Chapter Thirty-Six #3
“You won’t decide some delivery truck outside the museum looks suspicious and suddenly appear?”
“No.”
“You won’t have Marco accidentally monitor my phone because you’re concerned?”
“No.”
“You won’t send Elettra to Mercer Street with food until I surrender?”
The corner of his mouth moved. “I had not considered using Elettra as an emotional weapon.”
“She would be extremely effective.”
“Terrifyingly.”
The faint humor disappeared almost as quickly as it came.
Isolde picked up the car keys.
Taddeo watched her hand close around them.
Neither spoke.
The proof was going to hurt them both.
That was what made it proof.
Elettra waited in the entrance hall twenty minutes later with Isolde’s suitcase and two boxes beside the doors.
She did not ask whether Isolde intended to return and did not say anything sentimental about Northglass having become her home.
She hugged Isolde hard enough to make the goodbye real, then placed a container of food beside the luggage because apparently kidnapping, gunfire, emotional devastation, and freedom could all coexist with Elettra’s belief that Isolde might become hungry during a thirty-minute drive.
Marco stood near Isolde’s car and handed over the unrestricted phone after the luggage was loaded. “Your hold profile is gone completely. The gate does not require authorization for you to leave.”
“And entry?” Isolde asked, and Marco’s mouth shifted with what looked suspiciously like approval.
“You don’t have automatic residential entry anymore. If you come back, the gatehouse calls the house unless you decide later you want permanent access.”
For a second, Isolde could only look at him.
Taddeo had not left himself a hidden shortcut.
She was not still his resident by administrative convenience.
Even returning would have to be chosen.
“Thank you,” she said.
Marco looked uncomfortable with sincerity. “Try not to crawl under any more steel tables while people are shooting at you. It complicates extraction.”
“I make no promises.”
“I expected that.”
Taddeo remained on the Northglass steps.
He had not come closer.
The space between them felt almost cruel.
Isolde walked toward him anyway.
For a moment neither of them seemed to know whether goodbye entitled them to touch, which would have been funny if the uncertainty had not hurt so much. Isolde solved it by wrapping both arms carefully around him, avoiding the worst of the wounds beneath his shirt.
Taddeo inhaled sharply.
Then his arms came around her.
He did not hold tightly enough to make leaving difficult.
“I love you too,” Isolde whispered against his chest. She felt his entire body respond before his arms tightened by the smallest amount.
Taddeo bent his head.
He waited.
Isolde lifted her face and kissed him.
The kiss remained brief because anything longer would have made leaving more difficult than she could tolerate, and when she stepped back, Taddeo let his hands fall away immediately.
She got into her car.
Her car.
The engine started at the first turn.
Nobody occupied the passenger seat. No tinted sedan waited ahead of her, and no security vehicle pulled out behind her when she drove down the Northglass approach.
Her unrestricted phone lay beside her purse, her apartment keys rested in the cup holder, and her own money remained accessible through bank cards nobody else controlled.
When she reached the perimeter, the iron gates opened.
Isolde drove through.
They closed behind her.
Three miles later she pulled onto the shoulder and cried hard enough that continuing to drive became impossible.
Freedom, she discovered during the twelve days that followed, was wonderful.
The first night back at Mercer Street, Isolde slept in her own bed with every lock engaged because she chose to turn them herself.
She woke at six to Crownport traffic beyond windows nobody had reinforced against gunfire, showered with the bathroom door open simply because there was no reason not to, and ate crackers directly from the sleeve while standing barefoot in her kitchen because the refrigerator was nearly empty and nobody appeared with a carefully balanced breakfast. The pleasure she took in all of it was almost ridiculous.
Linnea arrived shortly after nine with coffee, groceries, and enough questions to qualify as a hostile interview.
Isolde gave her what she safely could without turning Linnea into another person carrying information that could make her useful to dangerous people.
Corwin had become involved with criminals.
Isolde had been dragged into the consequences.
For several weeks, she had lived somewhere she had not initially been allowed to leave.
Linnea became very quiet.
