Chapter 1 - THE NINE HOURS
For thirteen years, I had been able to read Alessandro Vitale by the smallest movement of his hands. An open palm meant he was telling the truth. Two fingers against his wrist meant someone in the room had disappointed him. When he was angry enough to be dangerous, he became very still.
At the lakeside house, he was still now.
Forty-seven days had passed since I walked away from our wedding, and I had asked one question. Why, after seeing what his affair had done to me, had he stayed in that Venice hotel for nine more hours?
Across the kitchen table, Alessandro turned the antique watch between his fingers. The engraved words flashed beneath the yellow light. Thirteen years behind us. The rest of our lives ahead.
“I thought you would come back,” he said at last.
I almost didn't understand him. “To Venice?”
“To me.”
Rain tapped the windows. Beyond them, the lake was dark and flat, with one fishing boat rocking beside the pier. Alessandro looked as tired as I had ever seen him, but I refused to mistake exhaustion for innocence.
“You thought I would forgive you.”
“I thought you would be furious. I thought you would leave for a few days and then call.”
“And Bianca?”
His throat worked. “She was there. I let her stay.”
“Did you sleep with her after I left?”
“No.”
“That's a very small defense, Alex.”
“I know.”
“Why didn't you come after me?”
He finally raised his eyes. “Because coming after you would have meant admitting I could lose you. And I've spent thirteen years treating your love as the one thing in my life I couldn't lose.”
There it was. Not a secret business negotiation. Not a threat that had prevented him from running into the corridor. Not a tragic reason that would somehow make eleven months of deception romantic. Just entitlement dressed up as certainty.
He set the watch down. “I was a coward.”
The words should have satisfied me. I had imagined hearing them through forty-seven nights of bad sleep. Instead they made my chest ache, because I could picture every dinner I'd kept warm and every promise I'd believed while he learned how much he could take without making me leave.
“You didn't choose her,” I said. “You chose the version of your life in which neither woman had the right to ask you to change.”
“Yes.”
“Then don't tell me you lost me because you made one mistake.”
“I won't.”
I stood and went to the window. His reflection hovered beside mine in the glass. On our wedding morning, there had been two hundred fourteen guests, two hundred white roses on the altar, and a dress I had spent six months fitting. I had canceled all of it rather than become the woman who smiled for photographs while quietly swallowing a truth everyone else knew.
“Have you spoken to Bianca?” I asked.
“I ended it the morning I returned to Rome.”
“After those nine hours.”
“Yes.”
“Does she agree it's over?”
“Not happily.”
I turned. “That isn't an answer.”
“She called twice. Her father called more.”
Vittorio Moretti. Bianca's father. In Rome, his name could close doors faster than a threat and open them faster than a bribe. The Vitale and Moretti families had spent decades making agreements that neither side would ever write down.
“What does he want?”
“For me to reconsider a partnership.”
“A partnership or a marriage?”
“Both, probably.”
I laughed without humor. “How convenient. A wedding canceled and a replacement bride already available.”
“Serena—”
“No. I am not doing this again. You don't get to explain her father's ambitions as though your affair happened to you.”
He nodded. It irritated me that he accepted the blow. I wanted a fight because a fight would be easier than witnessing the first honest conversation we'd had in months.
My phone lit up on the table. Chiara Conti, my attorney, never called after nine unless there was a reason. I answered.
“Are you alone?” she asked.
“Not exactly.”
“Get somewhere private.”
I stepped onto the covered terrace, shutting the door behind me. Cold air rushed under my coat.
“Tell me.”
“An application was filed this afternoon to transfer your interest in Bellini Atelier to a holding company.”
My father's old restoration and printing workshop stood in Trastevere, behind a courtyard where he had taught me to recognize paper by touch. It was the only building my parents had left me. I had refused three offers to sell it.
“What holding company?”
“Orsini Heritage Group. I am sending you the documents.”
A file appeared. I opened it and felt my stomach drop. There, beneath three pages of dense language, was a signature that looked exactly like mine.
“I didn't sign anything.”
“I know. You were with me in my office at the recorded time.”
“Who certified it?”
“A notary we've never used. And the transaction cites a charitable entity called the Bellini Foundation.”
I stared at the name. “I don't have a foundation.”
“You don't. Somebody apparently thinks you do.”
