Chapter 7
CASSIA
He meant what he said.
Maria delivers a key to the study. My own key. No explanation, just a small envelope on my breakfast tray with the brass weight inside.
I turn it over in my palm. Brass, worn smooth at the edges. Old. This key has history. Has opened this door for decades, maybe longer.
And now it’s mine.
The coffee maker has been moved to the sideboard when I let myself in. A fresh bag of the creamer I use sits beside it. Not the powdered kind from the kitchen. The oat milk creamer I mentioned once to Maria in passing.
He noticed. Or someone noticed and told him.
I take what I can get.
The study is different when I’m alone. Smaller. More mine. I run my fingers along the spines of the books on the shelf behind the desk. Law texts, histories, a few novels in Italian that I can’t read. Salvatore’s collection, untouched for years.
There’s a photograph on the bottom shelf, half-hidden behind a stack of ledgers. I pull it out.
A woman with dark hair and laughing eyes, holding a baby in her arms. Lucia. It has to be. She’s young in this picture, maybe my age, and she’s looking at the camera like whoever’s behind it hung the moon.
Salvatore, taking a picture of his wife and child. A moment of ordinary happiness, preserved in silver and paper.
I put it back where I found it. Some things aren’t mine to touch.
The days take on a rhythm.
I arrive early, before the compound wakes. Make coffee with the creamer he provided. Spread ledgers across the desk and lose myself in numbers until Maria appears with the lunch I forget to eat.
The work is methodical. Soothing. Each discrepancy I find is a thread I can pull, a pattern I can trace. Numbers don’t lie. Numbers don’t look through you. Numbers reward patience and attention with truth.
I’m building a case against someone in this house. Someone who’s been stealing for years. Someone who sits at the same table, eats the same food, fakes loyalty while bleeding the family dry.
I don’t know who yet. But I will.
Zio Pietro finds me one afternoon.
He’s been meeting with Dante, but he pauses at the threshold, watching me work. Late sixties, maybe, with silver threading through his dark hair and lines carved deep around his eyes. But he stands like a man who hasn’t forgotten how to fight.
“I was there, you know. When Salvatore made the arrangement with your father.” He leans against the frame. “You and your sister were in the garden. Elena was doing cartwheels. You were sitting under a tree with a book.”
I don’t remember that day. But it sounds right. Elena, center stage. Me, disappearing into pages.
“Salvatore watched you through the window.” Pietro’s mouth curves. The hard lines around his eyes ease. “Said you reminded him of Lucia. The way she’d disappear into a book and forget the world existed.”
My throat closes. Lucia. The woman in the photograph. The woman Nonna Rosa speaks of like a saint.
“I didn’t know that.”
“Most people don’t.” He pushes off the frame. “But I thought you should.”
He leaves before I can ask why. Before I can ask what it means that a dead man saw me when no one else bothered to look.
I sit with the ledgers cooling under my hands, turning his words over.
My fingers press flat against the open pages.
The touches start small.
His hand on my lower back when we pass in the hall. Brief. Proprietary. Gone before I can react, but my skin holds the memory for hours. I find myself pressing my palm against my spine later, trying to recapture the warmth.
His fingers brushing mine when he hands me a file. An accident, maybe. Except his eyes hold mine too long, and his pupils blow wide before the blankness slides back into place.
My name in his mouth now. Cassia. Lower. Slower. Like he’s tasting it, rolling the syllables across his tongue before releasing them.
My father said my name like an afterthought. Dante says it like a discovery.
I catch him watching sometimes. I’ll look up from the numbers and find his gaze on my hands, my neck, the curve of my shoulder. He looks away when I notice.
Not fast enough.
One night, a cup appears at my elbow. Coffee. Steam curling. That woodsy scent I’ve started dreaming about.
He’s turning away, but his hand lingers on my shoulder. Warmth bleeding through my blouse, sinking into muscle, spreading down my spine like honey.
Our eyes meet.
The compound has gone to sleep. Just us and the lamplight and the silence that hums between us like a live wire.
Neither of us speaks. What is there to say?
Then he’s gone. Footsteps fading down the hall.
I take a sip. Creamer. Two sugars. The way I drink it.
He learned. Without asking. Somewhere in the chaos of ledgers and shell companies and midnight hours, he learned how I take my coffee.
Don’t hope. Don’t hope. Don’t.
Too late.
A soldier reports to Dante while I’m working. Young. Sharp features. Nervous hands. Delivering news about a shipment delay.
His gaze drifts to me between sentences. Lingers on my chest. Tracks down my body with casual entitlement, like I’m inventory to be assessed.
I know that look. From my father’s associates. From men at parties who saw Elena first and noticed me afterward.
You learn to ignore it. You learn to make yourself smaller, quieter, less worthy of attention.
I don’t make myself smaller. Not anymore.
Dante stops writing. He doesn’t look up. Not yet. The silence stretches until the soldier realizes the room has gone wrong.