“Did somebody hurt you?” she asked, setting her coffee on the kitchen counter and watching Isolde with enough care that lying would have been insulting.
“Yes.” Isolde refused to make Taddeo’s history prettier simply because loving him had survived it. “Not in the way you’re probably imagining, and I am safe now, but yes.”
Linnea held her gaze. “Do you need me to help you disappear?”
Once, Isolde would have said yes before the question ended.
“No.”
“Police?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.” Isolde rubbed one hand over her face and sighed. “I’m aware that sounds complicated.”
“I hate that it sounds complicated.”
“So do I.”
Her return to the museum happened gradually over the following week, and the first morning she walked through the staff entrance nearly undid her.
The conservation laboratory smelled exactly as it should—old paper, adhesives, clean cotton, solvents, dry wood, and the peculiar dust produced by objects that had survived long enough to require professional argument about how much of their damage should remain visible.
Marcus stared at her long enough to make clear he had questions before deciding none of them were his business.
Paul welcomed her back without pressing and politely ignored the way she startled when somebody dropped a metal tray in the adjoining room.
Linnea became an efficient barrier between Isolde and every coworker tempted to ask what kind of family emergency lasted weeks and returned someone with healing cuts along her hands.
Isolde worked.
She went to the grocery store.
She drove herself to the museum and left whenever she wanted.
One afternoon her phone battery died because she forgot to charge it, and nobody arrived at the conservation lab demanding to know why her location had disappeared.
She wandered through a bookstore alone and remained forty minutes longer than she planned.
She bought terrible takeout at eleven at night without Elettra judging her nutritional choices, stayed late at the museum once because a treatment reached a stage she did not want to interrupt, and changed her mind another evening and left early because she was tired.
She loved every ordinary choice.
None of them made her stop loving Taddeo.
That was the second thing freedom taught her.
For the first few days, Isolde expected distance to correct whatever captivity had distorted.
She imagined returning to her apartment and museum would reveal her attachment to Taddeo as dependency created by danger, forced proximity, or the psychological ugliness of needing comfort from the man who controlled whether she could leave.
She expected freedom to separate attraction from circumstance so cleanly that choosing him would become obviously impossible.
Instead, she missed him in humiliatingly specific ways.
She missed the way he forgot coffee until it went cold while reading reports.
She missed arguing about music and the controlled profanity that emerged only when someone exceeded his patience by an impressive margin.
She missed catching him watching her across a room and watching him realize she had noticed.
She missed working opposite him in the library while neither spoke for an hour, then having him ask one precise question that proved he had listened to every explanation she gave him about the evidence.
She even missed Northglass’s kitchen, which felt especially offensive because her own kitchen had never participated in kidnapping anyone.
On the third day, Taddeo sent one message.
If you need me, you know where I am.
Nothing followed.
He did not call.
He did not manufacture an emergency. Marco never appeared outside the museum, and Elettra did not arrive at Mercer Street bearing enough food to compromise Isolde’s emotional resolve.
No suspicious Bellandi business developed conveniently near her apartment, and no one found a security excuse to keep Taddeo present at the edges of her life.
By the eighth day, the absence had become almost unbearable.
By the tenth, Isolde understood why.
Taddeo had spent most of his adult life proving attachment through action.
He protected, arranged, threatened, watched, controlled, killed, fixed, carried, anticipated, and solved.
Doing something was how he loved people because action allowed him to place danger inside a structure he could understand.
The hardest thing she had ever asked him to do was nothing.
He was doing it.
On the twelfth morning, Isolde woke before her alarm and spent nearly ten minutes staring at the ceiling.
Then she got dressed and went to work.
Returning to Taddeo did not require abandoning the rest of her life to prove that he mattered, so she spent four hours documenting treatment on an eighteenth-century port ledger, ate lunch with Linnea, attended a collections meeting that ran twenty minutes long because museum administrators were apparently capable of creating suffering without weapons, and left at the normal end of her shift.
At five-seven, Isolde got into her car.
She drove west.
Alone.