POV: Mia
Day one, I cry. Once. Alone in the bathroom with the tap running so no one hears it. I give myself four minutes and then I wash my face and I am done.
I do not cry again.
Crying is for when you have nothing else to do. I have things to do.
By the end of day one I know the layout of my floor completely. Two stairwells one at each end of the hallway. The one on the left is used by guards. The one on the right is slower, creakier, and nobody uses it after ten at night, which tells me it is either unwatched or they think it is secure enough not to watch. I will find out which one. There is a service elevator near the kitchen that needs a key card. I have seen three different people use it, all of them staff, none of them guards.
I file that away.
The cameras are at every exterior door. Not in the kitchen corridor, which is either a mistake or a decision, and I need to figure out which one of those it is before I use it for anything.
Six guards. Rotating every six hours. The first shift is sharp eyes moving, posture right, the kind of alert that comes from genuinely caring about the job. The second shift is slightly softer. There is one guard on the second rotation, heavyset, who leans against the wall near the back stairwell and checks his phone for twenty seconds every hour on the hour like a habit he does not know he has.
Twenty seconds is not nothing.
I catalog every face I see. I assign each one a number in my head one means no threat, ten means high danger. Most of the guards land around five. Luca, who I see once on day one crossing the lower hallway, gets an eight immediately. He smiled at me when he saw me watching from the top of the stairs. It was a kind smile. That is exactly why he gets an eight.
Dante gets a ten.
Not because he has threatened me. He has not said one frightening thing since I arrived. He has not raised his voice or touched me or made any kind of move that looks like danger. He sent Rosa with clean clothes and three meals a day and left me entirely alone since the night I arrived, which was either respect or strategy and I cannot decide which.
The most dangerous men in my father's world were always the quiet ones. The loud men were manageable you could see them coming. The quiet ones had already decided before they walked into the room. Dante walks into every room already decided. That is why he gets a ten.
That is the only reason.
Rosa appears on the second morning.
She does not knock the way someone asking permission knocks. She knocks once, firmly, like a person who already knows she is coming in, and then she opens the door and sets a coffee cup on the table by the window and looks at me directly. Not the way the guards look at me categorizing, measuring. She looks at me like a person looks at another person.
"The coffee here is better than anywhere in the city," she says. "Drink it while it is hot."
Then she leaves.
I look at the coffee for a full minute. I think about the note under my door on the first night. Do not trust Luca. The handwriting was small and fast, the kind of handwriting that belongs to someone who writes quickly because they have a lot to do. I looked at Rosa's hands the first time I saw her. She is left-handed.
I drink the coffee.
It is, genuinely, the best coffee I have had in my life. That almost makes it worse.
She comes back on the third morning with coffee and a newspaper. She sets the newspaper down folded to the financial section and leaves without explaining it. I read the whole section twice. There is one small article near the bottom four paragraphs about the Russo estate entering a legal dispute over asset control, which is a polite way of saying someone is already taking my father's things apart while the ground over his grave is still fresh.
I read it a third time. I look at the name of the firm handling the dispute.
I know that firm. I know it because my father used it for three years and then stopped using it very suddenly when I was sixteen, and when I asked him why, he said only: "Some people you trust until you can't, and then you stop." He never explained further.
I write the firm's name on the inside cover of the novel on my nightstand, small enough to look like a printer mark.
By evening of day three I have filled two pages of the inside cover.
The evening meeting is in the same room as the first two a sitting room on the ground floor, two chairs, a low table. No desk between us, which I noticed on day one. Dante sits across from me, not behind something. I do not know yet if that is deliberate or if it just is.
He looks tired tonight. Not in a soft way. In the way a machine looks tired like something is running too hard for too long and the strain is only visible in very small ways if you know where to look. I know where to look. I grew up studying men who could not afford to look tired.
We talk about nothing important for ten minutes. I answer his questions about whether I need anything. He answers my question about how long he expects this to last with: "Until it is safe for it to end," which is not an answer but I let it go for now.
Then he picks up a folder from the table beside him and slides it across to me.
I open it.
Photographs. Twelve of them. The men from the auction, each one identified full name, title, territory. I scan the faces and feel my stomach tighten because seeing them labeled makes them real in a different way than they were on the stage.
One photograph has a red circle around it. The man inside the circle has a round face and expensive glasses and the look of someone who handles money for dangerous people.
"He was bidding for someone else," Dante says. He is watching my face carefully. "Not for himself. Someone hired him to be in that room and bring you to a specific location. Someone who wanted you specifically not just any Russo asset. You."
I keep my eyes on the photograph.
"I need you to look at the name printed below that photograph," Dante says, "and tell me if your father ever mentioned it."
I look down at the name.
The room tilts slightly.
The name is not one I have heard in years. It is not a name my father ever said out loud in front of me. But I know it. I know it because I found it once in an old document in my father's study when I was twelve a name on a legal form, handwritten, in the space marked maiden name.
It is my aunt Elena's name before she married into the Russo family.
She was the one who sent him. The thought arrives fully formed, cold and certain, and I know in my body that it is true before my brain has even finished the sentence.
My father's sister-in-law. The woman who held my hand at his funeral. The woman who cried into a black handkerchief for three days straight.
I look up at Dante.
His dark eyes are steady on mine, waiting.
I make a decision in the space of one breath.
"No," I say clearly. "I have never heard that name before."
He holds my gaze for five long seconds.
He does not believe me. I can see that he does not believe me.
He nods slowly anyway and closes the folder and says we will continue tomorrow.
I walk back to my room and sit on the floor with my back against the bed and think about my aunt's dry eyes above her wet handkerchief, and I think about the legal firm's name written in my novel, and I think about the note under my door.
And I think: before I tell Dante anything, I need to know what he is going to do with it.
Because if Elena is involved, the circle of people my father trusted and should not have trusted is bigger than one woman.
And somewhere inside that circle is the answer to the question Dante still has not given me.