Epilogue #3
Her message waited on his phone.
Home. Alive. Gate worked. Miraculous.
Taddeo had ignored the final word because responding would only encourage her.
Northglass was quiet when he entered, with one lamp left burning beside the staircase and another near the entrance.
Months earlier, Elettra might have remained awake until he returned; now she had accepted Isolde’s argument that a criminal underboss old enough to command several hundred men was probably capable of locating his own bedroom without domestic supervision.
Taddeo took off his coat, checked one message from Marco about the diverted shipment, then headed upstairs before professional instinct convinced him that forty-three missing minutes required immediate personal intervention.
His bedroom door stood partly open.
Isolde had fallen asleep diagonally across the bed with a museum condition report open beside one hand, one bare foot beyond the blankets, and enough of the mattress occupied that Taddeo suspected she had consciously expanded into his side before losing the argument with exhaustion.
Her phone charged untouched on the bedside table, and even four months later the sight of it carried enough history that Taddeo noticed the absence of monitoring almost as clearly as the device itself.
Her car keys sat inside her open bag near the chair.
The Northglass gate would open for that car tomorrow morning, just as it had opened tonight and every other time she decided to leave.
Taddeo crossed the room and lifted the condition report carefully from beside her hand.
Isolde woke almost immediately, blinked until recognition replaced confusion, then frowned toward the clock while pushing herself onto one elbow.
“What time is it, and before you answer anything else, did somebody die or get shot? I need to know which category of conversation I’m consenting to before midnight. ”
“Twelve forty-three. Nobody died, and nobody was shot.” Taddeo set the report safely on the bedside table and told her one shipment was missing for forty-three minutes near North Ward, which earned him a long stare before Isolde dropped back against the pillow.
“Will standing in your office until three in the morning make the shipment reappear?” She pulled the blankets higher as she asked, and when Taddeo told her no, she followed with the more important question.
“Can Marco investigate for six hours without you personally supervising his breathing, or has his competence deteriorated catastrophically since dinner?”
Taddeo considered the answer just long enough to make irritation sharpen her face. “Probably. There is a Venn Meridian connection we still need to examine, and someone may be trying to make the Serevins look responsible.”
“Excellent. They will both still be suspicious after breakfast.” Isolde lifted the blanket on his side of the bed and looked at him as though the solution should have been obvious to anyone with basic reasoning ability.
“Get in bed, Taddeo. If North Ward invades before eight, I give you permission to become dramatic.”
Months earlier, nobody in Northglass would have spoken to him like that, though the difference mattered less than the reason she could.
The woman currently occupying most of his bed had once studied the estate’s cameras because she was trying to escape him, while tonight her car sat downstairs with her keys in her own bag and her unrestricted phone charging beside the bed.
She could leave before he woke, sleep at Mercer Street tomorrow, stay three nights in Crownport because work ran late, or decide one day that loving him was no longer enough to make returning worthwhile.
Taddeo disliked every one of those possibilities.
He also would not trade them for certainty bought through a locked gate.
He removed his watch and placed it beside Isolde’s phone before switching off the lamp and getting into bed.
She shifted toward him before she was fully awake again, settling against his chest while his arm came naturally around her waist, and Taddeo felt the quiet weight of her body relax against him because there was nothing in the gesture she could not end simply by moving away.
Reports waited downstairs. A Bellandi shipment had vanished near Serevin territory for forty-three minutes, and Silas Venn still stood somewhere beyond the evidence surrounded by explanations that remained irritatingly plausible.
By morning, Taddeo would begin pulling those problems apart because he was still Bellandi underboss, Crownport was still dangerous, and learning how to love Isolde without owning her had not made either of their worlds simple.
Tonight, however, Isolde slept beside him because she had chosen his bed, chosen Northglass, and chosen the complicated life waiting inside both without surrendering her right to choose differently tomorrow.
Taddeo closed his eyes, tightened his arm gently around her, and let the shipment wait until morning.