Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
GIA
The first thing I'm aware of is the ceiling.
Cream, high, the same one I stared at for two hours before sleep finally came.
Morning light cuts through the gap in the curtains in one thin, decisive line across the floor and I track it with my eyes while the rest of me comes awake slowly.
My body is tired in that specific way that means the sleep I got was the wrong kind — too deep at the wrong time, too shallow when I needed it most.
The second thing I'm aware of is the jewelry box.
I don't look at it yet. I lie for another minute, on my back, listening to the house. The east wing is quiet. Rafael is not in the room as usual. Birds somewhere outside, distant. The faint sound of movement from the floors below where the household starts its day without waiting for me.
Sighing, I push myself to get up.
I pull my robe on, run a hand through my hair, and then I cross to the dressing table and open the jewelry box. The velvet lining gives at the corner where it was never quite glued down properly and the phone is there exactly where I left it, tucked under a string of pearls I've never worn.
I take it and sit on the edge of the bed.
Small, cheap, the kind that leaves no trail.
I know how to do this, not because anyone sat me down and walked me through it, this is just the kind of knowledge that settles into you when you grow up in a house like mine.
Absorbed through walls, through half-heard conversations, through years of watching men like my father conduct their lives with one layer always hidden underneath the visible one.
A specific sequence. Brief. Coded. Nothing traceable if the phone was ever found.
I type.
Settled. Access confirmed.
I type for a minute or two. I give a route reference, coded, the way my father taught me. And a timing window. Twelve minutes. I'd heard Rafael say it to one of his men in the corridor outside the study.
My thumb hovers.
The thing about a first step is that it's still a step. My father would say I'm being sentimental. He'd probably be right. I press send, watch the message go, and then I sit there with the phone in both hands like it's done something to me personally.
I hope it is just minor information.
You're splitting hairs, Gia.
I power the phone off, press it back into the velvet lining, close the box, return it to the drawer. Stand up. My reflection in the dressing mirror looks exactly the same as it did ten minutes ago, which seems wrong. It feels like something should be different. Some visible mark of what I just did.
There isn't one. Of course, there isn't. I pull my hair back, change into something presentable, and go downstairs.
The kitchen smells like butter and coffee and something with rosemary, and for a single unguarded second it makes me homesick for the apartment in the Marais in a way I wasn't expecting.
Sunday mornings, Laura still in pajamas, the boulangerie two streets over.
I used to let her put too much jam on everything and pretend not to notice.
The chef, Marco, fifties, with the kind of forearms that come from thirty years of kneading dough, is at the range when I come in. He glances up, does a quick reassessment of the situation, and gives me a nod that is professionally neutral but not unfriendly.
"Mrs. Caruso. Breakfast?"
"Please." I slide onto one of the stools at the kitchen island, which is probably not where I'm supposed to eat — there's a whole dining room for that — but the dining room is enormous and silent and I can't face it alone this morning. "Whatever you're making is fine."
He tilts his head toward the pan. "Frittata. Prosciutto, herbs."
"Perfect."
I look around. The kitchen is warm and lived-in in a way the rest of the house isn't quite, copper pans hanging in a row, a corkboard near the door covered in handwritten notes.
I'd half hoped the other women would be here, there are two other wives in the household's orbit who came to dinner earlier this week, warm in that careful mafia-wife way, watchful under the warmth. But the kitchen is just Marco and me.
"How long have you worked here?" I ask.
He doesn't look up from the pan. "Eleven years."
"You must know where everything is buried."
He pauses for exactly one beat. Then the corner of his mouth moves. "I know where the good olive oil is. That's enough."
I almost laugh. "Fair."
"You like coffee, Mrs. Caruso?"
"I would actually marry the coffee machine if I wasn't already spoken for."
He sets a cup in front of me without comment, but the almost-smile stays.
I wrap both hands around it and let myself have thirty seconds of just this, the warmth of the cup, the smell of the kitchen, the ordinary comfort of a person making food nearby.
Thirty seconds of not being anyone's wife or anyone's spy or anyone's daughter.
The door opens.
The air in the room changes, the way it always does, that specific shift in pressure that I am apparently now conditioned to notice like some kind of awful instinct.
