Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Amanda
The Casa Aurelia studio smells like hairspray and I love it more than I love most people.
I've been on set since six this morning, and the energy is exactly the kind I feed on.
Stylists dart between racks of clothing.
A lighting tech curses at a softbox that won't behave.
Somewhere behind me, the creative director is having what I can only describe as a small spiritual crisis over the color of a backdrop, and honestly? Mood. We've all been there.
"The amber, Marco," I call across the room, not looking up from my tablet. "Trust me. The brand wants warmth. The cool gray reads like a tax office."
Marco swivels. Stares at me for a beat. Then waves a hand at the assistant.
"The amber," he says, like it was his idea all along.
I bite back a smile. This is what I'm good at.
Reading a room before it knows it needs reading.
My parents wanted a lawyer or a son or a daughter who took up less space, and instead they got a girl who can walk into a million-euro shoot and make it run smoother just by paying attention. Their loss. Genuinely.
I do a slow sweep of the floor, mentally ticking boxes. Lighting, sorted. Backdrop, sorted. Wardrobe—
That's when I see her.
The models are lined up near the wardrobe station, a row of impossibly long limbs and bored expressions, all of them scrolling phones or getting their faces dusted with powder.
Agenzia Luce sent six girls this morning.
Eastern European, mostly, the agency rep told me.
The kind of beauty that photographs like a weapon.
Five of them look exactly how models look at seven a.m. Tired. Pretty. Detached.
The sixth one looks different.
She's young. Younger than the rest, I'd guess. Maybe eighteen, maybe not even. She's standing slightly apart from the others, her arms wrapped around her ribs like she's holding herself together. While the other girls slouch and yawn, she stands very still.
A makeup artist is working on her face, and I watch the brush move along her jaw, blending, blending, blending in one spot longer than makes sense. I drift closer, pretending to check the wardrobe steamer.
Under the foundation, along the soft hinge of her jaw, the skin is a faint, sick yellow-green.
The color a bruise turns when it's already a few days old and starting to fade.
The makeup artist is layering concealer over it with the efficiency of someone who's done this exact thing before.
No reaction. No question. Just cover it and move on.
I look at the girl's eyes next. They flick up to the mirror, then away, then to the door, then back to her own hands.
"Hey," I say softly, crouching beside her chair so I'm not looming over her. "I'm Amanda. I'm running things on the brand side today. Can I get you anything? Water, coffee, something to eat?"
She looks at me like I've spoken in a language she half understands. Up close her eyes are a pale, washed-out blue, and there's something in them that has nothing to do with being at a glamorous shoot in Milan.
"No," she says. Her accent is thick. "Thank you. No."
"You sure? We've got pastries that are honestly criminal." I keep my voice light, warm, the same tone I'd use to coax a spooked cat out from under a couch. "I won't tell anyone if you eat three."
The corner of her mouth moves.
"Okay," she says. Then, quieter, glancing toward the agency rep by the door. "Maybe water."
"Water it is."
I straighten and turn walking straight into the shoot coordinator, a brisk, severe woman named Greta who runs Agenzia Luce's on-set logistics.
"Is there a problem?" Greta asks.
"No problem," I say easily. "Just making sure the girls are comfortable. The one on the end seems a little—" I choose the word carefully. "Nervous."
"She is new." Greta's tone makes it clear the conversation has a ceiling, and we've just hit it. "She does not speak much English. She will be fine on camera. That is what matters."
"Sure," I say. "It's just that bruise on her jaw. Your artist's been working on it for a while. If she's hurt, we should—"
"Models bruise." Greta cuts me off, smooth as glass.
"They are clumsy. They do not eat. They faint, they bump into things.
It is nothing." She tilts her head, and now there's something cool and assessing in the look she gives me, like she's recalculating exactly who I am and how much I can cost her.
"You are marketing, yes? Not casting.The girls are my responsibility.
You worry about the brand. I worry about them. "
The dismissal is so polished I almost don't feel the blade until it's already drawn back.
