Chapter 5
CECELIA
Constantine Venosa's office felt like the inside of a fortress.
Dark wood paneling, floor to ceiling bookshelves, a desk that could have served as a dining table for six.
The windows were enormous but the glass was thick, the kind that didn't rattle in wind, and the view they offered of the grounds below felt less like a vista and more like surveillance.
Everything in this room had been chosen to communicate the same thing — that the man who occupied it was not temporary, not provisional, not someone who could be moved.
I sat in the chair across from his desk and tried to look like I wasn't cataloguing every exit.
The man Emilio — smaller than Constantine, quieter, with eyes that missed nothing and gave away less — had taken the seat beside me rather than across from me, which I noticed.
Beside implied something different than across.
It implied management rather than confrontation.
I wasn't sure yet whether that was reassuring.
Constantine stood at the window with his back to both of us, looking down at the grounds.
He'd barely spoken since we came inside, and the silence wasn't uncomfortable exactly — it was purposeful, the silence of a man who was thinking rather than performing.
I'd grown up around men who used silence as a weapon, who let it stretch and sharpen until the person on the receiving end started filling it with confessions just to make it stop.
This didn't feel like that. It felt like he was genuinely deciding something.
I wasn't sure which was more dangerous.
"I'm sorry to keep you both waiting." Emilio came through the door slightly breathless and set a file on the desk in front of Constantine's empty chair. "Last minute intel." He caught my eye briefly and I watched him decide something before he looked away.
Constantine moved from the window and took his seat. He didn't open the file immediately. He looked at me first with a long considering look that I held without flinching, because flinching in front of men like this was something you learned not to do early.
"Ms. Avola," he said. "You're in a lot of trouble."
I thought about the car ride. About the way he'd laughed when I'd said fucking Venosas — the surprised laugh of a man who hadn't expected to be amused.
About the way he'd shared the family history without heat, almost ruefully, like a man observing an absurd situation from a slight distance.
About the way he'd said I understand more than you think and meant it.
I thought about all of that and I decided to be still and let him lead.
"The strong silent type, hmm?" He opened the file. "You left Sicily just over a month ago. Is that correct?"
"That's correct." I wasn't going to volunteer anything he didn't already have.
"You traveled under your own passport. First class to Paris, connecting to Chicago." He turned a page without looking up. "You withdrew a significant amount of cash from the household accounts over four months prior to leaving." A brief pause. "Methodical."
I said nothing.
"A woman named Nicola Espinoza helped you escape."
The name hit me like a hand around my throat.
I stared at him.
I hadn't said her name. Not once, not to anyone in Chicago, not to Jacob, not to the woman at the apartment office, not in any conversation I'd had since I landed.
I had kept Nicola out of everything because keeping her name out of things was the one protection I could still offer her from this distance.
Constantine's eyes were on me. Not unkind. Not satisfied. Just watching, with the careful attention of a man who understood that what happened next mattered.
"I know you don't trust me, Cecilia." He said my name differently than he'd been saying it — not Ms. Avola, not the formal distance of an interrogation. My name. "But you're going to have to."
He picked up a photograph and slid it across the desk toward me.
I looked down at it.
Nicola's car. I recognized it immediately — the small blue Fiat she'd had since we were eighteen, the one with the cracked side mirror she'd never gotten fixed because she said it gave the car character.
It was in a ditch off the road that ran along the vineyard's eastern boundary.
The one she would have taken home after dropping me at the airport.
"This doesn't prove anything." My voice came out steadier than I felt. I slid it back across the desk. Neither of us missed the way my hand was shaking.
Emilio leaned forward and set two newspaper clippings in front of me.
I read the first headline.
Then the second.
The office went very quiet. I could hear the rain against the thick glass. I could hear my own breathing, shallow and strange, like someone had reached into my chest and was slowly compressing everything inside it.
Nicola.
