Chapter 4 - The Woman in the West Wing
That evening, the lieutenants carried out the order. Two armed men were placed at the corridor leading to the West Wing. A third stood outside the bedroom door itself. The staff had been informed that the Signorina was resting and would receive no visitors.
Only Alessandro held the key.
He did not go to her at once. He remained in his study until the estate had fallen fully into darkness. He drank a single glass of whiskey without tasting it. He turned the family signet ring around his finger a hundred times. He watched the small lamp on his desk flicker once and steady itself.
Then, near midnight, he rose, took the key from the drawer, and walked alone toward the West Wing.
The corridor was silent. The guard straightened at his approach and stepped aside without a word. He unlocked the door himself and stepped inside.
Victoria was sitting by the window. She was still in the cream-white dress from the morning, though it was now creased and darkened at the sleeves where she had been holding herself. Her hair had come loose from its pins. Her eyes were swollen and red from an entire evening of weeping in silence.
She saw him and rose from the chair at once.
“Alessandro,” she said. Her voice broke on his name. She crossed the room in three quick steps and caught his hand in both of hers, gripping his fingers as though she was drowning.
“Alessandro, I swear. I swear on my mother’s name — I did not know. I do not understand what is happening. Please listen to me. Please.”
He pulled his hand back.
The entire room seemed to freeze. Her hands remained suspended in the air where his had been. She looked at her own empty palms, then up at his face, and something small and terrible broke in her eyes.
When he spoke, his voice was low and shaking with the effort of holding the fury still inside his chest.
“Do not swear. Do not cry. For two months, you spread that butter for me with your own hands. You held the master code to the security system. You refused to taste a single bite of the bread you prepared this morning. I do not need to hear you explain. I need only the final piece of proof — and I will have it.”
Victoria stepped back. One step. Her face had gone completely pale, the color of the moonlight coming through the window behind her.
“Alessandro, please listen to me.”
He lifted his hand and cut her off with a single sharp motion. “No. Not now. Perhaps not ever again.”
She stopped in the middle of the room. Her hands, still lifted toward him, began to shake violently. She could not steady them. She lowered herself into the nearest chair almost by accident, as though her legs had simply stopped answering her. She stared at him without blinking — unable to believe that the man she loved was looking at her the way one looked at a murderer.
Alessandro turned his back to her. He walked to the door. Just before he closed it, he stopped. He did not turn his head. He did not speak. He only stopped, one hand on the wooden edge, as if for a single fraction of a second one part of him were begging the rest of him to turn around.
Then the door closed. The bolt slid into place from the outside.
Inside the West Wing, Victoria pressed both hands against her face and began to weep without a sound, her shoulders shaking silently against the arm of the chair.
Outside the door, Alessandro leaned his back against the cold stone wall. He closed his eyes. And for the first time in twenty years — in a life full of gunfire and betrayal and buried friends — he felt his own heart hurt in a way that was not a metaphor at all. It was physical. It was real. It had a location in his chest, and it did not stop.
Alessandro did not sleep that night. He remained in his study until the sky beyond the tall windows turned from black to iron gray. Then, at first light, he called for a small, quiet team of investigators — handpicked from among the men who had served the family the longest and spoken the least.
He gave them a single instruction. Search everything belonging to Victoria. Every property in her name. Every bank account, open or closed. Every letter. Every message. Every phone call from the last two years.
He wanted the final piece of proof to complete the sentence he had already prepared in his heart: a name of an accomplice, a transfer of money, a single line of text sent to a stranger in the middle of the night. Anything.
He was not searching for a reason to forgive her, he told himself. He was searching for a reason to understand.
Because during the long hours of darkness, a single question had begun to gnaw at him. A question he could not silence with the reports on his desk. A question he could not answer with the evidence in his hands.
Why?
She did not need money. He had given her everything — cars, jewels, an entire wardrobe from Milan, a private garden that had once belonged to a duchess. She had no surviving family to protect. No brother in debt. No sister in danger. No father whose gambling had left blood marks on unknown ledgers.
In three weeks she was to become the wife of the most powerful man in New York, and every door in every city on this continent was already prepared to open before her name.
There was no shape of a motive that fit the woman he had believed her to be.
He sat with that question until his coffee turned cold.
At mid-morning, there was a soft knock at the study door. Sophia Rossi entered, her hands twisted together in her apron, her eyes lowered.
“My lord,” she said quietly. “I have not come to disobey. I only come to beg. Emma is a child. She has already tasted the poison. She has already seen too much. Please — let me take her away from the estate. Just for a little while, until this is finished.”
Alessandro rose from behind his desk. He walked around it and stood before her.
“Sophia. Look at me.”
She lifted her eyes.
“I owe your daughter my life. I do not forget debts of that size. Whatever this family survives, Emma will attend the finest school in this country. A trust in her name has already been prepared. You have my word on the Moretti seal. But I ask you for one more week. One week only. After that, you may take her wherever your heart chooses, and my men will guard the road.”
Sophia’s eyes filled. She nodded and whispered her thanks.
But when she returned to the servants’ hall to gather Emma, the little girl refused. She held her gray rabbit against her chest with both arms and shook her head slowly.
“I am staying, Mama. Uncle Alessandro needs someone in this house who is not afraid to tell the truth.”
Sophia had no answer for that. She only pressed a kiss into her daughter’s hair.
That afternoon, the head of the investigation team returned to the study. His face was carefully blank.
“My lord, there is nothing. No hidden account. No stranger’s number in her call history. No letter. No wire. No meeting outside her ordinary hours. Nothing at all.”
Alessandro heard the words. In his head, a small ringing began — thin and high, like a wine glass held too close to a bell.
She is too skilled. Or is there someone else standing behind her?
May you like
He did not know the answer. But for the first time since the morning of the buttered bread, a small seed of doubt was planted inside him. Not doubt about Victoria.
Doubt about the picture itself. About how neatly, how conveniently, how perfectly it had been arranged around her.
