine.”
The older woman returned to the basil.
Isolde rested one hip against the worktable. “He accessed a private conversation after I told him not to. He knew exactly what I meant, knew I did not consent to him reading it, and did it anyway because he decided the information might be dangerous.”
Elettra did not rush toward sympathy. “Was it dangerous?”
“Yes.”
“And that changes nothing about whether you told him no.” Elettra set another cutting into the basket. “Those are separate questions.”
Relief moved through Isolde so unexpectedly that she almost laughed. “Thank you.”
“You sound surprised.”
“Everyone around here seems to think danger is a universal solvent. Apparently if enough men have guns, normal boundaries dissolve.”