Chapter Thirty-Three #4
“This is not automatically about him. If I leave Taddeo, that does not mean I automatically leave Crownport with you, and if I do not leave with you, that does not automatically mean I chose Taddeo.”
Corwin lowered his voice, disbelief still obvious. “You would stay with the man who kidnapped you.”
“I did not say that.” Exhaustion entered her face. “I said that when this is over, I decide.”
Corwin stared at her.
Taddeo recognized the expression because he had worn some version of it often enough: the humiliating discovery that a principle so obvious in language had never once become the center of his decisions.
Corwin rubbed both hands over his face. “Fine. Then we argue about it somewhere that isn’t a freight terminal full of guns.”
“That is closer.” Isolde looked at him for another second. “Apparently tonight I am rewarding incremental improvement.”
Taddeo would have enjoyed Corwin’s irritation more if Isolde’s attention had not changed at that exact moment.
Her face remained almost still.
Only her eyes moved.
They passed over Corwin’s shoulder and settled somewhere northeast of the verification table, then dropped toward Orsino’s laptop as though nothing had happened. Several seconds later she looked up again without turning her head completely.
The blood left her face.
Taddeo did not follow her gaze.
He had watched Isolde notice too many details other people missed to mistake the change for distraction.
She shifted closer to him slowly, using the table as an excuse to alter position until she stood within speaking distance. Her fingers rested lightly along the steel edge.
“The communications man,” she said quietly while keeping her attention on Orsino’s screen. “Under the warehouse overhang.”
“Russo.” Taddeo kept his own gaze lowered. “Tell me what you noticed without looking at him again.”
“His right hand.” Isolde swallowed, and her fingers tightened slightly against the table. “The ring.”
Taddeo’s pulse changed.
He remembered Marco pulling Russo’s personnel photographs the previous night, the broad silver band and flat black stone that had seemed useful only as a visual identifier.
“You recognize it.”
“From the museum.” Her voice remained controlled, though memory sharpened it.
“During the attack, when the emergency lighting came on in the service corridor, one of the masked men caught himself against the prep-room doorframe after somebody fired. I never saw his face. His glove had pulled back at the wrist, and there was a wide silver ring with a dark stone on his right hand. The emergency light caught it.”
Taddeo remembered the museum report.
Not every attacker had been identified.
At least one man had disappeared through the service side without ever being accounted for cleanly.
Russo had never appeared in the investigation.
Now a Bellandi soldier whose transfer into freight protection Lelio had personally sponsored years earlier sat at secondary communications only because somebody used stolen credentials to put him there hours before the exchange, and Isolde remembered the same distinctive ring on a masked man who had come into her museum looking for Corwin’s archive.
Coincidence had become an increasingly poor explanation.
Taddeo touched two fingers briefly against the inner seam of his coat.
Marco saw the signal without looking directly at him. He shifted his weight and activated the concealed independent transmitter.
Nico’s voice entered Taddeo’s hidden receiver almost immediately. “Secondary network live. All hidden positions ready. Official communications unchanged.”
Taddeo tapped a single acknowledgment beneath his coat.
Orsino’s eyes flicked once toward Marco and returned to the laptop. The older man had spent enough of his life around Taddeo to recognize a security shift without needing it narrated in front of anyone who might be watching.
Corwin noticed too.
“Something is wrong.” He kept his voice low, but his grip tightened on the second drive. “If you tell me nothing is wrong while every Bellandi around this table suddenly starts standing differently, I’m going to assume you are lying.”
“Give Orsino the drive,” Taddeo said. “Keep your driver where he is.”
Corwin stared at him. “You went from auditing my theft to emergency instructions in less than thirty seconds. Explain what changed.”
Isolde gave Corwin a slight shake of her head before he could turn around and look for the answer himself. “I recognized one of the Bellandi men from the museum attack. Taddeo needs him to believe I didn’t.”
Corwin’s face changed immediately, but he kept his head pointed toward the table. “One of your people attacked her?”
“One of Lelio’s, if the identification is right.” Taddeo looked toward Isolde instead of Russo. “How certain are you?”
She breathed in slowly before answering. “I would not identify his face because I did not see it. I remember the ring. I remember thinking at the time that wearing something distinctive while masked was careless.”
“That is enough to treat the risk as real,” Taddeo said. “It is not enough to pretend we have an identification you cannot actually make.”
Isolde met his eyes for the briefest moment.
The distinction mattered.