She'd driven home in the dark after leaving me at the airport. She'd driven home on that road, the one she'd driven a thousand times, and someone had been waiting for her. Someone who knew she'd helped me. Someone my father had sent, or authorized, or simply not stopped.
She was twenty-two years old. She had her whole life in front of her.
She had plans — a job she loved, a flat she'd just painted yellow because she said yellow rooms made mornings easier, a man she'd been seeing for three months who she'd described to me in such careful detail that I knew she was trying not to hope too hard.
She had driven me to the airport in the dark and smiled through her tears and said you bet your ass I will and driven home and someone had been waiting.
Because of me.
A tear fell from my eye and landed on the paper with a splat. I stared at it. Then I looked up at Constantine Venosa and the question came out as barely a whisper.
"They did this because of me?"
He nodded once. Slowly. Without looking away.
I don't know exactly what happened next.
I was in the chair and then I wasn't — my legs simply stopped working, the way things stopped working when the weight became more than the structure could hold, and I slid from the chair to the floor without meaning to.
The newspaper clippings went with me, still clutched against my chest, and I pressed them there and said no, over and over, the word coming out small and broken and completely inadequate for what I was feeling.
No. No. No.
Nicola who had never hurt anyone. Nicola who had kept every secret I'd ever given her. Nicola who had sat in that car and cried for me because she loved me enough to let me go and brave enough to drive away after.
Dead because she'd done that. Dead because I'd asked her to help me and she had, because that was who she was, because she would have done anything for me and I had let her and now she was gone.
I was so far inside the grief that I didn't register him moving until he was already there — Constantine, on the floor beside me, lowering himself down with the unhurried deliberateness of a man who had made a decision and was carrying it out.
He didn't ask permission. He didn't say anything at first. He simply put his arms around me and let me fall apart against his chest.
He was solid in a way that had nothing to do with physical size, though he was considerably larger than me.
It was the solidity of someone who had decided not to move, who had planted himself next to a person in collapse and was simply going to be there until it passed.
I could feel his heartbeat, steady and slow, a counterpoint to the ragged way I was breathing.
"You're safe here." The words were quiet, barely above a murmur, his voice low against my hair. Not it's going to be fine — he was too honest for that. Not she wouldn't want this — he hadn't known her. Just you're safe here, the one true thing he could offer, given simply.
I cried until there was nothing left. He didn't rush me.
He didn't shift or check his watch or make any of the small movements that communicated impatience.
He just stayed, one hand moving slowly through my hair, the other arm around me, an anchor in the particular way that some people were anchors — not by pulling you back to shore but by simply refusing to let you drift any further.
At some point the worst of it passed. These things always did, eventually. The grief didn't leave but it receded enough to breathe around, the way it did when you'd spent everything you had and your body simply couldn't sustain the intensity anymore.
I sat up slowly. Became aware of the wet patch on his shirt, the mascara that had gone with it. I looked up at him, mortified, and reached out to wipe at it uselessly.
"I'm so sorry—"
He pressed his hand over mine, flat against his chest, and shook his head.
"Don't apologize." He held my gaze. His eyes up close were very dark, and there was something in them I hadn't expected from a man like this — not pity, which I would have resented, but something quieter and more serious than that.
Recognition, maybe. The expression of someone who had sat with grief before and knew what it looked like from the inside.
We stayed like that for a moment, his hand over mine, both of us on the floor of his office, and then he said quietly, "Do you think they're coming for you?"
"Yes." I already knew the answer. Had known it since I read the headlines. "And I don't think my fate will be any different from Nicola's." I took a breath. "I did the one thing nobody in my family has ever done. I escaped. My father doesn't forgive that. He can't — it undermines everything he is."
Constantine stood and held out his hand.
I took it and he brought me up with an ease that suggested the effort was minimal, and we moved to the couch by the window and sat at opposite ends.
I needed the distance. I needed to be able to think clearly and thinking clearly near this man was already proving more difficult than it should have been.