Chapter 6
The room sat in silence for a long moment. Isabella had gone pale and small in her chair, arms wrapped around herself.
“Was it your idea,” I asked her, “or hers?”
“Mine, partly.” Isabella’s voice shook. “I met with Dimitri’s driver twice. I thought I was helping smooth things over before the war got worse. I never asked why he wanted Claire kept quiet in the kitchen. I just — went along with it. Because Mom said it was tradition. Every Moretti wife earns her place.”
Claire looked at Isabella for a long moment — not with hatred, something closer to exhaustion.
“I earned my place a long time ago,” she said. “I just didn’t know I’d have to earn it twice — once with your brother, and once with the ghost of a man who ordered my father killed.”
Nobody had an answer for that.
I stood, pulling the folder closed.
“Here’s what happens now,” I said. “Every account tied to this house that isn’t in my name or Claire’s gets frozen by morning. Every wire authorization gets reviewed by me personally before it moves another dollar. And Dimitri Kovac is going to learn exactly what it costs to reach into my family through a debt his father and mine left buried for eighteen years.”
“Luca—”
My mother reached toward me.
“Don’t.” I stepped back. “You’ll keep your home. You’ll keep your allowance. That’s more mercy than you gave my wife in six weeks of watching her hands crack open over a sink.”
I looked at Claire.
“Come with me.”
She stood, and for the first time that night, she didn’t look like she was asking anyone’s permission to move through her own house.
We didn’t speak on the walk upstairs. Claire’s hand found mine somewhere around the second landing, and I let it, grateful for the small proof that whatever had cracked open downstairs hadn’t broken the thing between us.
I led her to the study, my private room, the one place in the house that still felt entirely mine. Marco had already gone ahead, phone pressed to his ear, murmuring instructions to someone about account freezes that would hit before sunrise.
Claire sat on the edge of my desk instead of the chair. She always did that — perched instead of settled, like part of her never fully trusted a room to hold still under her.
“Say something,” I said.
“I don’t know what to say.” She looked at her hands, the cracked skin at her knuckles catching the desk lamp. “An hour ago I thought I knew exactly who I was. A waitress you fell in love with. Nothing more complicated than that.”
“You’re still that person.”
May you like
“I’m the daughter of a man your father had killed.” Her voice didn’t rise. It didn’t have to. “That’s not a small complication, Luca.”
I crossed the room and knelt in front of her, taking both of her hands.
