“Not bad, huh?” he asks as I take it in.
“Wouldn’t expect anything less. Any word on Lucien’s whereabouts?”
He shakes his head. “Nothing.”
Bastian walks over from the kitchen biting into an apple. “Where’s Vittoria?”
Bruno gestures down one of the corridors to the slightly open door. “She grabbed a few things mostly for the little girl. I checked the bag. It’s just books and toys.”
“Thanks.”
“We’ll need to leave in a few minutes.”
Bastian and I walk toward the room Bruno pointed at and find Vittoria sitting behind the large desk studying a photo. When she shifts her eyes to us, they’re sad.
“Are you okay?” I ask her.
She shrugs a shoulder and stands, tucking the photo, frame and all, into her tote. “Are you going to sell it?”
“Not yet. Anything missing?”
“You want an inventory? Are you afraid my brother stole something that belonged to us before he left?”
“Just asking, Dandelion. What did you put in your bag?”
She rolls her eyes, then reaches into her tote to show me a photo of herself and her father. It’s fairly recent, and she’s got her head on his shoulder as he snaps a selfie.
“Oh, also this.” She takes out a second of her and her mother. She’s young in this one. Maybe twelve. “Is that okay, or do you think I’ll somehow turn them into weapons?”
“It’s fine.”
“Unless you want to search me, I’m ready to leave.”
A dozen of Benedetti’s men will accompany Bruno and her to the airport, and two of our own will be on the flight with them.
She turns to go, but Bastian, who is standing at the door, closes it. She turns back to me.
“I’m doing this for you, Vittoria. I want you safe.”
She meets my eyes. “Are you stopping construction on all the sites to keep me safe too?”
“No. That has nothing to do with you.”
“Of course it does. It’s my legacy.”
“Your father’s legacy.”
She shakes her head. “If I hadn’t come to Italy, if I hadn’t accompanied my father’s body, how would you have done it?”
“Doesn’t matter anymore, does it?”
“I just want to know how much of this is on me. Because me being there, you raiding the church and kidnapping me, then forcing me to marry you, it was all for this. Exactly this. I made it easy for you by showing up like that, didn’t I?”
I sigh. “Don’t think of it like that, Vittoria.”
“Your talk of my safety is bullshit, Amadeo. I’m your prisoner. Let’s call it what it is.”
“You’re hardly a prisoner.”
“You may not lock me in a room for now, but I’m still your prisoner. Both of yours.”
“For fuck’s sake, are we back to this?” I’m growing impatient.
Bastian steps in, takes her, and turns her to face him. She looks up at him. He takes her hands, and I see his fingers move to the empty ring finger of her right one. I wonder if that’s conscious.
I step back and watch. She doesn’t pull away. She’s angry with me, not him. Or at least she knows she needs an ally, and he seems to be her choice for that. Same as last time when we took her to the barn with us.
“You’re not a prisoner. Not anymore. No one will lock you in any room. Understand?” he says.
She shrugs a shoulder and shifts her gaze away. He tilts her face up to his.
“Give us two days. We’ll talk again once we’re in Italy.”
“Why do you need to stay? What are you going to do?”
“Need to look into a few things,” I say. She turns to me, eyes narrowed. “Dandelion, don’t look at me like that.” She doesn’t respond to me but to Bastian.
“Two days,” she says.
“You’re cute when you’re angry,” he says.
“Which is a good thing since you’re angry a lot,” I add, moving toward her and tugging on one of her braids.
With a sigh, she looks down, then finally up at me. “I trusted you. I know you can make me do whatever you want, but just remember that I trusted your word. Please don’t let me have been wrong to do that.”
In her eyes is such a raw emotion, an open wound, that I find myself unable to speak. She’s right. I swallow over the lump in my throat and nod. A knock on the door interrupts us, and Bruno pokes his head in.
“We need to go, or we’ll lose our time slot.”
“Yeah, okay,” I say, and Bastian and I both step away. She doesn’t say another word or even look at either of us. Instead, she makes her way out of the room, leaving Bastian and me alone in the penthouse.
“She’ll be all right,” Bastian says.
“I know, and I’m sure this isn’t easy for her.”
“Let’s take a look around. I’ll find Lucien’s office.”
I nod and take the seat behind Geno Russo’s desk.
Bastian and I spend two hours in the penthouse. Geno’s office was in pretty decent order, but if he kept anything of importance there, it’s gone now. Lucien’s office, on the other hand, looked like someone bulldozed it. Or, more accurately, shredded every single piece of paper in it and left the mess like confetti all over the floor.
The bedrooms are pretty generic like no one really lived here. I’m sitting on Vittoria’s bed flipping through a book on the nightstand when Bastian walks in.
“Bruno texted. Flight took off without a hitch.”
I close the book, set it aside, and stand. “Good.”
“You got the password to the desktop?”
“Yeah. Brady passed it along. Why?”
Bastian holds up a thumb drive. “Found it taped to the bottom of a drawer in Lucien’s bedroom.”
That gets my attention. I follow Bastian to the study, switch the computer on and type in the password. Very tricky. It’s Vittoria’s birthday. Bastian plugs the thumb drive in. He sits behind the desk to open the single folder on the drive, and I stand behind him and watch as the first photo fills the screen.
It's startling what I see. At first, I think it’s Vittoria. But he clicks to the second image, then the third.
“It’s her mother,” I say.
“Leah Russo.” He clicks to the next one. They’re obviously taken over a period of time because she’s wearing different clothes in different seasons. She is as beautiful as Vittoria and so recognizable. In fact, she could be Vittoria’s slightly older sister. Her hair is exactly like Vittoria’s, a wild mane of blond waves that won’t be tamed, and her eyes are as blue and as sad. They share many similar features with one very noticeable difference. The furrow between the older woman’s eyebrows and the way she seems to be looking over her shoulder in so many of the shots.
But that changes as she enters a hotel lobby with her scarf pulled tight around her neck and her hat low on her forehead. Her hair is hidden in a single thick braid down her back, and she bypasses the lobby to disappear into the elevator. The photographer shot a series of images, catching her second after second as she searches the lobby before the doors close, her expression anxious.