Chapter Seventeen #2
I stopped at the corner where the hallway opened into his own sleeping space and pressed my shoulder against the wall. From here I could hear him clearly without being seen.
His voice was low. Clipped. The same flat tone he used when giving orders that ended lives. “Say that again.”
A pause. The faint sound of the voice on the other end of the line, too distant for me to make out the words.
“Both of them,” Matteo said. “Dario and the child.”
Another pause. Longer this time. I heard the soft click of him pacing. “I gave you every address. Every planted man. Every name connected to the photographs. And you are standing there telling me they vanished into thin air between one night and the next.”
The voice on the other end spoke again. Whatever it said made Matteo’s next words come out colder.
“No. You do not get to tell me it is impossible. You get to find them. Expand the radius. Pull every camera within fifty miles of that airstrip. Lean on the operators who move people for men like Dario. I want names. I want locations. I want the child breathing, back home where she belongs. And I want Dario Rizzo alive long enough to understand exactly how much pain a body can hold before it stops being useful.”
Silence stretched. My pulse hammered against the collar so hard I was certain he would hear it.
“I do not care how clean the extraction has to be,” Matteo said.
“I care about results. The girl is four years old. She has been used as leverage for months. Every day she stays missing is another day the woman in my penthouse looks at me and wonders whether I am capable of keeping the only promise that matters to her. Find them. Or I will replace every one of you with someone who can.”
He ended the call.
Iwoke up tasting metal. The penthouse was quiet in the way it only got when Matteo was already on the other side of the door, killing something with his voice.
Coffee had been left on the nightstand. The smell hit me like a hand over my mouth.
I made it to the bathroom on bare feet and dry-heaved into the sink until my eyes watered.
I stayed there with my forehead against the marble and waited for it to pass.
It did not feel like last night. Last night had been cream and his mouth and the politician’s blood still sitting behind my eyes. This was different. Deeper. Like my body had decided something and had not bothered to ask me.
I counted backward because that was the only math I still trusted.
The auction. The stage. The nights he came home and put his cock in me like a schedule. The mornings he checked between my legs with two fingers and a look that was not tenderness, only inventory.
I was definitely late.
Not by a day.
By enough that even I could not blame stress or the cream or the fact that I had stopped being a person with a calendar.
The drawer to the right of the sink opened on the first pull.
I already knew what would be in it.
He prepared for everything. If he had extra silk that barely counted as clothes, he would have this, too. And, lined up in a neat row like ammunition, three unopened boxes of pregnancy tests.
I laughed once. It came out ugly.
I sat on the closed lid of the toilet with the box in my hands and stared at the instructions until the words stopped meaning anything. Then I did it anyway. I set the stick on the edge of the sink and washed my hands and did not look at it.
Two minutes.
When I picked the stick up, both lines were already there.
Clear. Undeniable. The exact future he had millions of dollars to force into me.
I sat down hard. There was no rush of love. No soft place in my chest that opened for the idea of a child with his mouth and my eyes. There was only the same cold that had arrived the night Dario picked Camilla up off the floor and smiled.
He would use this.
The second I told Matteo, the penthouse would shrink. The teams would get new orders. Not find the girl.
Do not let the wife leave.
He would put his hand on my stomach the way he already did when he came inside me and call it protection. He would look at me like the seat was finally safe. And Camilla would stay in whatever room Dario had put her in, while I grew heavier behind glass.
I wrapped the test in toilet paper and then in a page I tore from the back of the diary. I folded it small enough to disappear. The diary went back on the nightstand, face down. The test went into the pocket of the shirt I had started sleeping in because it still smelled like Matteo.
I hated that I needed it.
I rinsed my mouth. I washed my face.
When I looked in the mirror again I did not look like a woman who had just found out she was pregnant.
I looked like the girl on the secondary stage. Empty on purpose.
The door opened down the hall. His voice carried, low and sharp, the tone he used when men had failed him.
I stood in the bathroom with his child in me and understood the only true thing I had left. If I stayed, I would get a nursery. If I left, I might get my sister.
I chose before I left the room.
I walked into the room with the wall, picked up Camilla’s photograph, and held it against my chest until the edges bent. I did not cry. I had already spent every useful tear on Dario’s phone screen.
When Matteo’s footsteps stopped outside the door, I was ready. Not to tell him. To lie.