My father's business had been modest but valuable, sitting on property people had wanted for years. He had died eight years earlier in what police called a single-car accident. The workshop survived him because I could not bear to let it become an expensive restaurant with his name over the door.
“Can you stop the transfer?”
“I've filed an emergency challenge. Tomorrow we'll go to the notary in person. Don't sign anything, don't speak to whoever contacts you about this, and Serena—are you still with Vitale?”
I looked through the glass. Alessandro had not moved from the table.
“Yes.”
“Then listen to me carefully. The holding company has a director named Corrado Ferri.”
The terrace seemed to tilt.
Corrado Ferri had attended Alessandro's father's funeral, held the family together during its bloodiest years, and stood at the church rehearsal with his hand on Alessandro's shoulder. Alessandro called him Uncle Corrado. Nobody else dared.
“Are you sure?”
“It's in the registration. I checked twice.”
“Send me everything.”
I ended the call and went inside. Alessandro read my face before I said a word.
“What happened?”
“Someone forged my signature.”
He rose. “On what?”
“A transfer of my father's workshop. Tell me what Orsini Heritage Group is.”
The way his expression changed told me he recognized it.
“It's a company Corrado uses for property investments.”
“Your Corrado?”
“Yes.”
“Why is he trying to take my building?”
“I don't know.”
“Then it's fortunate I didn't marry into a family that expects me to accept those three words.”
He reached for his phone. I held up my hand.
“Do not call him. Not until I decide what to do.”
“Serena, if Corrado is involved—”
“If Corrado is involved, then the man who stood beside you at our rehearsal is stealing from me. And I would like to know why before he has time to invent a story.”
Alessandro slowly lowered the phone.
For the first time that night, something besides regret crossed his face. It was the look he wore when a familiar room suddenly held an unfamiliar threat.
“Do you have somewhere safe to stay?” he asked.
“I have a home.”
“People know the address.”
“People know yours, too. You don't own the concept of safety.”
A reluctant flicker of a smile appeared and vanished. “No. I suppose I don't.”
I collected my coat and bag. He made no attempt to stop me. At the door, his voice followed me.
“What can I do that you would actually want?”
“Tell me the truth when it costs you something.”
He glanced at the watch. “You can take this back.”
“I didn't give it to you to be returned.”
“Then let me keep it until I deserve to wear it.”
“Do what you want with the watch, Alex. Just don't confuse keeping a gift with keeping a promise.”
Outside, Chiara's documents waited on my screen. I drove toward Rome through wet roads and memories I would have preferred to leave behind. At a red light, another message arrived from an unknown number.
It contained a photograph of the Venice hotel corridor, time-stamped 11:04 p.m. Two minutes before I had dropped the watch box.
In the picture, Corrado Ferri stood beside a service door, speaking into his phone. At his feet was a small suitcase I recognized immediately. Bianca's luggage.
Beneath the photograph was a sentence.
You saw the affair. You didn't see who arranged the room.
I pulled onto the shoulder and looked at the photograph again. Maybe someone wanted to make Alessandro look like a victim. Maybe someone wanted to make me afraid. The timing made either possibility ugly.
Then a second message came.
Ask why your father refused to sell the workshop before he died.
My father's face appeared in my mind: his patient smile, paper dust on his sleeves, the way he always locked the back room before leaving. The business had never been large enough to interest men like Corrado.
Or so I had believed.
I deleted neither message. Instead, I forwarded both to Chiara and switched on the dash camera my brother Luca had installed after a stranger followed me home from the canceled wedding.
Behind me, the lights of a dark sedan came on.
When I eased back onto the road, the sedan followed.
For thirteen years, I had mistaken the security of being loved by a powerful man for security itself. Tonight I understood the difference. Alessandro had hurt me in a way that could not be undone. Someone else was trying to take the last place that still felt like my father's hands.
I tightened my grip on the wheel and headed for the nearest police station, not the Vitale estate.
The sedan stayed behind me for six turns.
May you like
Only when the blue-lit entrance appeared ahead did it accelerate past, its windows black and its license plate covered in road mud.
I watched it go and made myself a promise. Whatever Corrado wanted from the Bellini name, he would have to come through me to get it. And this time, no man was going to decide the terms of my life while I waited patiently to be chosen.
