POV: Mia
I do not sleep.
I lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling and think about Elena's maiden name printed under that photograph, and the more I think about it the more it arranges itself into a shape I cannot un-see. The dry eyes. The way she managed the funeral like a project. The legal firm her family's firm, three generations back, the one my father stopped trusting when I was sixteen and never explained why.
He knew. Some part of him knew and he could not bring himself to say it out loud because she was family and family is the last thing you let yourself believe the worst about.
That was his weakness. He loved people past the point where the evidence told him to stop.
I am not going to make that mistake.
By six in the morning I have made three decisions. First: I stop waiting for Dante to bring me information on his schedule. Second: I stop pretending I know less than I do, at least about some things. Third: I go on offense. Starting now.
I get up. I wash my face. I find the most put-together version of the clothes Rosa brought me nothing impressive, just clean and deliberate and I put them on like armor.
Then I walk downstairs and open the door to Dante's study without knocking.
He is already at his desk. It is not even seven yet and he is already at his desk with three open folders and a coffee cup and the expression of a man who either did not sleep or does not need to. He looks up when I walk in. He does not look surprised.
That almost stops me. Almost.
"I am done," I say.
He waits.
"I am done with one conversation per evening. I am done being managed. I am done sitting in that room reading between the lines of things you almost tell me." I stop in front of his desk and I look at him directly. "I want to know who ordered my father killed. I want to know what my role is in whatever plan you are running. And I want to know right now whether I am a prisoner in this house or something else because the answer changes how I behave and I think you are smart enough to want me behaving correctly."
The room is very quiet.
Dante looks at me for a long moment. Not the careful, measuring look he has used in our evening meetings something different. Something that is almost, almost not controlled. Like a door that is mostly closed but not latched.
Then he stands up.
He is taller than me by almost a foot and I refuse to step back. I keep my feet exactly where they are and my eyes exactly on his and I wait.
"You want answers," he says.
"I just said that."
"You lied to me last night."
The air goes thin. I hold his gaze and say nothing.
"The name in that folder," he says. "You recognized it. I watched your face and you recognized it and then you decided not to tell me." He pauses. "I want to know why."
"I want to know why you have not answered a single direct question since I got here," I say back. "We can want things together."
Something moves through his eyes. Fast, almost invisible. If I were not standing this close I would miss it entirely.
He says: "You are safer here than anywhere else in this city. That is a fact."
"That is not what I asked."
"It is the answer that matters most right now." His voice is even. Controlled. But underneath it underneath it there is something that sounds almost like frustration, which means I am getting somewhere. "The rest of what you want to know I will tell you when I can trust that telling you will not get you killed faster than the people who are already trying."
I open my mouth.
"Listen to me." His voice drops and somehow that makes it heavier, not lighter. "Someone inside your father's circle sold him. Not an outside enemy. Not a rival family working blind. Someone who knew his schedule and his accounts and his private movements. Someone he trusted." He holds my gaze and does not look away. "I do not know yet how far that circle extends. I am still finding the edges of it."
I wait.
"That includes people you love, Mia."
The way he says my name hits differently than it should. Low and careful, like he knows it is going to land hard and is not pretending otherwise. I feel it in my chest and I am angry at myself for feeling it.
"I already know that," I say. My voice comes out steady. I am proud of it. "I have known that since the funeral. You are not protecting me from new information, Dante. You are just controlling when I get it, which is a different thing and I need you to understand that I can tell the difference."
A silence.
Something shifts in his expression. Small. Like a wall that did not fall but moved an inch.
"Sit down," he says.
"I would rather stand."
"I know." He looks at me. "Sit down anyway. This is going to take more than one minute and I am not going to talk to your anger. I will talk to you."
That lands. I hate that it lands.
I pull out the chair across from his desk and sit down. I fold my hands on the table and wait. He sits back down too and for a moment we are just looking at each other across the space between us all the history in it, all the silence, eight years and a dead man and a locked door and a note on the floor and a name in a folder.
He opens his mouth to speak.
His phone buzzes on the desk between us. He glances at it. Something in his face changes fast and hard, like a light switching off. He picks it up and reads the screen and whatever is on it, it is not good. I watch his jaw tighten and his eyes go flat.
"What is it?" I say.
He stands up. "Stay here."
"Dante "
"Mia." He looks at me and there is something in his expression I have not seen before not danger, not control. Something urgent. Something almost like fear, contained and cold. "Stay in this room. Do not open that door for anyone except me or Rosa. Do you understand?"
He is gone before I can answer.
I sit in the chair across from his empty desk and listen to his footsteps disappear down the hallway and I think about what could make a man like Dante move that fast.
Then I look down at his desk.
He left in such a hurry that he did not close the folder in front of him. I can see the top page clearly from where I am sitting.
It is a phone record. Highlighted in yellow, near the bottom, is a number I recognize.
It is my number. My old phone number, the one that was disconnected the night I was taken.
And the person who called it three times, the night my father died is Dante.