25. Gianna
GIANNA
T he hallway just outside the suite housing Valentina and Luca smells of antiseptic and bergamot, a strange combination that clings to the walls even after the medics have cleared out.
I walk slowly, tracing the edge of the wainscoting with one hand as I pass the doors.
The rhythm grounds me. Left, right, another breath.
They’ve kept the don and his wife separate so both of them can receive undivided attention. I stop by Valentina’s chamber first.
She is sitting up in bed, propped against a column of pillows with a shawl drawn around her shoulders and a book open across her knees, though I do not think she has turned a page in the past twenty minutes.
Her hair is pinned back in a low knot, and someone has brought her tea she isn’t drinking.
Her face is pale in the late morning light, but there’s still steel in the way she holds her spine.
I step into the doorway, and she lifts her head, offering a thin smile that looks more like a truce than a greeting.
"Are the girls all right?" she asks.
"Yes. They’re with their nanny. We haven’t let them out of the south wing."
She nods once and closes the book without marking her place.
The way her fingers rest on the cover reminds me of how she holds a pistol.
She has not asked about the server.
She already knows.
And I think she believes I haven’t told Dante everything yet. F
or a moment, I consider letting her know that my husband now knows everything, that I’ve chosen this family over the one I was born into.
The words refuse to come, and instead, a wave of tiredness washes over me, so acute that it makes me shiver.
"Have you eaten?" I ask instead, my voice dropping to a low murmur.
"I tried. My mouth still tastes like metal."
I don’t know what to say to that.
I stand with my hands folded in front of me until the silence fills with too much memory.
Then I nod and leave her to the stillness.
Luca is two doors down, in a room with reinforced window locks.
He is awake when I enter, but his color is still off, as if something inside him is lagging behind the rest. He’s sitting in the armchair beside the window, one hand curled loosely around a tumbler of water, the other pressed to the side of his neck.
He looks thinner than he did yesterday, which shouldn’t be possible.
Like the poison stole something beneath the skin that hasn’t returned.
He doesn’t greet me.
Just watches me cross the room. "They dosed it carefully," he says, his voice gravel-rough but lucid. "Not enough to kill instantly. Just enough to make it hurt."
"Dante handled it," I reply. "You’re both lucky he did."
Luca’s mouth lifts, but it’s not a smile. "No such thing as luck in this house."
I crouch beside the chair and set my hand over his.
He lets me.
That alone tells me how bad it was.
His eyes drift toward the window again.
"Tell him to finish it," he says quietly. "Whatever he needs to do, whoever he needs to break. Just end it."
I nod, though I don’t know if he sees it, and then I step out.
Lockdown protocol has silenced even the floorboards.
No music from the kitchen, no faint piano drifting from the east wing where the twins sometimes practice scales with sticky fingers and wrong notes.
Even the staff walk differently now.
Shoulders stiff.
Heads low.
No one wants to be the one who makes the next mistake.
The girls are in the playroom in the south wing.
I check on them every half hour, even though the guards outside their door are the best we have left.
I have memorized the pattern of their footsteps. I have counted their weapons twice.
Arietta asks when Papa is coming back.
I tell her soon.
I lie like it costs nothing, and she believes me because she wants to.
Alessia does not ask.
She watches the windows instead, drawing long, looping letters into the fogged glass with her finger.
The tension has turned to static beneath my skin.
I cannot sit.
I cannot eat.
I pace the corridor once, then again, then finally pull on a shawl and step outside.
The sky is dull, thick with clouds, and hanging low.
The olive trees sway in rhythm with a breeze that smells faintly of damp stone and cut grass.
The garden is empty.
A good sign.
No unscheduled movement.
I walk along the gravel path that rings the southern perimeter, past the fountain with its cracked base and the fig tree that bears bountiful fruit.
My shoes leave soft indentations in the gravel, each one vanishing behind me as I go.
I am halfway to the garden wall when I hear boots crunching fast behind me.
Two guards approach, one of them raising a hand to slow me.
"Madam," he says. "You have a visitor."
My throat tightens. "Who?"
He exchanges a glance with the other man.
"Man says he’s served you for years, and to tell you his name is Renato."