Then Dante lifts his head. Slow. The look he gives the soldier has nothing to do with the shipment delay.
“Out.” Quiet. Conversational. The most dangerous register he has. “Now.”
The soldier’s face goes white. He doesn’t finish his report. Doesn’t reach for the door handle so much as claw for it. The click of the latch echoes after him like a gunshot.
Dante picks up his phone. Dials without looking. “Renzo. The soldier who just left my study. Reassign him. Somewhere he won’t see my wife again.”
He hangs up. Goes back to his papers like he didn’t just rearrange a man’s life in a single breath. Doesn’t explain. Doesn’t look at me. But his shoulders have squared, his pen pressing harder into the page.
I should bristle at being treated like territory.
Warmth blooms behind my ribs instead.
Lorenzo finds me in the hallway.
No footsteps. No warning. Just there, blocking my path like he materialized from shadow.
Tea sloshes in my cup. My heart slams against my ribs.
He’s bigger up close. Broader. Built for damage and nothing else. His eyes are dark, flat, empty in a way that makes every instinct I have scream run.
“He’s my brother.”
Three words. No inflection. The threat isn’t in his tone. It’s in everything else.
“If you hurt him, there’s nowhere you can go that I won’t find you.”
I should shrink. Apologize. Promise to be good, be useful, be invisible the way I’ve been my whole life.
My fingers tighten around the ceramic until the heat bites.
I think about the coffee. The shoulder. The soldier dismissed without a second thought.
I think about a dead man who noticed me through a window, and a living one who’s learning how I take my coffee.
I’m not here to hurt him. I walked into his study and offered myself like a sacrifice, and somewhere along the way, I stopped wanting to be sacrificed.
I meet Lorenzo’s eyes. Hold them. Let him see that I heard him, believe him, understand what he’s capable of.
I don’t look away.
His flat gaze gains a degree of focus. His chin lifts a fraction of an inch, the barest nod.
He walks away without another word.
I stand in the hallway, tea cooling, pulse hammering. I believe every word he said.
But I’m not running.
That night, I can’t sleep.
The bedroom is too full of him. His warmth across the mattress. His breathing, too controlled for real sleep. The careful distance we maintain, inches apart but miles away.
I lie awake, tracing the ceiling cracks, trying to make sense of what’s happening.
I give up around two in the morning.
The kitchen is quiet. Moonlight casts everything in silver. My feet are bare against the cool tile.
The spice rack is a disaster. Organized by color. Red paprika next to red chili flakes next to cinnamon. Chaos disguised as order.
I start reorganizing. Alphabetical. The one thing I can control when everything else is shifting sand.
Nonna Rosa appears at the threshold. Worn robe, slippers, gray hair loose around her shoulders.
She looks at me. At the spice jars. At the clock on the wall.
She doesn’t ask what I’m doing. She puts the kettle on.
“Couldn’t sleep neither, cher.” That soft New Orleans lilt turning words to music. “Some nights are like that. The house gets too loud, even when it’s quiet.”
She brings me a cup of tea. Sets it beside my reorganized spices.
“Lucia used to do this. Not spices. Books.” Nonna Rosa settles against the counter. “She’d rearrange the whole library when her mind wouldn’t settle. Salvatore would find her at dawn, surrounded by stacks, happy as could be. He never understood it. But he loved watchin’ her anyway.”
I wrap my hands around the warm ceramic. “They were happy?”
“Deliriously.” Nonna Rosa’s eyes go soft. “That man worshiped the ground she walked on. And she loved him just as fierce. When she died.” She shakes her head. “Part of him went with her. The rest just took eleven years to follow.”
We stand in the quiet kitchen, drinking tea. The compound sleeps around us.
“He’s different with you, dawlin’.” Nonna Rosa studies me over her cup. “I’ve known that boy since the day he came into this world. Watched him build walls so high I thought no one would ever get over them.”
“He doesn’t let me in either.”
“No?” Her eyes sharpen. “Then why’s he teachin’ himself to make coffee with creamer? Tell me that.”
I don’t have an answer.
She pats my hand. Shuffles back to bed.
I finish the spice rack. Wash my cup. Climb the stairs.
He’s awake. I can tell by the quality of his stillness. Coiled, alert, listening.
I slide into bed. Maintain the distance.
“Where were you?”
Rough. Quiet. Like he’s been waiting.
“Kitchen. Couldn’t sleep.”
A pause. “You reorganized something.”
“The spices.”
“Nonna Rosa’s going to kill you.”
“Her system was chaotic.”
A sound from his side of the bed. Not quite a laugh. There and gone.
We lie in the dark, the distance charged with everything we’re not saying. His warmth radiating across the sheets. My heart beating too fast.
I press my face into the pillow. His scent is in the fabric. In the sheets. Everywhere.
I fall asleep before I can decide if that terrifies me or not.
For the first time in weeks, I don’t dream about being invisible.