Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
ANNA
He couldn’t know it was me.
But my well-laid-out plan could have been ruined even if he didn’t know who I was. I had actually gotten into his house. Then I’d been stupid and given in to a feeling. A feeling! Estúpida.
But it couldn’t all be bad. In his eyes, I was just a random maid who’d crossed the line and taken a plunge in his bath.
He’d fire me. That was the worst-case scenario.
Which would be disastrous. I’d sacrificed an expensive plane ticket and the cost of a ninety-day visa for him.
Not to mention the seven years I’d waited for him to turn up in Marbella.
But if he had, he’d never stayed in that hotel.
I’d know because there had never been another Martello on the guest list.
I’d lain awake half the night. Restlessly falling in and out of sleep.
When he’d pulled the handle down, I’d experienced what the beginning of a heart attack probably felt like.
I’d expected the door to burst open despite the lock.
His house. His rules, and he was a man. In the Mafia.
Breaking doors open was probably as routine for him as filling a bucket of water would be for me.
But it had stayed intact. I didn’t know when he’d moved away or when he’d walked off, but for the rest of the night, every phantom noise had been another twist of that handle.
I was brave, but not stupid enough to open the door and peek.
Instead, I’d listened to each tick on the wall clock while I wrote one thing down in my diary.
Tranquila. Solo tengo que matarlo y salir de aquí.
Calm down. I just need to kill him and get out of here.
But by the time daylight made an appearance, I had come up with a million possible outcomes. All of them bad. The first one was picturing Magda in the morning with a scowl and a ‘you’re fired’ notice.
Magda stood in front of the stove, firing off a shopping list on the phone in rapid Italian.
“Carne, pollo, pasta, vino…”
She seemed to be planning on buying out the entire market. The person on the other side was hopefully taking note of it.
Annoyance brewed in my insides for each item she listed. Why hadn’t she told me he was going to be home early?
She was out of breath when she hung up. She glanced my way before she fell into another explanation. “Signor Martello has come home unexpectedly early. The house is a mess and—”
“You said he was in Sicily.” The accusation flew out of me.
Her neutral glance turned into a frown. “Allora, what’re you angry about?”
“I’m not.” I forced my facial muscles to relax. “I just wanted to get used to the house before he sees me at work,” I finished lamely.
She dismissed my worries with a wave of her hand. “He won’t even notice you.” There was an odd expression on her face when she said it.
Is he blind? I hoped so. Easier to kill the monstruo.
“She’s right. He’s the silent type.” Isidora stepped into the kitchen behind me.
I already knew that. The silent monster.
Magda turned to us with her hands on her hips. “He has better things to do than notice if the house is cleaned.”
Bet he was too busy murdering fathers in front of their daughters.
“Absolutely,” Isidora agreed enthusiastically behind me.
“Go now. I want the downstairs looking spick and span.”
I followed Isidora in the general direction of the living room. She was five years younger than me and pretty. Short cropped hair, a boyish body, and a friendly glint in her eyes.
“She’s a neat freak, but she’s super sweet.”
Would she know his allergies, though?
I followed behind her, trying to gauge the floor plan.
She stopped and opened a door. It was one of the storerooms. “Here.” She gave me a duster and cleaning cloths, then pulled out a bucket and mop for her.
“I have worked here for three weeks, and this has to be the easiest job I’ve ever had.
” She pulled out the cleaning products and piled them in another bucket.
“Nico is rarely home, and when he is, he keeps to himself.”
“Nico?”
She gave me a look that asked how much of a dumbwit I was.
“Niccolò Martello? The man who owns this house and therefore owns you?”
I’d die before I called him anything but a murderer. Least of all by a shortened first name.
Sometimes it had felt as though it would have been easier to pull all of Alfonso’s teeth out than to get any information from him.
Every conversation I had with him ground to a stop when he asked me to reconsider dating his son Joel again.
As if I would ever get back together with the boy who abandoned me the day my father died.
After I’d got New York and Niccolò Martello’s name out of him, I had dropped Alfonso altogether. His son, I dropped a long time ago.
“Are you coming or what?” Isidora stood outside the storeroom with two buckets in either hand and a mop under her armpit.
“Sorry.” I walked out and closed the door behind me.
