CHAPTER 2: The Gates of Villa Moretti
ISABELLA
The air hit her first.
Warm, even at midnight. Salt and orange blossom, and something older underneath, like stone that had held the heat of a thousand summers. Isabella stood at the top of the jet stairs with a bruise throbbing along her jaw, and for one stupid second, she thought: It's beautiful.
Then Matteo's hand closed around her elbow, and she remembered.
"Walk."
Three black cars waited on the tarmac, engines running, headlights cutting through the dark. Dante was already in the first one. He hadn't looked back at her. He hadn't needed to.
Luca opened the door of the second car. "Signorina."
It was the only polite word anyone had spoken to her in eleven hours. She almost didn't know what to do with it.
She slid inside. Luca took the seat beside her. Matteo took the front. The doors shut, and the cars rolled forward in formation, like a funeral procession.
Count the turns, she told herself. Count everything.
Left at the airport gate. A highway, then a smaller road, then a smaller one still. Mountains rose black against the stars. She marked a shrine to the Madonna at a fork in the road, a stone bridge, a long climb with the sea glittering far below.
"You're counting."
Luca hadn't turned his head. He was watching the window, his face unreadable.
"I don't know what you mean."
"The turns. Don't bother." He handed her a bottle of water. "My brother changes the route every time."
She took it, because her throat felt like sand. "Why tell me that?"
"Because you'd work it out by the fifth turn," Luca said, "and I'd rather not watch you be disappointed."
She didn't answer. She drank the water and kept counting anyway.
An hour and a half later, the cars slowed.
Iron gates rose out of the dark, twice her height, topped with spikes. They swung open without a sound, and the cars rolled through, and behind them the gates closed.
She heard the lock engage.
It sounded like a verdict.
DANTE
He watched her from the top of the courtyard steps.
She climbed out of the car clutching her suitcase with both hands, as if it were a shield. The old stone of Villa Moretti rose around her four hundred years of walls, built to survive sieges, built to keep things in as much as out.
Lanterns burned along the balconies. Men stood beneath them with rifles, silent, motionless.
She saw them. He watched her see them.
Her eyes moved fast. Gate, wall, balcony, door. Gate, wall, balcony, door. She was counting exits.
Good, Dante thought. Count them. There are none.
Then the courtyard light caught her face, and he saw the bruise.
A dark mark along her jaw, already blooming purple. His handiwork.
Something shifted in his chest, small and sharp and entirely unwelcome. He dismissed it at once. A bruise on his property was a flaw, nothing more. He didn't tolerate flaws.
"Matteo," he said. "Ice. And have the doctor look at her in the morning."
"I don't need your ice," Isabella said.
Every man in the courtyard went still.
Dante came down the steps slowly. One. Two. Three. He let the silence stretch until it hurt.
"I didn't ask what you needed."
"I know." Her voice was steady, though her knuckles were white around the suitcase handle. "That seems to be a pattern."
Behind him, he heard someone swallow. Luca, probably. Or the housekeeper, who stood in the doorway with her arms folded and her face carved from stone.
Dante stopped an arm's length from Isabella. Close enough to see her pulse jumping at her throat. Close enough to see that she was exhausted, terrified, and refusing to show either.
Stubborn, he thought. It will cost her.
"Listen carefully, Isabella. I will say this once."
"I'm listening."
"Rule one. You do not leave these walls. Rule two. You do not speak to anyone who is not under my roof. Rule three." He leaned in, and his voice dropped until only she could hear it. "When I speak to you, you answer. Immediately. Without that tone."
"And if I break them?"
"You will not break them twice."
He let the sentence settle between them. He had said it to men twice her size. He had watched them go gray.
Isabella didn't go gray.
She lifted her chin, and her green eyes held his, and for the span of one heartbeat something passed between them that he could not name and did not like.
"Understood," she said.
It was the right answer. It should have satisfied him.
It didn't, because she had said it like a woman who was filing it away.
ISABELLA
He turned and walked toward the house, and every man in the courtyard moved in his wake like iron filings drawn to a magnet.
Isabella stayed where she was.
Her legs wanted to shake. She locked her knees and breathed through it. In. Out. The way she had during final exams, during the night her mother left, during every moment when the only choice was to keep standing.
Don't fall apart. Not here. Not in front of them.
"Signorina."
Luca again, quietly, at her shoulder. He took her suitcase from her hands before she could stop him.
"It's heavy," he said, as if that explained it.
"I can carry my own things."
"I know." A faint smile, there and gone. "That's why I didn't ask."
He walked ahead with her bag. She followed, because the alternative was standing alone in a courtyard full of rifles.
At the doorway, the housekeeper stepped aside without a word. She was perhaps sixty, black-clad, with eyes that missed nothing. She looked at Isabella's bruise, then at her face, and something in her expression flickered. It might have been pity. It might have been contempt.
Isabella couldn't tell. She didn't speak the language. She didn't know the rules. She didn't know a single person in this country who wasn't on Dante Moretti's payroll.
She stepped across the threshold anyway.
Behind her, somewhere in the dark, the sea breathed against the cliffs. Ahead of her, the house swallowed her whole.
Forty-one, she thought, almost calm. Forty-one armed men since the gate.
She would need to count again tomorrow.