Chapter Twenty-Seven #2
“You think he ordered the museum.”
“I think I want to know where Federico Lanza is.”
“I'll find out.”
“And Marco?”
“Yeah?”
“Nothing to Cesare yet.”
A longer pause followed.
“Understood.”
Taddeo ended the call.
Isolde stared at the museum file.
“That is more than Corwin had,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Still not proof.”
“No.”
“But enough that he wasn't imagining it.”
Taddeo closed the folder. “Enough that Lelio becomes the primary internal suspect.”
Isolde pushed out of the chair and crossed toward the window. Her hands disappeared into the sleeves of her sweater as she looked across the grounds.
Taddeo stayed where he was.
Several days earlier he would have followed because his instinct interpreted distress as something requiring intervention, usually physical presence. Now he understood that sometimes concern meant allowing another person to determine whether closeness helped.
“You told me,” he said after a while.
Isolde looked back. “Yes.”
“You didn't have to.”
“No.”
“Why did you?”
Her gaze moved toward the grounds again.
“Because if Lelio ordered the attack, this isn't only Corwin's secret. It involves your people, your investigation, and men who tried to take me.” She swallowed before continuing.
“And because keeping information from you to prove I can would make my choices about you just another kind of reaction.”
Taddeo absorbed the distinction.
“This isn't forgiveness,” she added.
“I know.”
“I'm serious.”
“So am I.”
Isolde looked at him, and the defensiveness she had been preparing seemed to lose its target.
Taddeo walked around the desk but stopped several feet from her. “I owe you something.”
She folded her arms. “That sounds ominous.”
“Probably.”
“If you are about to explain why what you did was necessary, don't.”
“I am not.”
The directness made her posture change slightly.
Taddeo had rehearsed versions of the apology at three in the morning and rejected all of them because each contained some sentence designed to preserve his own sense of competence.
I was afraid for you. True, but explanatory.
The coordinates were dangerous. True, but irrelevant to the boundary.
I believed Corwin was manipulating you. Possibly true, still irrelevant.
He looked directly at her. “I am sorry.”
Isolde said nothing, but Taddeo could see she had stopped breathing normally.
“I knew you did not want me to read the messages,” he continued. “I understood the boundary. I broke it anyway.”
Her eyes dropped for a moment.
“I believed knowing the information mattered more than how I got it.” Taddeo kept his hands at his sides because the instinct to reach for her had no place in the apology. “I believed my judgment about the danger mattered more than your right to decide what you gave me.”
Isolde's mouth tightened. “That is exactly the problem.”
“Yes.”
“You don't get credit for recognizing it afterward.”
“I know.”
“And I'm still angry.”
“I know.”
Her eyes sharpened. “Stop saying you know like that makes it easier.”
Taddeo nodded slowly. “All right.”
She looked away.
For several seconds only the quiet hum of heating beneath the office floor occupied the room.
When Isolde finally spoke, her voice was lower. “Why are you like this?”
The question was not cruel.
That made it harder.
Taddeo could have answered with the work, with Cesare, with Marcello, with every year of being rewarded for assuming control before uncertainty became dangerous. None of those explanations reached the oldest truth.
“My father died because people knew where he was weak.”
Isolde turned back.
Taddeo looked toward the windows rather than at her while the memory came with the unwelcome clarity it always carried.
“Marcello had been moving between two collections meetings for almost a month. Same men, same cars, but never the same route twice. He knew someone was asking questions around him.”
“Who killed him?”
“Men attached to an organization that doesn't exist anymore.” Taddeo's mouth tightened. “Cesare made sure of that.”
Isolde remained quiet.
“They couldn't get at my father directly for months,” he continued. “So they watched the people around him. One of them found out my mother's sister was having trouble with her landlord and that Marcello occasionally handled things for her personally even after my mother died.”
“Your aunt.”
“Yes.”
“They used her?”
“They created a problem they knew he would come fix.” Taddeo flexed one hand before forcing it still. “He knew it might be a trap and went anyway because leaving family exposed wasn't something he could tolerate.”
Isolde's face softened painfully.
“He was shot before he reached the building.” Taddeo finally looked at her. “Afterward I watched every man around Cesare look at the story and reach the same conclusion. Marcello loved someone, therefore someone could make him predictable.”
