The corridor window doesn't lock properly. I discovered this three days ago when I was mapping the house the way a prisoner maps a cell — quietly, methodically, pretending I was just stretching my legs when really I was counting exits.
The latch is loose. One firm push and it swings inward and the room on the other side connects to the study through an interior door that Dante doesn't bother locking because who would be stupid enough to break into a mafia boss's office while he's gone.
Me. I would be that stupid. Congratulations, Sera. New low unlocked.
I pull myself through the window and land on the carpet harder than I intended. My knee hits the floor and the sound is loud in the empty house and I freeze — pressed against the wall, breathing through my mouth, counting heartbeats until I'm sure nobody heard. Silence. The house breathes around me the way it always does — old stone and old money and old secrets.
The interior door opens without a sound. His study is dark. Moonlight cuts through the blinds in silver slats across the desk — his father's desk, his desk now, the leather chair pushed back like he left mid-thought.
The room smells like him. Cedar. Smoke. The whiskey he pours and doesn't drink. My chest tightens and I press past it because I'm not here for his scent. I'm here for the truth.
The letter is in the second drawer. I know this because I watched him pull it from there the night he — the night it happened. My hand finds the handle. Pulls. The drawer slides open and there it is. Unmarked. Handwritten. Folded once. I unfold it and hold it up to the moonlight and read.
The words are worse when they're quiet. When there's no hand on my throat, no voice screaming, no rage filling the room so thick I couldn't breathe. Without all that, the letter is just sentences on paper. Clean. Precise. Devastating.
My father chose the restaurant. Arranged the seating. Fed the location to a team who wired the device under the floor. Calculated which chairs would kill and which would wound. Chose his own seat. Took the shrapnel as the cost of credibility.
My hands start shaking halfway through the second paragraph. By the end the paper is rattling so hard I have to set it down on the desk.
I press both palms flat against the wood and stare at the words and my vision swims and my lungs are doing something wrong — too fast, too shallow, the breathing of a woman whose body is processing what her mind hasn't caught up to yet.
My father. My father who braided my hair. My father who kissed my forehead at every doorstep. My father who covered me with his body the night of the wedding with Nico — no. Not the night of. Every night. Every Sunday. Every time he called me princess and I believed it.
He sat at a table with two other men and decided they would die and timed a bomb and my entire childhood rearranges itself behind my eyes like furniture being moved in a dark room.
Every gentle thing he ever did has a shadow now. Every braid, every cigar on the balcony, every I love you, principessa — all of it backed by a man who calculated blast radiuses over dinner.
I pull out my phone. Photograph the letter. My hands are shaking so badly the first two shots are blurred. The third one holds. I fold the letter. Put it back. Close the drawer. Exactly where it was. Exactly how it was.
Footsteps.
My blood goes cold. Not a metaphor — the temperature in my veins drops so fast my fingers go numb. Footsteps in the corridor, approaching, the measured pace of someone who knows this house and every sound it makes.
I move fast — through the interior door, across the room, up through the window. My foot catches on the sill and I stumble through and pull the window shut behind me and turn around and Luca is standing three feet away.
He looks at me. Looks at the window. Looks back at me. His face is a study in stillness — no surprise, no anger, just a flat assessment that reminds me of a camera recording.
"What were you doing in there?"
My spine straightens. My chin lifts. The posture of a woman who's been caught and has no intention of showing it.
"Looking for my husband. Have you seen him?"
Luca doesn't blink. His eyes stay on mine a beat too long — the kind of look that says I know exactly where you came from and exactly what you saw and I'm deciding what to do with that information. Then he steps aside. Says nothing. Walks away down the corridor with footsteps that are too quiet for a man his size.
I stand there with my heart slamming against my ribs and the photograph burning a hole in my phone and the absolute certainty that Luca saw everything and filed it. I don't know what he'll do with it. I don't know whose side he's on. But I know the look of a man holding a piece of information like a loaded weapon — I married one, and I'm standing in the house of another.
It doesn't matter. What matters is the letter. What matters is the words I just read and the photograph on my phone and the question that's eating through my chest like acid — did my father really do this. I need to hear it from his mouth.
I need to sit across from him and watch his face while he either denies it or confirms it because a letter is paper and paper can lie but eyes can't. Not my father's eyes. Not to me.
The guard rotation at the east gate has an eleven-minute gap. I've timed it from the upstairs window over the past three days — the way women in these houses time everything, the way prey memorizes the predator's schedule.
Tomorrow morning at six-forty the east gate will be unmonitored for eleven minutes. Enough time to reach the main road. Enough time for a taxi. Enough time to get to the hospital where my father can answer all my questions.
I sit on the edge of the bed. The pregnancy test is still in my robe pocket. The packed bag is still at my feet. The photograph of a letter written about my father is on my phone. The bruises on my throat are turning yellow at the edges. And tomorrow morning at six-forty I'm walking out of this estate to look my father in the eyes and ask him if he's a murderer.
The worst part isn't the question. The worst part is that I already know the answer. I read it in black and white on a dead man's desk and my hands haven't stopped shaking since.