Chapter 4 - ELEVEN MINUTES
The footage was grainy and gray, the color of a photograph left too long in the sun.
Matteo played it at normal speed. The corridor outside Dante’s study, the west hallway, empty. A grandfather clock at the far end, its pendulum a pale sliver. At 11:31, the corridor went dark. Not black — dark, the way a hallway goes when a man puts his palm over the lens of a camera and holds it there.
“It stays dark for seven minutes,” Matteo said. “Then it comes back.”
At 11:38, Alessia appeared from the side entrance. She walked to the study door, paused, and went in. Her uniform was the same as it was now. She looked, on the screen, very small.
At 11:40, Bellini entered the corridor.
Then the footage skipped.
The timestamp jumped from 11:40 to 11:51.
“Eleven minutes,” Matteo said. “Gone.”
Dante watched the screen without expression. “Camera failure?”
“No. Manual deletion.”
“From where?”
“Security terminal.”
“Who has access?”
Matteo hesitated. “Me. You.” A pause. “Bellini.”
Alessia stared at the screen. She had not known that. She had not known that the man who accused her had been standing in that corridor during the missing eleven minutes, in the dark, while she was behind the curtains of the study.
Bellini hadn’t simply seen her leaving.
He had been there.
Matteo continued.
“There’s something else.”
He opened another file. A gate camera, the service entrance at the west side of the property, shot from above. At 10:52, a vehicle entered. It was dark, low, expensive. No plate was visible.
“It left at 12:03,” Matteo said.
“Who authorized it?”
The pause this time was longer.
“The authorization code belonged to Bianca Moretti.”
Silence.
Dante’s mother had been dead eleven years.
Alessia looked at him.
“That’s impossible,” she said.
“No,” Dante said quietly. “It’s deliberate.”
He stood up and walked to the window, and stood there with his back to them for a long moment, and Alessia watched the light move across his shoulders and thought about the fact that his mother’s name was still a working password in a house that had buried her eleven years ago.
“Who else knew her codes?” he asked.
Matteo shook his head. “I don’t know. The system was built before my time. The codes were never rotated. Everyone who had access then might still have access now.”
“Who had access then?”
“Your father. Your uncle.” Matteo paused. “Bellini.”
Dante said nothing.
That evening, the staff were finally released.
Everyone except Bellini.
Dante ordered him to remain in the guest wing. Bellini laughed when he was told.
“You’re imprisoning me because a maid found a cufflink?”
“No.”
Dante stood in the foyer with his hands in his pockets. The chandelier was lit, and the marble floor shone, and the house looked, for all the world, exactly as it had that morning.
“I’m asking you to stay because someone used my dead mother’s security code.”
“And if I refuse?”
Dante looked at him.
“Then I’ll stop asking.”
Bellini stayed.
Alessia picked up her suitcase.
Dante saw her.
“Where are you going?”
“Home.”
“You live here.”
“I used to.”
“You weren’t fired.”
She looked around. The foyer was empty now — the staff gone to their rooms, the security men at their posts, Mrs. Conte vanished down the east corridor without a word.
“You stopped them from firing me because you needed to know what I saw,” Alessia said. “Yes.”
“Now you know.”
“Not everything.”
“That sounds like your problem.”
Dante approached her. He stopped a few feet away, and for a moment neither of them spoke.
“You want to leave?”
“Yes.”
The answer came too quickly. He looked at her.
“Why?”
“Because somebody broke into your study, stole a folder, deleted the security footage, and used your dead mother’s access code.” She adjusted her grip on the suitcase. “All good reasons. And someone tried to make me responsible. Better reason.”
“So you’re leaving.”
“So I’m leaving.”
Dante did not stop her.
That surprised her. She had spent the whole day being managed — by Mrs. Conte, by Bellini, by the order of the house — and she had braced herself for one more hand on her arm.
He simply said, “I’ll have a car take you.”
“No.”
He almost argued. She saw it happen — the small forward lean, the breath he took. Then he remembered that the woman in front of him had spent the morning having other people decide her future, and he stopped himself.
“Fine.”
She reached the door.
“Call me when you get home.”
She turned.
“Is that an order?”
“No.”
The answer came immediately, and it was not an order. It was a request.
Something changed in her expression — small, but real, the way a lock changes when the right key goes in.
“Fine,” she said.
She left.
Dante watched the door close.
Matteo appeared from the hallway.
“You let her go.”
“She wanted to leave.”
“That’s never stopped you before.”
Dante looked at him.
“It does now.”
Matteo studied him for a moment.
“This is about the maid.”
“This is about whoever thought framing her would stop me from looking.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know.”
At 10:17 that night, Dante’s phone rang.
He answered immediately.
“Are you home?”
“No.”
His body went still.
“Where are you?”
“My father’s old apartment.”
“Why?”
“Because I remembered something.”
“What?”
May you like
“When my father burned those papers,” Alessia said, “he kept one envelope.”
Dante was already moving.