I hold her gaze for a second longer than is comfortable. Every instinct I have is screaming that something is wrong here.
But I've spent years learning which questions you don't ask.
I learned it around Vittoria's family, the way you learn the stove is hot before you understand what fire is.
There are doors you don't open. Threads you don't pull.
I've built an entire life around the careful art of not knowing more than I need to.
So I smile. The big one. The one that's gotten me out of a hundred awkward situations.
"Of course," I say. "You're absolutely right."
Greta's shoulders ease. She thinks she's won. She has, technically. She turns away, already barking at someone about call times.
But I don't get out of her hair, not really. I get her a bottle of water, and I bring it to the girl myself. When I hand it over I crouch down again and read the small white tag clipped to her wardrobe rack.
Nadia. And below it, the agency stamp. Agenzia Luce.
"Here you go, Nadia," I say.
She freezes when I use her name. Just for a heartbeat. Like being known is its own kind of danger.
"Thank you," she whispers. Her fingers close around the bottle, trembling. I see it. She sees me see it.
Then her hand disappears back into the sleeve of her sweater.
I stand and return to my tablet. I tell Marco the amber looks perfect, and it does. The shoot rolls on, gorgeous and gleaming and worth every euro.
Valentino
The espresso has gone cold in front of me, which tells me how long I've been sitting here doing nothing.
Two days here and I have ash. Shell companies that fold into other shell companies. A name that I cannot move on without proof. So I drink coffee across the street from Casa Aurelia, watching men carry equipment cases through a service door, and learning nothing I didn't already know.
I take out my phone and call Luca.
He answers on the third ring. He always answers on the third ring, never the first, never the fourth. I have stopped wondering why.
"Conti," he says.
"The thing in Sicily. Are you finished?"
A pause. With Luca, the pauses carry more than the words.
"Two days," he says. "Maybe less."
"When it's done, come to Milan." I turn the cold cup in a slow circle on its saucer, watching the ring of liquid it leaves on the white porcelain. "I need eyes I trust. Surveillance. Maybe entry on a property later…"
The line goes quiet again.
"Send me the address," he says.
That's the whole architecture of us, right there. He doesn't ask why. I don't pretend there's a warm reason. Six years of this. I give him a city and a target, and he disappears into it like water into dry ground.
I’m about to hang up. My thumb is already moving toward the red circle on the screen when the café door opens.
The small brass bell above it gives a bright, stupid little ring.
Everything in me stops.
A woman walks in.
Tall. Long-legged. Model-thin. Platinum blonde hair falls in loose waves past her shoulders. Blue-green eyes. Clear, bright skin. She moves toward the counter with the kind of ease that pretends not to know it turns heads.
But it does.
Everyone looks.
She doesn’t seem to notice. Or she’s learned not to seem to.
I know that face.
It isn’t possible.
But I know that face.
"Conti." Luca’s voice sounds far away now. "You still there?"
I don’t answer.
My hand has gone still around the phone. So has the rest of me. Not the controlled kind of stillness I use across a table from men who lie for a living. This is different. This is my body recognizing something before my mind can make sense of it.
A beat too long.
Then another.
"Conti."
"I’ll call you back," I say, and end it.
I set the phone face-down on the table, and I look at her.
Amanda White.
Vittoria’s friend. The American. The bright, loud one they keep far away from anything that bleeds.
She lives in Chicago.
That is the first fact my mind reaches for, as if facts have ever stopped the impossible.
She lives in Chicago.
But it’s her. There’s no mistaking it.
She’s wearing an expensive, close-cut camel-colored coat. A scarf in some deep wine red. Heels. She looks like she stepped out of one of the glossy advertisements pasted across the building behind her.
She looks like she belongs in this city the way I never will.
Why is she here?
Amanda
"You’re spiraling," Vittoria says in my ear. Her voice comes through tiny, the way it always does when she has me on speaker while she does six other things. "I can hear you spiraling from an ocean away, babe."
