Chapter TWENTY-ONE #2
"But the signs are clear enough. I'd estimate perhaps five or six weeks, given what you've described. Congratulations, Signora Bruzzano."
He pauses at the door, something kind crossing his weathered face.
"Whatever else this house is currently weathering, I hope you'll find some room to plainly let yourself feel glad about this, even briefly, before the rest of the world's demands reclaim your attention."
I thank him, my voice steadier than I feel, and watch him show himself out with the same discreet efficiency he brought to the examination, a cold professionalism of a man well practiced in handling this family's more sensitive needs without ever once making the people involved feel like a
transaction rather than a person.
I sit a moment longer in the quiet room after the door closes behind him, listening to the household's distant, ordinary sounds resuming somewhere below — Pina's footsteps, a door closing, the small evidence of a house continuing forward despite everything still unsettled within it.
I sit alone in the small sitting room for a long while after he leaves, my hand resting against my still-flat stomach, trying to let his words actually land the way he intended them to.
Glad. I search for the feeling underneath the fear and the strategy and the exhausted aftermath of yesterday's violence, and find it there, eventually, small and fierce and entirely unexpected — a child, our child, conceived somewhere in the careful, deliberate intimacy of these past weeks,
a fact that exists now regardless of consultas or rivals or thrones, flat-out true the way the icon's gold leaf is simply true beneath whatever grime has accumulated across four centuries.
I think of Agata's daughter, Calliope, carrying her own mother's grief and her own careful resolve across decades of silence, and wonder whether this child, when it finally arrives,
will inherit something gentler — a family finally willing to speak its truths aloud rather than burying them in unmarked graves and locked chests.
I sit with hoping, fiercely, protectively, that whatever comes of tomorrow's vote, whatever Marzio still has planned beyond his escape, this child will grow up in a house that has finally learned the cost of silence too thoroughly to ever practice it again.
It's this thought, more than any other, that finally tips my careful strategic calculation back toward telling Aurelio immediately rather than waiting for some theoretically calmer evening.
I rise, smoothing my skirt, already composing the words I'll use, and I am nearly to the study door when Costanzo's voice carries down the corridor ahead of me, urgent, frustrated, an old tone of a man delivering news he wishes he didn't have to.
"Marzio's gone," I hear him say, before I've rounded the final corner. "His own men overpowered the guards sometime last night. He's already cleared the coastal checkpoint."
I stop in the corridor, my half-composed confession suddenly competing with this fresh, urgent crisis, and understand, with a sinking certainty, exactly how the rest of this afternoon is about to unfold.
I stand there with one hand pressed unconsciously against my stomach, thinking of every careful plan I've made today — tell Pina first, wait for the right moment,
let today's chaos settle before adding one more variable to it — and feel a deep unease at watching a plan that felt entirely reasonable this morning begin to look, in the harsh light of fresh crisis, rather less wise than it did when I first reasoned through it.
I find Aurelio in the study a few minutes later, already deep in conversation with Costanzo about search routes and checkpoint alerts, his face carrying an exhaustion that runs considerably deeper than the morning's consulta session alone would explain.
"It's done," he says, before I can ask, glancing up from the map spread across his desk.
"The vote on legitimacy still stands for tomorrow, formally, but the consulta voted unanimously this morning to strip Marzio of his standing altogether, effective immediately, pending whatever criminal proceeding follows. Tarcisio proposed it himself. I didn't have to ask for it.
Now this — Marzio's escape — complicates everything further, but Costanzo and I are already coordinating the search."
"And the legitimacy vote itself?"
"Still uncertain. But Costanzo tells me the room's mood has shifted a good deal since yesterday — several of the men who were skeptical this morning are apparently reconsidering,
given how plainly Marzio's violence demonstrated exactly the kind of man who'd actually benefit from controlling this mountain's throne."
Aurelio crosses to me, his hand finding my jaw with the same careful tenderness he's used every time he's needed me to understand he meant something wholly, though his attention is visibly split, half on me and half still on the map behind him.
"How are you? Truly. I've been so occupied with the consulta's reaction and now this escape, I haven't properly asked."
"Tired," I say, which is true, if incomplete. "Still a little shaken. But otherwise managing."
He studies my face a long moment, something searching in his gaze, and I feel the guilt of holding back a piece of myself from a man who has, across the past three weeks, given me every reason to trust him with the whole truth.
I think of Dottor Ferraro's visit only an hour ago, the confirmation still settling into something real inside me, and I catch myself wanting, badly, to simply tell him now — to set down the careful strategic reasoning I built in Pina's kitchen and let this moment,
however chaotic the room currently is, hold both truths at once.
"Aurelio, I need to tell you something," I begin, but Costanzo, still bent over the search map, cuts back in before I've managed more than the opening words.
"The eastern checkpoint just radioed in — they've found the car, abandoned, near the Reggio turnoff. Aurelio, you'll want to see this yourself."
I watch him torn between two demands on his attention, a quiet helplessness of a man being pulled in directions he can't fully reconcile, and I make the decision for both of us before he has to choose.
"Go," I tell him. "This will keep until tonight."
"I'll be back as soon as I can," Aurelio says, already moving toward the door, his attention already shifting fully toward Costanzo's report. "Whatever it is you wanted to say — it'll keep until tonight, won't it?"
"It'll keep," I tell him, and watch him go.
"Tonight," I tell myself, once the study door has closed behind him. "I'll tell him tonight, once today's chaos has finally settled."
I do not yet understand how badly that postponement is about to cost both of us.