CHAPTER 3: The Taste of Power
ISABELLA
Luca carried her suitcase up three flights of stone stairs, past portraits of dead Morettis who watched her with painted eyes. Carmela walked ahead with a ring of iron keys. It was past two in the morning, and the house was only shadows: a vast hall, a staircase wide enough for a funeral, a long corridor in the West Wing where every footstep echoed.
At the very end, Carmela unlocked a heavy door.
Isabella stepped inside. Luca set her suitcase at the foot of the bed.
"Buonanotte, signorina," he said quietly.
The door closed. The key turned. The footsteps faded.
She didn't sleep.
She lay on top of the silk sheets in her jeans and sweater, shoes still on, staring at a ceiling painted with faded clouds, and listened to the house breathe. Footsteps in the corridor. The patient tread of someone who stopped outside her door every hour and never opened it.
At dawn, the sea turned from black to gray to gold beyond the window, and Isabella finally admitted what she had been refusing to look at all night.
The room was gorgeous.
That made her hate it more.
A canopy bed carved from dark walnut, hung with cream silk. A fireplace big enough to stand in, cold and swept. A marble bathroom with a tub big enough to swim in. French doors opening onto a stone balcony, and beyond the railing, a sheer drop to black rocks and white foam. Everything she touched was soft, heavy, expensive. Everything she tested was locked.
The door, from the outside. The windows, barred in iron twisted into vines. The balcony, forty feet above jagged stone. No phone. No pen, no paper.
Behind the headboard, her fingers found scratches.
She dragged the bed away from the wall and stared. Lines. Dozens of them, cut into the plaster, grouped in fives with a diagonal slash through each bundle. Someone had counted days here.
Someone had counted a lot of days.
She shoved the bed back and sat on it very carefully, as if the mattress might bite.
At seven, the lock turned. A young maid in a gray uniform set down a tray of coffee, bread, and figs, and fled without meeting her eyes. Behind her came a stooped, gray-haired doctor, who tilted Isabella's face to the light and pressed two fingers along her jaw. She flinched.
"Niente di rotto," he murmured. Nothing broken. He left a jar of salve and was gone before she could ask a question.
Then Carmela entered, the housekeeper with the iron keys, and pressed a cool wet cloth to the bruise. Her fingers were rough and surprisingly gentle.
"Carmela," she said, touching her chest.
"Isabella. Please, a phone? Telefono?"
Carmela shook her head once. Firm. Final. She pointed at the tray, then held up one finger and said a name Isabella understood, because it had been spoken over her like a sentence in a courtyard full of rifles.
"Dante."
The door closed. The lock turned.
Isabella stood in the beautiful room and shook. Not from fear this time. From rage, hot and clean. Dante Moretti had hit her. Had bought her. Had locked her in a room where someone else had counted days.
She hated him. She hated the cold gray eyes and the perfect suit and the way he had said You will not break them twice like a man reading the weather.
She hated him so purely that she felt almost steady.
DANTE
"She didn't sleep," Matteo said. "Danilo stood outside her door all night. He heard her pacing until dawn, then the bed scraping across the floor."
Dante did not look up from the ledger. Morning light poured through the study windows, laying gold across the Moretti crest carved into the stone fireplace. "The bed."
"Carmela found it crooked this morning. She knows what that means." A pause. "The girl found the marks."
Now Dante looked up. "And?"
"No screaming. No tears. She asked Carmela for a phone, then looked ready to kill the wall."
Something like satisfaction moved through him.
Across the room, Luca stood by the window, arms folded. "Dante. Of all the rooms in this house—"
"It's the most secure."
"It's the room where—"
"I know what it is." Cold. Final. Luca's mouth closed.
Dante looked down at the courtyard, where gardeners and guards moved through the lemon trees. Three million dollars, paid for a girl who knew nothing and belonged nowhere. He did not buy things he couldn't use. He had not decided what to use her for.
"Have Carmela bring her down at nine, with my breakfast," he said. "She carries my food. She handles my things. She learns this house. A woman with no purpose has too much time to invent one. I'd rather give her mine."
"And if she poisons you?" Luca asked quietly.
A slow smile curved Dante's mouth.
"Then I'll learn something about her."
ISABELLA
The tray weighed almost nothing. Isabella carried it like a bomb.
Matteo walked a step behind her, and the house, which had been only shadows at night, rose around her in daylight.
She had thought the hall enormous in the dark. It was larger. A black-and-white marble floor stretched like a chessboard beneath a vaulted ceiling painted with saints and storm clouds, and a crystal chandelier hung from it like frozen rain. A staircase of carved white stone swept down in a double curve, its iron balustrade polished by four hundred years of hands. Tall windows poured sea light across gilded mirrors, marble statues, and paintings she was sure she should recognize. The air smelled of beeswax, orange blossom, and old stone. Through an arched doorway she glimpsed a terrace, then a second courtyard, then another, as if the house kept unfolding.
And people were everywhere. Maids in gray uniforms polished the banister with soft cloths. Kitchen boys hurried past with silver trays, and gardeners passed with baskets of lemons. She counted eleven servants before she reached the bottom step, and every one of them lowered their eyes and watched her pass.
Her stomach dropped. It wasn't a house. It was a palace, and every glittering inch had been built on fear and bought with blood.
She had never owned more than a suitcase's worth of anything, and beside all this she felt like a stain on the floor.
She hated that it took her breath away.
The study doors were twice her height. Matteo knocked once and opened them.
Dante sat at the far end behind a desk the size of a car, sleeves rolled, platinum cufflinks gleaming on the blotter. He did not look up.
"Put it down."
She set the tray on the desk and stepped back.
"Now taste it."
She stared at him. "What?"
Finally, he raised his eyes. Gray. Flat. Unhurried. "Every dish. In front of me."
"You think I'd—"
"I think nothing. I know what I would do in your position. So we will establish, on the first morning, that your hands touching my food has consequences."
She sipped the coffee, bitter and scalding. Chewed bread. Bit into a fig, sweet and obscene in her mouth. She did it all without looking away, and the hatred in her chest burned so bright she thought he must feel it.
He watched her. One minute passed. Two. A clock ticked.
At last, he reached for the cup.
"Your duties." He drank. "You will bring my meals. You will keep my rooms in order. You will learn my habits and follow them without comment."
"So I'm your maid."
"You are my personal assistant. It says so in your contract."
"You already have one."
"I have a business assistant. You are..." His eyes narrowed fractionally, as if the word had surprised him. "Different. The east wing is forbidden. My study, when I am not in it, is forbidden. And the door at the end of the north corridor—"
"What about it?"
"You do not open it. You do not touch it. You do not ask about it." His voice dropped. "If you do, the consequence will be of a different order than a slap."
She should have been afraid. She was. But beneath the fear, something stubborn answered.
"You keep saying consequences," Isabella said. "You haven't said what you actually want from me."
For a moment, he went very still.
"That," Dante said, "is what I haven't decided."
It was the most honest thing he had said to her. It was also the most frightening.
He picked up his pen. "Matteo. Take her back."
She went without looking at him, the answer like a weight in her pocket: the man who owned her did not know what she was for.
In her room, the lock turned behind her. She looked at the wall where the tally marks hid and thought about the door at the end of the north corridor.
You do not ask about it.
She hated Dante Moretti.
But she was going to find out what was behind that door.