Morning found Lorenzo Falcone stretched across the sofa in the great room, his suit jacket still buttoned, a crease of exhaustion carved between his brows.
He had spent the night there without meaning to. He had sat alone in the dark long after the last of the household staff had melted away into their quarters, staring into the cold hearth as if it might answer him, glancing every so often at the grandfather clock that ticked its patient, merciless rhythm against the marble. At some hour he could not remember, sleep had taken him where he sat.
When Lorenzo rose and saw the slippers still set neatly by the door, untouched, arranged exactly where they had waited all night, something cold and gray settled over his face. He drew out his phone. For the first time since she had gone, he typed a message to me.
[Adriana, since you don't want to come back, then you might as well never come back.]
I stood beside him, unseen, and read the words as they left his hands. I looked at Lorenzo and let a small, bitter smile touch what remained of me. I will never come back to bother you again.
He washed, changed into fresh silk, and left for the office as if it were any ordinary morning.
The place he went to was the shared counsel house he had built alongside my brother, Marco Rizzo. Two bloodlines had sunk their weight into those walls, two Families who trusted each other no further than the length of a drawn blade, and yet who had agreed, years ago, that the law made a finer weapon than the gun when wielded by patient men. It was a shield forged between allies, and Lorenzo was its architect. Soldiers in dark coats stood at its doors and said nothing to anyone who did not belong.
Lorenzo had scarcely settled behind his desk, had scarcely begun to roll the heavy fountain pen slowly between two fingers as he did when a thing was weighing on him, when the door opened and Bianca Moretti came in. She carried a stack of papers against her chest, and there was a tremor in her that a lesser man might have mistaken for something real.
"Lorenzo," she breathed, "you are the only one who can help me this time."
Her eyes brimmed. She looked fragile enough to break, a woman held together by nothing but the mercy of the man in front of her.
"I spoke to Vincent," she went on, her voice catching. "He swore to me it wasn't done on purpose. The road was slick with rain, his vision blurred, and before he understood what had happened he had struck someone."
Lorenzo was on his feet at once. He guided her into a chair with a hand at her elbow, took the papers gently from her arms, and set the pen down on the desk.
"Is the person dead?"
Bianca nodded.
The gray came back into his face, deeper now. He pressed on, his voice low and even. "Have the family been reached? Is there anything at all to say who she was?"
She shook her head. For a fraction of a moment, before the grief arranged itself across her features, her jaw set hard and still. Then it was gone, and only the trembling remained.
"Vincent said she was thrown by the impact and struck the windshield," she whispered. "Her face was ruined. There was nothing left to name her by. No one has been able to find her people."
Lorenzo's eyes turned grave, the eyes of a man beginning to feel the shape of something he could not yet see in the dark.
"How fast was Vincent driving?" he asked. "Were there cameras nearby? Any witnesses?"