I stop walking.
For a moment, I cannot place the name.
Not because I’ve forgotten it, but because it seems impossible that the word would be spoken again now, of all times, wrapping in something so calm and familiar.
Then I manage a weak nod. "Where?"
"The main waiting room. He came on foot from the north side. The gate team verified him. He asked for you by name."
I turn without another word and follow them back through the courtyard.
When we reach the front wing, I see four more guards stationed just beyond the double doors, and at least two in the corridor.
All of them alert.
All of them watching.
And there in the waiting room, near the fireplace, seated in the high-backed chair, is Renato.
He rises when I enter, still holding his cane in one hand, the other smoothing the front of his coat.
The same coat he wore every autumn.
Wool, deep brown, with a Rossi crest stitched faintly beneath the inner collar.
His face has aged overnight.
New lines curve around his mouth and eyes.
But his posture is the same.
Upright.
Serene.
As if nothing outside this room has touched him.
"Signorina," he says, and the name hits me in a place I thought I had burned down years ago.
"Renato," I answer, and I do not realize I have taken a step forward until the guards shift at the door.
He smiles, just faintly, and bows his head.
"I am sorry for the intrusion," he says, voice gravelly. "But I thought it was time we spoke."
He shrugs one shoulder, the movement slow.
"I worried for you. The news reaches even the quieter corners of the city. I heard...something happened."
I nod. "There was a breach. We’re still securing the grounds."
His gaze flickers, not with surprise, but with concern.
"The girls?"
"They’re safe."
He exhales softly.
"That’s all that matters."
I study him for a moment.
His face is thinner, the lines around his eyes deeper than I remember, but his expression is still the same one that greeted me in the halls of the old Rossi estate every morning before school.
There’s comfort in it, even if I can’t afford comfort right now.
"Would you walk with me?" he asks. "If there’s time."
I hesitate only a moment before nodding.
"Of course."
He smiles gently, the kind of smile that carries too many years behind it.
Wistfulness wrings my heart raw as I notice how it isn’t the polite stretch of lips that he always reserved for strangers, but the kind worn by men who watched you grow from nothing and still see the child in the shadow of the adult.
I lead him through the western corridor garden, where the architecture softens.
Here, the estate forgets its angles.
The stone arches blur into trellises, and the gravel path is narrowed by moss.
Two guards are stationed at the far end, near the old sundial.
They straighten when they see us, eyes flicking to the man at my side.
I give a single nod, and they ease back into the hedge without question.
The corridor opens to an arcade of vines.
Moonflower and winter jasmine trail across wrought iron, already heavy with scent.
The air is cooler here, holding the echo of water from a nearby fountain I can’t yet hear.
It smells of rosemary and lime bark, damp mulch, and split citrus peels from earlier in the day.
Renato walks slowly.
His cane taps gently against the crushed stone path, a rhythm unhurried.
He does not fill the silence, and neither do I.
We pass a strange little tree near the edge of the path.
It is squat, with thick, waxy leaves, and dangles a dozen glossy yellow fruits shaped like teardrops.
He tilts his head, blinking at it. "What is that?"
"Medlar," I say softly. "It’s one of the only things that grows this far north if you bribe it with sun and shelter. My girls like it better than they admit."
He squints.
"I’ve never seen it before."
"They have to rot before you can eat them," I add, amused by his raised brow. "Astringent when fresh. Sweet only when they’re nearly gone. My mother used to say everything worth tasting makes you wait."
He chuckles under his breath.
"She was never wrong."
I nod, and we walk on.
The path curves.
The rosemary deepens.
He leans a little heavier into the cane and glances to his right, where a low stone bench half disappears beneath the leaves of an orange-blooming shrub.
"Do you remember the mulberry bush at the old estate?" he asks, almost idly.
I stop.
Of course I remember.
"It used to stain the marble pink," I say. "Rafa and I weren’t allowed near it after the first summer. But we always found our way back."
"Your father wanted it cut down," he says. "Too messy, he said. The berries fell too fast, ruined the tiles. But your mother liked how it looked against the columns. Called it a small rebellion."
A breeze stirs the jasmine behind us.