"I am not spiraling." I cradle the tiny cup between both hands like this much caffeine requires emotional support and glance out the café window at the studio across the street.
The Casa Aurelia banner ripples against the gray Milan sky.
"I am sitting here, drinking aggressively expensive coffee and living my best life. "
"Uh-huh."
"How are things," she asks, like she’s not the reason I have a shadow following me through Milan. I set the cup down. "Speaking of which. Your boy Elio. Care to explain why I’ve got a six-foot escort hovering ten feet behind me every time I leave the hotel? And more importantly, why him?"
There's a pause. Not a long one. But Vittoria doesn't do pauses, so I notice it the way you notice a step that isn't where you expected it.
"I can't tell you much," she says finally. The teasing is gone from her voice. That's new too. "Bruno asked me to look into something. In Milan. And when you told me you were going for the campaign, it made me nervous. So I sent someone I trust."
I trace the rim of the cup with one finger. "Nervous how?"
"Amanda."
"Vittoria."
She exhales, and I can hear her choosing words, which she almost never has to do with me. "I need you to trust me on this one. Keep him close. Don't argue with him just to argue with him because you find it fun—and I know you find it fun."
"I find a lot of things fun. It's part of my charm."
"It's the whole of your charm."
That pulls a real laugh out of me, and for a second, the tightness in my chest eases.
Then the bruise on Nadia’s jaw flashes behind my eyes.
I push it away.
Not my department. Marketing. Strategy. Pretty pictures. I learned a long time ago which questions not to ask, and that’s the deal I made.
"So," Vittoria says, and the lightness is back, deliberate this time. Like she’s reaching for it on purpose. “Have you killed Elio yet?”
“It’s been a real test of my restraint.” I drop my voice. “He picked up my suitcase like I was a damsel in a Disney movie. I almost filed a complaint with management.”
“You two and your history.”
She says it carefully, the way you’d handle something with sharp edges.
History.
That’s a generous word for it.
What we had was a few months of him in my bed and absolutely nowhere else, exactly the way I like it. It would have stayed neat and simple and forgettable if I hadn’t been doing what I always do. Scrolling. Looking. Because I can never not look.
A girl in his comments.
His fiancée, tucked into a separate drawer while he kept seeing me on the side.
"There is no history," I say, and I keep my voice flat and bright at the same time, which is a skill. "There’s a guy who lied. And you know how I feel about liars."
"I know."
"I don’t care what he did with whoever he wanted to do it with.
I cared that he kept her in his pocket and pretended I was the only one in the room.
" I shrug like she can see it. "I told him exactly what would never happen between us.
Then I moved on. The end. Riveting story. Should be a Netflix special."
Vittoria goes quiet again, but it’s softer this time.
"You okay?"
"I’m great. I’m in Milan. I closed Casa Aurelia." I make myself smile, hoping it shows in my voice. "I’m thriving so well it’s honestly obnoxious."
"Okay," she says, not believing me, but letting me have it anyway. "Call me tomorrow. And babe? Keep Elio close. Promise me."
"I promise to tolerate his enormous presence. That’s the best I’ve got."
"I’ll take it. Love you."
"Love you back."
I hang up and let the phone drop to the little marble table.
The café settles around me. Without Vittoria’s voice in my ear, there’s nothing to keep my mind from circling back to Nadia’s bruise. To Bruno asking her to look into something. To the way both of those things made Milan feel less like a city and more like a locked room.
I reach for my phone again, because that’s what I do when a room gets too quiet around me.
That’s when I feel it.
The prickle at the back of my neck.
The specific weight of being watched.
I lift my head.
A man sits two tables over, near the window, one ankle resting on the opposite knee.
He isn’t pretending not to look at me. He’s just looking.
Gray at the temples. A jaw sharp enough to cut glass. Eyes the color of a storm, fixed on me with an attention so flat and complete it pushes the air right out of my chest.
I know that face.
Oh, fuck.