Chapter Thirty-Two
Isolde
Isolde stopped trying to sleep shortly after two in the morning, although sleep had probably abandoned the effort long before she admitted defeat.
The bedroom felt different with the suitcase closed beside the foot of the bed and half the shelves emptied of the things Elettra had promised could be sent wherever Isolde ended up after Terminal Fourteen.
Her mother's green scarf rested inside the open top of the case because she had packed it, reconsidered, and taken it out twice before finally deciding she wanted to wear it.
Several professional books remained stacked beside the desk because she had lost patience halfway through deciding which belonged in a box and which she might want immediately if she returned to her apartment.
The room had begun as a cell, softened into something almost like a guest room, and then become mostly irrelevant once she started crossing the corridor to sleep with Taddeo, yet tonight it belonged to her again strongly enough that every packed object seemed to acknowledge the possibility she might never come back.
She left the bed and crossed barefoot to the windows, drawing one curtain aside until Northglass emerged beneath a pale strip of moonlight.
The lower garden lamps marked paths she had once memorized for escape, and beyond them the lawn faded toward the trees concealing the perimeter road she had nearly reached during the storm.
She knew now that when she left the estate before dawn, she would walk down the central stairs, cross the entrance hall, and go through the front door into a waiting Bellandi vehicle.
No climbing, no wet clothes, no calculated camera gaps, no running through darkness while men searched the grounds behind her.
The difference should have made the approaching departure feel like victory, but freedom arranged through an exchange negotiated by Corwin and Cesare still carried the uncomfortable shape of other men deciding which direction she would travel once the doors finally opened.
Two quiet knocks came from the corridor.
Isolde turned from the window and stared toward the door for a few seconds before crossing the room.
Taddeo stood on the other side in dark trousers and a black shirt with the sleeves rolled to his forearms, looking less like Cesare Bellandi's underboss than a man who had not slept because too many things could go wrong before sunrise.
He held a slim black folder against one leg and something smaller in his other hand, though the dim hall kept her from identifying it immediately.
“You're awake,” he said quietly, and Isolde leaned against the frame as she answered, “That makes two of us.
If you've come to recommend sleep, I'm going to close the door.” Something almost like amusement moved through his expression before he told her they would leave in a little over two hours, and when she asked whether something had changed with the exchange, he shook his head.
Then his attention moved briefly past her toward the packed suitcase before returning to her face, and instead of stepping across the threshold as he once would have without considering that the room might belong to anyone but him, he asked, “Can I come in?”
The question mattered more because he had already learned what happened when he ignored an answer he did not like.
Isolde knew he would not enter if she refused; she also knew that certainty had been earned only recently enough to remain fragile.
After a moment she stepped aside and said yes, and Taddeo entered without moving farther than the sitting area while she closed the door behind him.
He remained standing until she told him he was beginning to look like somebody waiting for disciplinary action, which earned her the dry response that nobody summoned him for disciplinary action.
“Cesare does,” she reminded him, and Taddeo's mouth moved faintly before he conceded that Cesare was different and sat at the far end of the sofa, leaving enough space that neither of them had to pretend accidental contact would be accidental.
Only then did Isolde notice what he had brought.
Her original phone lay across his palm.
For several seconds she simply looked at it.
The dark green case still had the thin crack across one corner from the afternoon she'd dropped it outside the museum, and the sight of that familiar imperfection struck harder than an undamaged replacement ever could have.
It was the phone she'd carried to work on the night Taddeo took her, the phone one of his men had removed from her hand while she tried to call 911, the phone filled with photographs of museum dinners, ordinary messages with Linnea, unanswered texts to Corwin from the days before his disappearance, and dozens of pieces of a life that had once seemed too mundane to be worth appreciating.
“You kept it,” she said, and Taddeo answered that Marco had wanted to dismantle it but eventually settled for copying what security needed before powering it off and locking it away.
He placed the phone on the table rather than putting it directly into her hand, then set a small clear sleeve beside it containing the inactive SIM.
When Isolde asked why he was returning it tonight, his answer was painfully simple. “Because it's yours.”
“You knew that on Mercer Street,” she said, picking up the phone and turning it over between her hands while familiar weight settled into her palm.
Taddeo answered yes without trying to improve the past, and when she pointed out that knowing it had belonged to her had not stopped him from taking it, he answered no with the same lack of defense.
The restraint irritated her precisely because she had spent weeks becoming accustomed to arguments in which Taddeo could usually find some operational explanation for whatever control he exercised.
Tonight he seemed determined not to turn explanation into innocence.
“The SIM is still inactive,” he said after a moment, though he immediately clarified before she could accuse him of returning a useless object.
Marco could reactivate the original number now if she wanted, but Taddeo believed leaving it dormant until after the exchange reduced a small but real possibility that someone monitoring her old contact information might detect the phone and infer movement around Northglass.
“I think waiting is safer,” he told her.
“But if you tell me you want it live now, I will have Marco turn it on now.”
Isolde studied him for several seconds because the practical facts had not changed nearly as much as the structure of the conversation.
A week earlier he would have explained the danger and announced the result.
Tonight he had explained the danger and left the decision sitting between them with her cracked phone.
She asked whether activating it would help her in any meaningful way before Terminal Fourteen, and when he said no because the temporary handset could still reach anyone she needed, Isolde rubbed her thumb across the cracked corner and decided to wait until after the exchange.
Taddeo nodded.
He did not look relieved.
That mattered.
“You could have made exactly the same security argument a week ago,” Isolde said, setting the phone across her knee.
“And you probably would have been right about the technical part.” Taddeo agreed, and when she told him he would also have used being right as permission to make the decision himself, he agreed with that too until she gave him a tired look and accused him of making her carry the entire conversation.
His expression changed slightly as he leaned his forearms against his knees.
“I'm trying not to explain myself into innocence.”
Something tightened in her chest.
She looked toward the suitcase rather than at him.
“You don't get to become good at this right before I may leave.
It's irritating.” Taddeo told her his timing had never been particularly good, and Isolde corrected him because his professional timing was annoyingly excellent; his emotional timing was catastrophic.
The small exchange loosened something between them without pretending the larger fracture had disappeared, and for the first time since he entered the room, she could imagine sitting here with him under circumstances that did not involve an armed exchange waiting before dawn.
That thought brought the question she had avoided since the earliest days at Northglass.
“If Corwin had never come back, how long would you have kept me?”
Taddeo became completely still.
Isolde held the phone in both hands and forced herself not to soften the question for him.
“If he never contacted anyone, the money stayed missing, and you never found enough evidence to know whether he was alive, what would have happened to me?” She had spent weeks living inside the answer without ever demanding that he say it aloud, because every stage of the investigation had produced a new immediate crisis.
Tonight there were only a few hours left before the arrangement that began on Mercer Street might finally end, and she needed the truth more than she needed reassurance.
Taddeo looked toward the floor for several seconds before answering. “I don't know.”
The words hurt even though they were the only answer she would have believed.