“Why’re you limping?” She was looking at my right foot.
With the indoor sneakers, the bruise wasn’t visible. I’d worn higher socks to hide it. “Knocked against something.” I went back to our previous topic. “Shouldn’t we call him Signor Martello?”
“We should.” She gave me a deliciously evil giggle. “But have you seen him?”
Yes. Faintly. Dark shadows and a tall figure. So, “no.”
“You’ll understand when you see him. I call him Nico when no one’s around.” She sighed as if she were thinking of a private thought. “He’s so hot. Quiet but hot. Cold but hot.”
I shook my head. The girl had a crush. If only she knew his true nature. Asesino. Or maybe puto gilipollas might be a name better suited for him because he was a fucking asshole.
I bit the inside of my cheek and took a moment to control myself before I spoke. “Isn’t he too old for you? What is he? Forty-something?”
“Thirty-two. Also, age is just a number, girl. Besides, he’s the type who’ll still look hot when he’s eighty.”
Pity he wouldn’t make it to eighty.
“He sounds like a dangerous man.”
She gave me a grin. “Dangerously hot.”
Right. I tried again. “A dangerous man like that must have a lot of enemies, right?”
“Probably.”
“He must eat at home. Not to take any risks and all?”
She frowned as she dropped the bucket in the living room. “What happened here?”
She was looking around the room as if it were a freak show. I followed her gaze and tried to see what the problem was. “I don’t see any—”
“Did you tidy up?”
“I…” Joder, what did I do wrong? “Kind of.” In the middle of the night, while I was snooping around. But that was a good thing, right? Tidying up, not snooping around.
Her scowl told me otherwise. “Didn’t Magda tell you anything? He doesn’t like it when it’s too neat.”
“Why? What’s there not to like?” But I was talking to myself.
She was rushing to all corners of the room, unfolding throws and tossing them randomly onto the sofas.
Then she swiped her arms and made the cushions scatter across the sofa.
Worse. She left them there. Then, she tugged at the carpet so the line went crooked. Weird way of tidying up.
“You clean and then you mess it up a bit.”
“Okay.” Maybe he was allergic to a clean room, if there was such a thing. This job might be easier than the last one.
“Don’t give me that weird look. Not my rules. Some kind of fetish he has, I guess. But he’s still…”
“Hot,” I concluded. Isidora was going to hate me when I put an end to his hotness.
We set to work. I pretended to work while I tried to figure out a man with hardly any presence on the internet.
He had two brothers, and his youngest brother, Stefano, was the only reason I could find any information about him because he occasionally appeared in the pictures Stefano posted.
Never posing and always in the background.
I might have recognized him if I came across his back.
His front, hardly. Other than that and a list of their restaurants, clubs, and companies they owned, which they probably used as a front for their dirty money, there was nothing much to be found.
I stared at the large dining table beyond the living room. “Does he eat in a lot?” Does he have a pineapple allergy? When I didn’t get an answer, I turned around to see Isidora dusting, bobbing her head to her earphones. She was of no help.
Under the bright sun of mid-July, the house looked and felt even more like my childhood home in Marbella.
Sunlight streamed in through the arched windows with the thin black steel frames.
The walls were all cream limestone, and the floors were natural wooden planks that told a story of lives lived before mine.
The furniture was either rattan, woven, or upholstered in linen or cotton.
It was all in earthy tones. Except for the bougainvillea plants, where the sun was strong enough to shine through.
On one of those corners, right next to the fuchsia plant, a medium Steinway walnut grand piano stood like a spotlight on stage. I felt its presence behind my rib cage.
“You okay?” Isidora had her headphones lowered and a suspicious gaze on her face.
“Yeah.” I choked down the emotion bubbling in my throat. “Why?”
She shrugged, putting on her headphones. “You look pale. Don’t worry, this job is pretty relaxed.”
I backed away from the piano and crossed to the other side of the room.
This place didn’t feel like a house. It was a memory.
A yearning for a past that could never be a present.
Or at least it felt that way to me, because I was linking my emotions to it.
Someone like Niccolò Martello probably found a magazine full of Spanish interiors and ordered his sister-in-law to recreate it.
His blank interior was my canvas of emotions. Does he even like Spain? Or does she?