Rafael.
He's in a grey shirt, sleeves already pushed up, collar open. He looks like he's been awake for hours, which he probably has. His eyes find me the second he comes through the door and they stay there for a moment.
Marco becomes very focused on the frittata.
Smart man.
I keep my hands around my cup. Rafael crosses to the coffee machine without breaking eye contact, which requires a detour around the island, which means he walks closer to me than he strictly needs to.
The hem of his shirt passes within arm's reach.
I can smell him, soap, something faintly woody, the clean warmth of a man who takes up more space than his body actually occupies.
I take a deep breath in and my eyes close automatically rolling backwards.
I’ve always been a sucker for people that smell good and this man smells so good, I can feel the tension rising up between my thighs.
He pours his coffee, turns and leans back against the counter looking right at me.
I look back.
The silence goes on long enough that it stops being silence and starts being something else entirely.
My pulse sits at a steady, inconvenient thud in my throat.
The memory of last night decides to surface at exactly this moment, his back under the shower spray, the turn, the face, still there, grinning at me.
Don't.
"How did you sleep?" he asks.
His voice in the morning is lower. I file that away in the part of my brain that has apparently dedicated itself to cataloguing Rafael Caruso in excruciating detail against my explicit instructions.
"Well," I say. "Really well. Best sleep I've had in years, actually."
A complete and total lie, delivered with great confidence.
He holds my gaze. I hold his back. I am an excellent liar. I have been my entire life. It is one of the few things my upbringing gave me that I'm genuinely grateful for.
"Good," he says, and I can't tell what he does or doesn't believe.
Marco sets the frittata in front of me quietly and retreats to the far end of the kitchen. Bless him.
I pick up my fork. Rafael doesn't move from the counter. He just stands there with his coffee like he has nowhere to be, which I know is not true, which means he's choosing to be here, which I am not going to think about.
"Someone was in my office last night." He suddenly says and I freeze.
The fork manages to stay in my hand. My face stays exactly where I put it.
Shit; shit, shit. I’m going to die.
My heart isn’t just beating; it’s a trapped bird slamming itself against the bars of my ribs.
I’m screwed.
The "cold" in my chest has turned into a numbing frost, creeping up my throat, making it hard to swallow. I need to blink. I need to look away, but I can’t. His eyes are a physical weight, pinning me to the chair.
Does he know?
I run through the night again, a frantic, high-speed reel in my mind.
My mind screams. Which things? The letter-opener I’d shifted two inches to the left to see the ledger underneath?
The silver clock I’d tilted to check for a hidden compartment?
Or was it the scent? Did I leave a trace of my perfume, a microscopic flake of skin, a single strand of hair that now sat in a plastic bag in his desk drawer?
"S-Someone broke in?" I keep my voice curious. A degree or two below concerned.
His eyes are intense and not blinking. "Yes. No sign of a break-in. But things were moved. Small things. Whoever it was is either very careful or knows their way around." He takes a sip of his coffee. His eyes don't leave my face. "I don't believe in coincidences."
"That's — god, that's unsettling." I set my fork down because holding it suddenly feels like too much to manage. "Do-do you know who?"
"Not yet."
"Not yet," I repeat, my voice sounding thin and tinny in my own ears. I force a shudder, a real one this time, because my hands have started to shake. "You think it was someone we know?"
Oh lord! Please help me!
"I think," he says, leaning forward, the porcelain of his cup clicking against the marble countertop with the finality of a gavel, "that whoever it was didn't realize I keep a silent log of the door's digital entry. It wasn't forced because they used a key. A key I thought only I possessed."
The blood drains from my face so fast I feel dizzy. I hadn’t known about the digital log. I thought it was a standard mechanical deadbolt.
My stomach turns over, a sick, greasy slide of pure adrenaline. I can feel the sweat beginning to prickle at my hairline. If I stand up, will my knees buckle? If I keep sitting here, will he see the way my pulse is leaping in the hollow of my neck?
As he stands up, slowly, and begins to walk around the island toward me, the kitchen feels like it’s shrinking. The exit is ten feet away, but it might as well be on the moon.