Sold To The Devil's Son

Chapter 6 — The Man at the Gate

The plan Adrian laid out over the following week was simple in shape and dangerous in practice: rebuild what Isabel had found, quietly, without ever letting Marchetti suspect the trail had been picked back up.

Camille's father moved into a guest wing that same night — not the east wing, she noted, but close enough to the main house that Adrian's security could watch every entrance to his rooms. He didn't argue. Some of the fear had gone out of his shoulders once the truth was spoken aloud, as if silence had been the heavier weight all along.

Camille spent her mornings now in Adrian's study rather than being fitted for dresses she didn't choose. He'd given her access to a locked cabinet of files — old shipping manifests, half-legible ledgers, photographs of men she didn't recognize standing on docks at odd hours — the fragments that had survived whatever cleanup had followed Isabel's death.

"Your father remembers names," Adrian said, spreading another set of documents across the desk between them. "Isabel had numbers. If we can match the two, we might reconstruct enough of what she found to make it undeniable."

"And if Marchetti finds out we're reconstructing it?"

"Then we move faster than he expects us to." Adrian didn't look up from the ledger in front of him, but something in his jaw tightened. "He doesn't know your father remembers anything specific. As far as he's concerned, the debt bought silence and nothing more. We keep it that way as long as we can."

It was strange, Camille thought, watching him work — how naturally they'd fallen into this, side by side over documents late into the night, the hostility of the first day eroding into something that felt, if not like trust, then at least like a shared purpose. He was careful with her in ways she hadn't expected. He explained things without being asked. He noticed when she was tired before she noticed it herself, and called an end to the night without making her feel managed for it.

It made the locked door in the east wing harder to ignore, not easier.

"I want to meet her," Camille said one night, nearly two weeks into their arrangement, when the documents had blurred into meaningless columns of numbers and her eyes ached from the reading. "Bianca."

Adrian's pen stopped moving. "Camille—"

"You said give you time. I have. I haven't pushed, I haven't gone near that door again, I've done everything you asked." She met his eyes across the desk. "I'm not asking to expose her to anyone. I'm asking because I think I understand now what it's like to be protected past the point where it stops feeling like protection and starts feeling like a cage. I don't want that to be true for her too."

Something in his expression cracked slightly — not resistance exactly, more like an old wound being pressed on gently instead of struck.

"She has good days and bad days," he said finally, quietly. "Tonight might be a good one. I can't promise she'll want to see you. But I'll ask her."

It was the first time he'd offered instead of refused, and Camille understood it for what it was — not a small thing, from a man who measured every door in his house by how much danger stood on the other side of it.

---

He came to find her an hour later, and led her down the corridor she'd only walked once before, in the dark, with her heart in her throat. This time the keypad opened at his touch, and the door swung inward onto a room that surprised her — not a cell, not the grim imprisonment she'd half-expected, but a bright, comfortable space, paintings on the walls, books stacked on every surface, a woman sitting by the window with a sketchpad in her lap.

Bianca looked up as they entered, and Camille saw immediately the resemblance to Adrian — the same dark eyes, the same sharp cheekbones — softened by something more fragile underneath.

"Adrian said you wanted to meet me," Bianca said, studying Camille with open, unguarded curiosity. "You're the wife."

"Camille."

"I know. I heard the staff talking." A faint, wry smile. "They talk about everything in this house. Except me, usually. It's a nice change, being the topic instead of the secret."

"Bianca," Adrian said, a quiet warning in his tone.

"I'm allowed to say true things, Adrian, even if you'd rather I didn't." Bianca's gaze returned to Camille, sharper now, more assessing. "Did he tell you why I'm locked in this wing, or did he just tell you not to ask?"

Camille glanced at Adrian, who had gone very still. "He told me you're unwell. He didn't explain more than that."

"Unwell." Bianca laughed, short and humorless. "That's one word for it. I have episodes. Bad ones, sometimes — I lose time, I say things I don't remember saying, I see things that aren't there. It started after our father died. Adrian's solution was to keep me somewhere no one outside this house could see it happen, because in our world, weakness in the family is an invitation. He's not wrong about that. I just wish he'd let me choose the cage instead of building it for me."

"That's not fair," Adrian said, low.

"No," Bianca agreed, not unkindly. "But it's true, and I think your wife deserves true things more than she deserves comfortable ones. You married her into all of this without warning her what it actually looks like from the inside." She turned back to Camille. "He's better than our father was. I want you to know that, whatever else you learn about this family. But better than our father is a low bar, and he still hasn't learned that keeping people safe and keeping them free aren't the same thing."

The room went quiet, the accusation settling over all three of them. Camille watched something shift behind Adrian's eyes — not anger at his sister, but something closer to old, familiar guilt, the kind worn smooth by years of arguing the same argument.

"I'm trying," he said finally, quietly.

"I know." Bianca's expression softened. "I'm not trying to wound you, Adrian. I'm trying to make sure she doesn't end up in a version of this house designed to protect her from everything except the truth."

Camille crossed the room and sat in the chair across from Bianca's, close enough to see the sketchpad in her lap — pages of drawings, dark and intricate, ships and docks and a man's face rendered over and over with careful, obsessive detail.

"Who is this?" Camille asked, nodding at the sketches.

Bianca's expression flickered, something uneasy passing behind her eyes. "I don't always know. Sometimes I draw things I've seen in the episodes, things I can't explain afterward. That one—" she tapped the sketch of the man's face "—I've drawn maybe a dozen times. I don't know his name. But I know Isabel used to ask me about him too, before she died. She said she recognized him from somewhere."

Camille went very still. Beside her, Adrian had gone rigid.

"You knew Isabel," Camille said carefully.

"She was kind to me. One of the only people who visited who didn't treat me like something breakable." Bianca's fingers traced the edge of the sketch, distant. "She asked me a lot of questions, near the end. About faces I might have seen in dreams, in episodes. She said something about a man on the docks. I told her I'd drawn him before, and she got very quiet, and she asked to keep the sketch."

"Do you remember what she said when she looked at it?" Adrian asked, his voice carefully controlled now, though Camille could hear the tightness underneath it.

Bianca thought for a long moment, brow furrowing with the effort of reaching for a memory that clearly didn't come easily. "She said she finally understood who'd been meeting with our father at the port. She said a name." Bianca's eyes lifted, uncertain, searching Adrian's face like she was reaching for something just out of grasp. "I think it was Marchetti. Not Vittorio — someone else. A brother, maybe, or a son."

The room seemed to go very cold.

Camille looked at Adrian, and saw in his face the same realization dawning in her own chest — that the folder her father had seen, the payments, the routes, all of it had a face now, drawn a dozen times over by a woman locked away and dismissed as unreliable by everyone except the one person who'd died for taking her seriously.

"There's someone else," Camille said slowly. "Someone connected to Marchetti's family that no one's accounted for."

Adrian's jaw was tight, his eyes dark with something that looked, for the first time since Camille had met him, less like control and more like fear.

"If that's true," he said quietly, "then Isabel wasn't killed to protect one man's secret. She was killed to protect a name none of us know yet." His gaze moved to the sketch in Bianca's lap, to the face drawn over and over in obsessive, uncertain detail. "And that means whoever it is might still believe no one else remembers what she found."

Bianca looked between them, understanding dawning slowly on her face. "You think I'm in danger too."

"I think," Adrian said, "that you might be the only person left alive who's seen his face."