The scent is thick, dizzying.
"I used to sit under it during storms," I murmur. "That one summer when he was gone for weeks. The roof tiles leaked in the south hall, but that bush never shook."
He makes a soft sound.
Maybe agreement.
Maybe regret.
"The fruit was always a little too sour," I add. "But we ate it anyway. The stains stayed for days."
He laughs then, not loud, but rich in the way that makes my heart ache once more for the childhood that I remember, and the one I never got to experience.
"I cleaned more of that marble than I care to admit," he says. "And never once complained to your mother."
"Because she would’ve fired you?"
"No. Because she would’ve made me plant another."
The silence is full with time, and memory, and all the versions of me he’s carried without my knowing.
We walk farther, to where the fountain finally reveals itself behind a wall of cypress.
It’s newer, more symmetrical than anything in the Rossi house, but the sound of water trickling is still the same.
Constant.
Steady.
Like something in the bones of the world hasn’t changed.
He pauses beside it, resting both hands on the crook of his cane.
"I miss the old garden," he says, low. "It was never perfect. But it had history."
"So does this one," I say, glancing at the tiled border, at the faint initials carved in stone—some Salvatore ancestor who thought himself eternal.
He considers that, then exhales.
"You’ve made it feel different," he says. "More like a house that breathes."
I don’t answer at once.
Instead, I reach down and pick a single medlar from the tree behind us, still firm, not ready. I place it gently on the stone edge of the fountain.
"Let it ripen," I say.
His gaze lingers on the fruit for a long moment.
Then he nods, just once.
We stand there for a little while longer, and the past folds around us like an old coat—worn at the seams, but still warm.
Then, I lead him past the older rose beds that never quite took to the new irrigation lines.
He hums quietly, a tune I cannot name, something he must have used to fill time in the kitchen when the house was too quiet.
As we near the perimeter wall, he slows.
"I have not seen Signor Rafa in some time," he says. "I believed he would come home after you visited. But then the rumors started."
A pebble of goosebumps breaks across my arm, but I say nothing.
"I don’t believe most of what I hear," he adds, carefully. "But if even a piece of it is true, I thought you might need to hear it from someone who still remembers him before all of this."
"I don’t know what’s true anymore," I say quietly. "I want to believe there’s still a part of him that wouldn’t turn on us. That wouldn’t turn on me."
"He loved you," Renato says with a sigh. "Even when he didn’t know how to show it."
We reach the old iron gate that separates the orchard path from the outer boundary of the estate.
The gate itself is narrow and rust-streaked, warped slightly at the hinge from age or weather or something older.
Just beyond it, the hedgerow rises dense and uneven, a wall of thorny branches and scrub oak that was once trimmed with precision but now breathes like something alive.
Sunlight splinters through the upper canopy in crooked slants, and it smells of bark and distant citrus.
I pause just short of the latch.
My hand hovers over the iron.
Something prickles at the base of my neck, not cold, not quite fear.
Just awareness.
My body knowing something before my mind catches up.
There is movement.
Quick.
Low to the ground.
Not the rustle of an animal.
Not the weight of a boar or the scattering dance of a hare.
This is different.
Intentional.
A slide between shadows.
My breath stutters.
And for a moment—one single, irrational beat—I think it’s Rafa.
The way it moved.
The way the hedgerow seemed to absorb the figure, not resist it.
The way the light fractured just as it passed, like it didn’t want to be seen, only recognized.
My heart kicks against my ribs hard enough to echo in my throat.
"There," I cry out sharply. "In the thicket. Something moved."
Two guards standing further up the path stiffen and begin moving toward the gate at once.
I step forward, eyes narrowing. "Check the perimeter," I call. "Now."
They answer with nods and draw their weapons, fading into the green.
My pulse climbs.
I watch the bushes for another sign, a break, a shape.
Then I feel a hand at the back of my neck.
Another over my mouth.
The scent hits first—sweet, cloying, chemical.
I twist, try to cry out, but my legs have already begun to fail me.
The sky tilts.
The last thing I feel is the gravel beneath my knees as my body gives way, and the thud of my shoulder against the base of a tree.
The bark is rough beneath my cheek.