Chapter 8

Chapter 8

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On the back, in faded ink, three words had been written.

Ask about Lorenzo.

Dante turned it over.

His eyes lifted to Alessia’s face.

“That wasn’t there when I found it,” she said.

He went very still.

“What?”

“The writing. It wasn’t on the back when I picked it up.”

“You’re sure.”

“Yes. I looked at both sides. I always look at both sides.”

The room was silent except for the fire.

Someone had added the message after Alessia found the photograph. Which meant someone knew she had been in the study. Which meant someone wanted Dante to read it.

Which meant the person who had done this was still inside the house.

CHAPTER 3 — THE CUFFLINK

By noon, the mansion no longer felt like a home.

It had never felt like one to Alessia — she had always understood that she was a guest in someone else’s monument — but by noon it had stopped pretending. Doors that were usually propped open were shut. The kitchen staff moved in pairs. Two of the security men stood at the foot of the stairs and did not talk to each other, which in a house like this was its own kind of alarm.

Matteo Greco had arrived at eleven.

Alessia had seen him only twice before — a broad man in his forties with a boxer’s shoulders and a quiet way of entering a room that made you want to check your pockets. He was Dante’s security chief, and he had worked for the family for nine years, and he did not look at Alessia the way the rest of the staff did. He looked at her the way a man looks at a door he is deciding whether to open.

By noon he had collected the phones of every employee who had been in the house after ten o’clock.

The staff were moved into separate rooms — the dining room, the breakfast room, the small parlor off the east hall — and told to wait. Mrs. Conte stood in the corridor outside the dining room with her arms folded and her face very still, and Alessia, walking past with Matteo, saw her look away.

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Bellini was in the study.

He had been in there since Dante called him in at half past eleven, and even through the closed door Alessia could hear the shape of his voice: clipped, reasonable, rising slightly at the ends. The voice of a man explaining something he was certain he was right about.

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