Chapter 1 - The Midnight Intrusion
The door wasn't locked.
Celeste stood in the corridor with her hand on the handle and understood that this should have stopped her, and let it not. Villa Balaki at half past midnight was a house of cold stone and older money, and the guards had let her through without a word — a woman in a white silk babydoll walking the second-floor corridor at that hour needed no explanation, and she had counted on that, because explaining herself would have required a lie she had not had time to build.
She had spent three weeks building everything else. The invitation to the house party. The dress. The name she gave at the gate, which was not hers.
The knife was strapped high on her right thigh, where a dress with no pockets still could not hide it.
Inside the room, it was dark except for the moonlight, and the moonlight was enough. It laid a long pale shape across the bed — a man asleep on his side of a bed built for two, one arm thrown up over the pillow, no shirt, the sheet down at his waist.
Renzo Balaki.
Five years of photographs and court records and the testimony of people who had been paid to be quiet, and here he was, breathing, forty inches away.
She crossed the floor without a sound. Her father had put her in Krav Maga at eight years old, then target shooting at eleven, then combat drills at fourteen — six days a week until the week he died — and none of it had ever felt like this. All of it had been theory. This was the first time her body had been asked to do the thing it had been built for.
Three feet from the bed, his eyes opened.
There was no startle in it. No confusion. No hand groping for a weapon in the dark. His eyes opened and found her in the first instant and tracked her the way a camera tracks a moving object, and Celeste understood two things at once: that he was fully awake, and that he had been awake before her hand had touched the door.
He sat up slowly, without hurry, and looked at her.
"If you walk into my room like this again," he said, "you're not leaving alive."
His voice was rough from sleep and had no heat in it at all, and that was worse than any threat she had prepared for. She had rehearsed for shouting. She had rehearsed for a man who would reach for the bedside table. She had not rehearsed for this — for a man who could be woken at gunpoint-range by a stranger and sit up like someone being handed a menu.
And something in her chest, locked down and bolted for five years, came loose.
She smiled.
It was the first one in five years and it felt like the scar of one, and it had frightened people at less.
"You should know," she said, "I'll come in. But next time I'm coming armed."
The silence afterward had weight to it. Somewhere out past the windows, beyond the cypress and the terraced slopes, Mount Etna stood against the sky with its plume of smoke going up into the dark — a mountain that everyone on the island called asleep and that everyone on the island knew was not.
Renzo Balaki watched her for a long moment, and she watched the exact instant his expression change from controlled surprise into something that had no business being on his face at half past midnight.
"Celeste Vicenzi," he said.
Her name in his mouth sounded like an accusation and a recognition at the same time, which was not how she had imagined her own name being said ever again.
"Marco Vicenzi's daughter."
It was not a question.
"You remember him," she said.
"I remember all of them."
He tilted his head. His eyes went over her once — not the way men had been looking at her in that dress all week, and not the way she had planned for either. It was the look of a man reading a page.
"The question is what you want."
She stepped out of the shadow of the bedpost.
"Confirmation. That it was you. That you gave the order."
Outside, the volcano went on smoking. Renzo got out of bed with a movement that had no wasted motion in it, and crossed to the window, and turned his back to her.
That was a test. She understood it a half-second after it happened. He was giving her his spine, in the dark, from eight feet, to see whether the daughter of Marco Vicenzi would take the opportunity.
She did not move.
"And if I had killed your father," he said, to the glass, "you would already be dead."
"So it was you."
He turned around and for the first time there was something on his face that might have been interest.
"I neither confirm nor deny."
He came toward her — measured, unhurried, giving her every chance to leave.
"But Celeste." Her name again, and this time it came out softer and landed harder. "If you suspect. Why come here alone? Vulnerable?"
"Who says I'm vulnerable?"
He stopped too close. She had to tip her head back to keep her eyes on his, and she refused to look away first, and the heat coming off him was enough that she could feel it through the silk.
"You're not what you appear to be," he said.
"None of us are."
"The difference is that I admit it."
The air in the room changed. She was aware of the exact distance between their bodies — of the way his breathing had deepened, of the way hers seemed to have stopped being something she was doing on purpose.
"I could kill you here," he said.
It came out almost like a whisper. He smelled of whiskey and cedar and something underneath that she could not name and did not want to.
"You could," Celeste said.
"But you won't."
"Why not?"
"Because I'm the only person who looks at you like you could bleed." She paused. "And you like it."
He went completely still.
She saw the pulse move in his throat. She saw his jaw work once and then stop. And in that stillness she felt the whole thing tip — five years of grief and planning and bullet-pointed revenge, and underneath all of it, unaccounted for, an honest current running the other way.
Then he stepped back. One step, and the spell broke cleanly, the way a thread does.
"Get out of my room."
"I'm not finished."
"Yes, we are."
His hand closed on her arm before she could move. It didn't hurt. It was simply firm, and far too warm against her skin.
"You're staying at the villa tonight. There's a storm coming through in the morning." He looked down at her. "You decide if you want to continue this game or if you want to live."
She looked at his hand, and then at his face.
"And if I choose the game?"
Something moved behind his eyes and a small smile formed, and it was the most dangerous thing that had happened to her all night.
"Then you'll find out why I'm Don."
He let her go.
"Guest room, second door on the right." He turned away. Then: "And Celeste. Next time, knock first."
She crossed the room, and she felt his gaze on her back the whole way, and when her hand reached the handle she could not stop herself from looking back. He was where she had left him — half in the moonlight, half in shadow, entirely still. Two marble figures in a dark room looking at each other.
"Good night, Don Balaki."
"Good night, Celeste Vicenzi."
The way he said her whole name sounded like a promise and a threat in the same breath.
She got out of the room before she could do anything insane, found the second door on the right, and locked herself in.
Then her knees went.
She slid down the back of the door until she was on the floor with her heart going like something trapped, and the adrenaline that had carried her through the last twenty minutes drained out all at once and left her shaking. She brought her hand up, without deciding to, and pressed it to her arm where he had held her.
Still warm. Still doing something under the skin.
"Shit," she said to the empty room.
She had come here with one objective: walk up to the man who killed her father, get a confession out of him, and finish it. And he had not confessed, and he had not denied, and he had looked at her as though she were the most interesting thing to happen to him in a decade.
Outside, the wind began to pick up — the storm he had mentioned, arriving on schedule. Lightning lit the room in one hard white frame. Thunder rolled down off the mountain and made the glass tremble.
Sicily was throwing a fit to match the one in her chest, and none of it changed the plan.
She was not backing down. Not after five years. Not this close.
The knife was still on her thigh. She had not needed it, and she had not once thought of it while she was standing three feet from him.
May you like
That was the part she did not examine.
She got up off the floor, and found the bed, and did not sleep.
