Chapter Thirty-Three #2
Corwin looked back at her and visibly stopped the first answer that tried to leave his mouth. “I am trying to make sure you’re all right, Izzy, and I think I’m allowed to be suspicious of the armed people who kept you behind a gate.”
“You are allowed to ask me what happened.” Isolde folded her arms against the wind and nodded toward the case at his side. “You are not allowed to arrive with your preferred interpretation already written and then force everything I do into it.”
Taddeo felt a brief, ugly satisfaction and killed it immediately. Isolde was not defending him. Treating her correction of Corwin as loyalty to Taddeo would simply reproduce the mistake both men had been making in different forms for weeks.
“Bring the case to the table,” Taddeo said instead. “Marco clears you before you cross the inner line. Then Orsino verifies the money.”
Corwin stared at him for several seconds before a tired laugh left him. “No hello? No congratulations on finally making your leverage work?”
“We have never met, so there is nothing to welcome back.” Taddeo looked deliberately at the case rather than allowing the argument to become personal before Corwin even crossed the yard. “Bring the evidence.”
“I feel like kidnapping my sister created enough of a relationship to make introductions unnecessary.” Corwin started forward anyway while Isolde rubbed two fingers against her forehead, already looking exhausted by both of them.
“If either of you turns this into a competition over whose decisions endangered me more, I am charging by the minute.” Her gaze moved from Corwin to Taddeo with the same expression she normally used when somebody had made a damaged object worse through amateur repair.
“Orsino can collect the money and donate it to whatever organization specializes in teaching emotionally stunted men to talk to women like human beings.”
Orsino did not look up from the laptop. “I will research appropriate charities once we are indoors and no one is attempting to shoot us.”
Corwin almost laughed.
The sound changed Isolde’s expression before she could stop it.
For one brief moment, the theft, disappearance, lies, and fear vanished from her face, and Corwin looked younger in response, as though some version of the brother she remembered had managed to survive the damage long enough to recognize her.
He left his driver beside the van and approached the exchange line carrying the case.
Marco stopped him at fifteen yards and conducted the weapons check exactly as negotiated, requiring Corwin to open his coat, turn, and show enough of his waistband and ankles to establish that he had not brought an obvious firearm into the center area.
No one touched him, and when Marco finally cleared the movement, Corwin crossed the remaining space until only several feet separated him from Isolde.
Everything in his posture changed.
The anger remained, but uncertainty entered around it, and for the first time Taddeo saw a man who had prepared obsessively for Bellandi betrayal yet apparently never decided whether his sister would want him to touch her after what he had done.
Isolde answered the question herself.
She crossed the distance and wrapped both arms around him.
The case struck Corwin’s leg before he dropped it to the pavement and pulled her hard against his chest, one hand closing around the back of her coat while he bent his head over her hair.
Isolde’s face disappeared against his shoulder, fingers gripping the fabric between his shoulder blades, and for several seconds neither of them spoke because there was nothing uncomplicated enough to say.
Taddeo turned his attention toward the rail side.
Possessiveness still came, immediate and irrational, but he no longer believed every feeling deserved authority simply because it existed.
Corwin had loved Isolde before Taddeo ever knew her name.
He had failed her badly and put her in danger through arrogance, but none of that changed the fact that she had been afraid he was dead and was now holding her brother alive beneath her hands.
When Taddeo finally looked back, Isolde had drawn away enough to examine Corwin’s face. She touched his cheek briefly before frowning at him. “You look terrible. Somehow worse than you did on video, which seemed difficult.”
Corwin laughed unsteadily and scrubbed one hand over the back of his neck. “Good to see you too. For the record, I slept occasionally.”
“You stole eight million dollars and disappeared into hiding, so I am not prepared to become emotionally invested in your hotel reviews.”
The corner of her mouth moved.
Corwin smiled back until his attention shifted past her toward Taddeo.
“You hurt her?” The warmth vanished from his voice, his shoulders tightening as he looked at Taddeo rather than at the woman standing directly in front of him.
Isolde noticed before Taddeo could respond. “Ask me.”
Corwin looked back at her.
