Chapter THREE #2
"But I've spent my whole life with my hands inside four-hundred-year-old paintings, signore. I've held things older than your entire family's claim to this mountain, and none of them have ever once frightened me as much as a man who thinks fear is the only useful thing a woman has to offer him."
He's quiet for a long moment, studying me with an intensity I feel in my spine, in the soles of my feet, in places that have nothing to do with the cold, precise fear I should be feeling and everything to do with something else altogether, something I don't yet have a name for and am, frankly,
furious at myself for feeling at all.
"Tesoro mio," he says finally, soft, almost to himself, and I don't yet understand — won't understand for weeks — that he means it on two levels at once, that the word for treasure in his mouth is doing double duty, naming both the icon on the table and the woman who guarded it,
both halves of the same inheritance he came to collect and is only now beginning to understand he doesn't fully know how to hold.
"My treasure. I think my grandmother sent me to collect much more than a painting."
"I'm not anyone's treasure." My voice comes out unsteady for the first time since I walked into this house, and I hate it, hate the way his eyes track the crack in my composure like he's filing it away the same patient, careful way I file away the condition of a damaged panel.
"I'm a person who had a life this morning. A workshop. Appointments. A bishop's office waiting on a saint I was supposed to deliver Thursday. None of that disappears just because your family decided four hundred years of silence was finally worth breaking."
"No," he agrees, and something in his voice has shifted, gone quieter, almost careful, like a man recalculating the shape of a transaction he'd assumed was simple.
"It doesn't disappear. I'm not going to pretend it does."
He studies me a moment longer, and then, in the first surprising thing he's done since walking into the room, he steps back — physically retreats, putting space between us that I hadn't asked for but find myself, despite everything, grateful for.
"You'll stay in the east wing tonight. Pina will bring you whatever you need. Tomorrow, you and I are going to have a longer conversation about exactly what my family believes it's owed, and exactly what you believe you're protecting. Tonight, you should eat something.
You look like a woman who hasn't eaten properly since this morning."
"I'm not hungry."
"You will be." He says it without arrogance, as observation, already turning toward the door, already, I sense, retreating into whatever version of himself runs the rest of this house when he isn't standing six feet from a woman he can't quite stop looking at.
At the threshold, he pauses, doesn't turn back, and says, quiet enough that I almost miss it: "For what it's worth, Signorina Vrenna — I don't yet know what my family did to yours. But I intend to find out. That's not a promise I'm making to comfort you. It's a promise I'm making because I find,
somewhat to my own surprise, that I want to know the truth more than I want the comfortable version of it."
He's gone before I can answer, the door closing with a soft, deliberate click, and I sit alone in a room full of candlelight and four-hundred-year-old gold, my pulse loud in my ears, furious at the small, traitorous part of myself that believed him.
The silver-haired woman returns perhaps ten minutes later — Pina, he called her, the name landing now with a face attached — carrying a second tray, this one with something hot, a clay dish of stewed beans and 'nduja, dark bread still warm enough to steam faintly in the candlelight.
She sets it down without the brisk efficiency of the first visit, lingering this time, and when I look up, I find her studying me with an expression I can't immediately place — not pity, exactly, and not the careful blankness of the men who brought me here. Something closer to recognition.
"You should eat," she says, in the same flattened coastal accent I noticed in the driver. "Whatever else happens tonight, an empty stomach won't help you survive it."
"Is that meant to be kindness?"
"It's meant to be practical." She straightens the carafe of wine I haven't touched, adjusts the angle of the bread basket with the same fussy precision I imagine she brings to every room in this house, and then, unexpectedly, sits — not beside me, but in the chair across from the settee,
perching at its edge like a woman who isn't quite sure she's permitted the liberty.
"I've worked for this family thirty-one years, signorina. I buried my own mother the same week I buried the last Bruzzano king, God keep them both. I've seen this house do unkind things. I've also seen it do kind ones, when it remembers how, which isn't as often as it should."
She glances toward the door Aurelio left through, and something in her face softens, just slightly, just enough for me to notice.
"He put you in the east wing. That's not nothing, whatever else it is."
"What's the east wing?"
"Was his mother's." Pina says it only, without elaboration, the way you'd state a fact too old and too settled to require commentary.
"No one's stayed there since she passed. Not because anyone forbade it. Because no one ever asked, and he never offered, until tonight."
She stands, smooths her apron, and pauses at the door, looking back at me with an expression that's gone, suddenly, almost gentle.
"Eat something, signorina. The 'nduja's good for the nerves, whatever the doctors say about it.
And get some sleep, if you can manage it.
Tomorrow's going to ask a great deal of you, I think.
I've worked in this house long enough to recognize a certain quiet that comes before something important.
We've had that quiet in the air since you arrived."
She leaves me alone with the food, the candles, the wrapped icon watching from its side table with painted eyes that have, by now, watched four hundred years of rooms exactly like this one — rooms full of powerful, dangerous men trying to decide what they owe the things they've taken.
I eat, eventually, more out of Pina's quiet insistence echoing in my head than actual hunger, the beans rich and warm and unexpectedly good, and I sit a long time afterward in the candlelight, turning Aurelio Bruzzano's voice over in my mind — tesoro mio,
the word for treasure used like he meant both halves of it at once, and the strange, unwelcome fact that some traitorous part of me had wanted, just slightly, for him to mean it.