Chapter 13 #2
"You look pale, little Gia," he says, his hand coming to rest on my shoulder. His fingers are warm. They feel like a brand. "Are you feeling alright?"
"I'm just..." I swallow hard, the lie sticking in my throat like glass. "I'm just worried for you. If someone has a key..."
"Don't be worried for me," he whispers, leaning down until his breath brushes my ear. "Be scared for them. Because when I find them, and I will find them, I'm going to make sure they never walk again."
I can't breathe. I am staring at the crumbs on my plate, counting them, trying to find a way to make my legs move, but the terror has turned me to stone.
He knows. He has to know. And the hunt hasn't even begun yet.
"I'm telling you," he says, "because I'm increasing security in that part of the house.
Guards on rotation through the east wing at night.
I'm also changing the locks." He pauses.
"I need you to be careful. If there's a traitor inside this house, I don't want you moving around alone at night until I've found them. "
Oh.
He's worried about me...
That's what this is?
He's standing in this kitchen in the morning telling me to be careful because he thinks someone dangerous has access to this wing, and he doesn't know that the dangerous someone is me, is the woman sitting here with his coffee, his frittata and his name.
"O-Of course," I say. "I'll be careful."
He nods once, slow. Still watching me. His thumb moves on the side of his cup, one small circle, and I notice it the way I notice everything about him now, which is a problem, a significant problem, and I have nothing to do about it.
"You're not eating," he tilts his head to watch me.
I pick up my fork automatically.
He pushes off the counter. Sets his cup down.
Then he's moving past me to leave and the distance between us closes briefly to almost nothing as he passes behind my stool, and I feel the warmth of him at my back for half a second before he's gone, through the door, into the hallway, the sound of his footsteps receding on the parquet.
I sit with my fork over a frittata I no longer have any appetite for.
Marco refills my coffee without being asked and says nothing.
I stare at the kitchen wall. He's putting more guards on the east wing at night.
He's changing the locks. My father's next message is already forming itself in my mind, the careful language, the coded shapes of things I can and cannot say.
I have to tell him something. I have to give him enough.
The phone is upstairs in the jewelry box and Laura is somewhere I still can't reach and the math of all of it is very simple, has been simple since the day my father showed me that footage.
Simple doesn't mean it doesn't hurt.
He told me to be careful. He came down here and told me himself.
I eat the frittata. It's excellent. I tell Marco so. He nods. That's the end of the conversation, and I carry everything else back upstairs alone.
Later that day, I find out about the east wing guard rotation by accident.
Not the rotation itself, Rafael told me that at breakfast. But the specifics of it, the gaps in it, the exact window between shifts that a person who paid attention could use.
I find this out because I spend the better part of the afternoon doing what I've been doing since I arrived: moving through the house quietly, learning it.
By four o'clock I need air, or at least a different ceiling to stare at, so I go down to the ground floor and take the long corridor toward the east garden entrance, the one that runs past the utility rooms and the back staircase used by the household staff.
It's quieter this way. Less chance of running into anyone I have to perform for.
I'm almost at the end of the corridor when I hear it.
A slow, uneven step. Then a pause. Then the careful scrape of something being set down and picked up again.
I round the corner.
Benedetto, the older man who oversees the household linens, who has nodded at me twice at dinner and once in the hallway and who walks with a pronounced lean to his left side that I noticed on day one.
He is at the bottom of the back staircase with a stack of folded tablecloths in his arms and one hand on the banister and the expression of a person conducting a private negotiation with their own body.
He hasn't seen me. He's focused entirely on the first step.
His left knee, I realize. The way he shifts his weight before attempting it, the specific calculation in the pause, something in that joint doesn't work the way it used to, and the stairs are steep, and the tablecloths are not helping.
He needs help.
I'm about to step forward when someone comes from the opposite direction.
Rafael.
He comes from the side passage that leads from his office, jacket off, sleeves still pushed up from this morning.
He sees Benedetto and he doesn't pause or announce himself or make any kind of production of it.
He just crosses the corridor, takes the stack of tablecloths out of Benedetto's arms with one clean movement, and waits.
Benedetto looks up.
"Take the rail," Rafael says.
That's all. Three words, the same quiet register he uses for everything, no instruction in it beyond the literal.
Benedetto takes the rail. Rafael follows him up the staircase one step at a time, the stack of linens held in one arm, the other hand not touching the old man but close enough that it is there if needed.
They reach the landing. Rafael sets the tablecloths down on the hall table at the top and says something I can't hear from where I'm standing, and Benedetto responds, and for a moment they're just two people talking at the top of a staircase before Rafael turns back and comes down alone.
I have approximately three seconds to decide whether to still be standing here when he reaches the bottom.
I stay.
He sees me when he's four steps from the bottom. Nothing crosses his face, no surprise, no self-consciousness at being watched. He just comes down the last four steps and stops.
"How long were you standing there?" he asks.
"Long enough."
He looks at me for a moment. Then he moves past me down the corridor, unhurried, and I watch him go because I can't quite make myself turn away yet.
The thing is I built a picture of him before I met him.
Everybody had. Rafael Caruso, Il Macellaro, the man who bleeds alongside his soldiers and laughs while doing it.
The man with the body count, the dead wife, the dead eyes that apparently make grown men decide somewhere else is a better place to be.
I collected those details the way you collect anything you might need to survive, carefully, without attachment.
And then I came here and I've been adding to the picture every day without meaning to. The way he takes his coffee. The angular economy of his handwriting. The fact that he told me himself about the office in a kitchen, like it was a conversation and not a power move.
Now this.
I look at the top of the staircase where the tablecloths are sitting in a neat stack on the hall table.
There is a version of Rafael Caruso, the version made of reputation and secondhand accounts and the things men say about other men when they want to explain why someone deserves what's coming to them. That version is useful. That version I can work with.
This version, the one that takes a stack of linens from an old man's arms without making it mean anything, without an audience, without any reason except that the old man needed to go up the stairs and the linens were in the way.
This version is considerably less convenient.
I stand in the empty corridor for another moment.
Then I go outside, into the east garden, into the late afternoon cold, and I stand on the gravel path with my arms crossed and I think about Laura.
Her face on that screen. The armed men in the background.
The specific, particular way my father looked when he showed me, not triumphant, not apologetic, just factual, because to him it is.
That's the picture I need to keep looking at.
Not the top of a staircase. Not a stack of folded tablecloths. Not the way two words from him, take the rail, landed somewhere in my chest like they had weight.
The wind comes through the garden and I let it.
I stay out there until the cold gets serious about it, and then I go back inside.