“I am standing here,” she said. “Do not discuss what happened to me with him as though I am evidence on Orsino’s table.”
Corwin’s jaw flexed. He visibly disliked the correction but made himself obey it. “Did he hurt you?”
“Yes.” Isolde’s answer came without hesitation, and Taddeo remained motionless while the word landed exactly where it should.
“Not in the version you are probably building, because nobody sexually forced me, nobody beat me, and the people at Northglass did not spend weeks abusing me. Taddeo kidnapped me, kept me from leaving, controlled parts of my communication, and later violated a privacy boundary after I explicitly told him not to. Those things hurt me without needing to become something else.”
Corwin’s face hardened. “He held you prisoner, Izzy. I don’t understand why you are saying that as though the distinctions make him better.”
“I am not making him better.” Her voice remained even, though Taddeo could hear strain beneath it. “I am telling you what happened because you asked me, and I will not edit the truth until it becomes the story you need.”
Taddeo met Corwin’s stare only after Isolde finished. “I held her against her will, and I was wrong to make her responsible for your debt.”
Corwin’s mouth twisted. “Convenient realization after you got everything you wanted.”
“Some realizations arrive late.” Taddeo kept his hands loose at his sides despite every instinct that responded when Corwin stepped half a pace forward. “Late does not make the earlier decision less wrong.”
Corwin’s gaze moved toward Isolde again. “And the rest of it? Because unless I have forgotten how to read people completely, there is more between you than hostage negotiations.”
Isolde closed her eyes briefly. “We are not doing this in a freight terminal before dawn while nearly everyone around us is armed.”
Corwin stared between them, and disbelief slowly replaced anger. “You and him.”
“Corwin.”
“You are serious about him.”
“This is not the time to discover my romantic life.” Color had risen faintly beneath Isolde’s cheeks despite the cold, and under almost any other circumstances Taddeo would have enjoyed it.
Corwin looked at Taddeo with renewed fury. “You kidnapped her and then slept with her while she was still trapped in your house, and you expect me to believe you understand what you did.”
Taddeo went very still. “Do not reduce her decisions to something I did to her because you need a cleaner reason to hate me.”
“She was behind your fucking gate.”
“Yes.” Taddeo did not allow himself the easier defense. “Captivity complicated everything between us. She initiated the first kiss, and I stopped because I believed the circumstances mattered. Later she made her choices clearly. None of that makes holding her at Northglass acceptable.”
The absence of denial wrong-footed Corwin more effectively than an argument would have.
Isolde looked between them with exhausted disbelief.
“Taddeo does not get to erase what he did because he loves me, and you do not get to erase what you did because you are my brother. Both of you made decisions for me because each of you believed your reason was important enough, so neither of you gets to stand here pretending the other man invented the problem.”
Corwin’s eyes moved toward Taddeo.
Understanding arrived visibly.
“He loves you.”
“This is still not the time.” Isolde bent, picked up the hard-shell case Corwin had left on the ground, and pushed it toward him. “You came here to finish something. Finish it before all of us freeze or somebody with a weapon decides our family discussion has become intolerable.”
Corwin took the case and followed her toward Orsino’s table.
The exchange became procedural because everyone needed it to.
Corwin placed a small hardware authenticator beside Orsino’s isolated laptop and supplied a handwritten sequence of temporary credentials.
Three financial accounts appeared once the secure connection resolved, together holding the Bellandi funds he had moved before disappearing.
Orsino verified the balances against the figures supplied earlier, then ran the agreed small test transfer rather than accepting that visible money and controlled money were the same thing.
“Eight point four remains present across the three structures,” Orsino said after reviewing the balances. “Presence does not establish that the Bellandis can recover it.”
“The hardware token does.” Corwin tapped the authenticator with one finger. “I kept the accounts separate because consolidating everything would have made a freeze easier if somebody found the route.”
“You attempted two additional transfers after disappearing,” Taddeo said. “One burned almost seventy thousand in fees.”
Corwin looked up with immediate irritation. “I was testing whether the route had been compromised, and I did not anticipate the Bellandis conducting a customer-satisfaction survey regarding transaction costs after kidnapping my sister.”