“That wasn't his fault.”
“No.”
“You sound like you think it was.”
“I think predictability gets people killed.”
Isolde studied him. “And Cesare taught you to eliminate it.”
“He taught me how to survive it.” Taddeo moved toward the desk, resting both hands against its edge.
“After my father died, men tested everything. Accounts. Crews. Relationships. They wanted to know what could be taken, who could be pressured, where I would bend. Cesare stopped most of it before it reached me.”
“So you learned that if you control the vulnerability first, no one else can use it.”
Taddeo looked at her.
“Yes.”
The word came rougher than he intended.
Isolde walked toward him but stopped outside touching distance. “And women?”
Taddeo understood the question.
“I watched men lose judgment over them.” He straightened slowly. “Wives threatened. Girlfriends followed. Children used to pressure fathers. Men handing over routes, names, money because someone they loved had become leverage.”
Her expression changed at that word.
Taddeo felt the ugliness of the parallel as clearly as she did.
“I made you exactly that,” he said.
Isolde's throat moved.
“Yes.”
“I took the thing I spent my life believing no man should let anyone use against him and used it against Corwin.”
“You did.”
Taddeo did not defend it. “I was good at understanding what choice meant when you were in my bed because the line was obvious. You wanted me or you didn't, and if you didn't, anything I took would be rape.”
Isolde held his gaze.
“I understood that immediately.” Taddeo rubbed one hand over the back of his neck, the vulnerability making his own skin feel too tight. “What I failed to understand was that the principle didn't stop when sex stopped.”
Something shifted in her face.
“I treated everything else like work,” he continued. “Movement, information, danger, communication. If I believed the outcome mattered enough, I believed I had the authority to produce it.”
“And now?”
“Now I understand that if your choices only count when they fit inside outcomes I approve, they aren't choices.”
Isolde stared at him for a long time.
Taddeo forced himself not to fill the quiet.
Eventually she said, “I don't know if I trust that understanding yet.”
“I don't expect you to.”
“I want to.”
That was almost worse.
Taddeo looked at her.
Isolde's arms slowly unfolded from around herself. “That's the part I'm angry about too.”
“What?”
“I want to trust you again.”
Taddeo could not think of anything useful to say.
For once he accepted that silence without turning it into control.
Isolde moved the final step between them.
Her hand touched the front of his shirt.
Taddeo went still.
She seemed to notice the restraint and let her fingers remain there, lightly curled near the center of his chest. “You can touch me.”
He raised one hand slowly. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
His palm settled against her waist.
Nothing about the contact resembled the possession scenes they had shared before the rupture.
There was no command in it, no deliberate testing of obedience, no erotic performance built around the word mine.
Taddeo simply held her, gently enough that if she moved away his hand would fall without resistance.
Isolde stepped closer.
Her forehead rested against his chest.
Taddeo closed his eyes.
The relief was almost humiliating.
He brought his other arm around her only after she leaned fully into him, and for several minutes they remained standing beside the desk with the museum-attack evidence spread behind them and Lelio Ardizzi's name becoming more dangerous by the hour.
Isolde's hands moved around his waist.
“I missed you,” she said quietly.
Taddeo's chest tightened. “I missed you too.”
“You looked terrible this morning.”
“So did you.”
She pulled back enough to frown. “That was unnecessary.”
“It was accurate.”
Her mouth curved.
The smile broke something open in him.
Taddeo lifted one hand to her face but stopped with his fingers just beside her cheek, waiting.
Isolde closed the distance herself.
Her lips touched his palm first.
Then she turned her face into his hand.
Taddeo exhaled slowly.
When he kissed her, it was softer than anything they had done since the first hesitant moments when both of them were still learning what desire could mean inside captivity.
Isolde's fingers moved into his hair without urgency, holding him near rather than pulling him closer, and Taddeo kept one hand at her waist while the other remained against her jaw.
The kiss deepened gradually. Not because either of them was trying to forget the argument but because neither had.
When Isolde pulled back, Taddeo stopped immediately.
A small, painful smile touched her mouth. “You're going to make yourself insane.”
“Probably.”
“You don't need permission to breathe near me.”
“I am recalibrating.”
“That sounds mechanical.”
“It feels mechanical.”