Marry the Devil, Bury the Truce

Chapter Nine What the Fountain Knows

They stayed in the east wing study long after the horror of the files had settled into something colder, more useful. Fury, Tori was learning, only got you so far. Eventually, it had to become a plan, or it became nothing at all.

"We need to find him before he finds another opening," Dante said, pacing the length of the study now, mind clearly working through the same calculations Tori could see forming behind her father's exhausted eyes. "A man who's spent twelve years planning this won't stop just because his first attempt failed last night. He'll adjust. Move faster, maybe, now that he knows we're aware of him."

"There has to be a way to trace him," Tori said. "The shell company that paid Enzo. The photograph from when I was sixteen. Someone had to develop that photo, print it, and deliver it. Twelve years of watching me doesn't happen without leaving some kind of trail."

"Photographs like that don't come from strangers," Salvatore said quietly, still seated behind the desk, looking older by the minute under the weight of everything he'd finally confessed. "Someone close to our family took that picture, Vittoria. Someone with access to your schedule, your routines, the café you used to visit after school."

Tori's mind raced backwards, sixteen years old, laughing outside a café with friends she barely remembered now, unaware a camera had captured a moment meant only for herself.

"Rosa," she said suddenly, the name leaving her mouth before she'd fully processed the thought. "Rosa used to walk me to that café. She was the only one who knew my schedule that well back then."

Salvatore went very still. "Rosa has worked for this family for over twenty years, Vittoria. She practically raised you after your mother died."

"I know," Tori said, throat tightening around the words. "That's exactly what makes it the perfect cover."

Dante was already reaching for his phone, dialling Marco with quick, efficient movements. "I need everything you can find on a woman named Rosa, employed by the Marchetti household for the last two decades. Financial records, family connections, anything that ties her to a shell company or an account we've already flagged." He paused, listening, jaw tightening. "Yes. Now."

The answer came back faster than any of them expected, and worse than any of them had hoped.

Marco arrived within the hour, tablet in hand, expression grim in a way that told Tori the news wasn't going to be gentle before he'd said a single word.

"Rosa Delgado," he said, pulling up a file on the screen. "Twenty-two years employed by the Marchetti household. But her employment records only go back that far because her real identity was buried under a new name before she was ever hired." He looked up, meeting Tori's eyes with something like sympathy. "Before she was Rosa, she was Rosalind Conti. Alessandro's older sister."

The floor seemed to tilt beneath Tori's feet. "That's not possible. Rosa raised me. She was there for everything, every scraped knee, every nightmare, every birthday my mother couldn't be there for after she got sick. She's not a stranger who infiltrated our house for revenge."

"I don't think it started that way," Marco said carefully. "The timeline suggests she was placed in your household before Alessandro's plan fully formed, likely as insurance, a way to keep eyes on the Marchetti family from the inside while he rebuilt his fortune elsewhere But twenty-two years is a long time to play a role, Vittoria. I think somewhere along the way, the line between assignment and genuine affection blurred for her. That doesn't mean she didn't ultimately choose her brother's plan over whatever she felt for you."

Tori sank into the nearest chair, the betrayal cutting deeper than anything Enzo's attack or her father's confession had managed to inflict. Rosa had laced her into that wedding dress just hours before the ceremony. Had told her she looked beautiful with something that felt, at the time, like genuine warmth.

"Where is she now?" Dante asked, voice hard.

"That's the problem," Marco said. "She never returned to the Salvatore estate after the wedding reception. Security assumed she'd gone back to the Marchetti household with the rest of the staff, but—" he glanced at Salvatore, "she's not here either. It hasn't been seen since roughly the time Enzo went through that balcony window."

Dante's expression turned to granite. "She's with him."

"That would be my assessment, yes."

"Then she knows everything," Tori said, voice hollow. "Every conversation I've ever had in this house. Every security detail, every schedule, every weakness either of our families has. Twenty-two years of information, handed straight to the man who's spent that entire time planning to destroy us."

"Not destroy," Dante corrected quietly, crossing the room to crouch in front of her chair, taking her hands in his with a gentleness that startled her given everything else churning in the room. "He wants an heir, Vittoria. He wants your bloodline, not your death. That means he needs you alive, which means we still have time to find him before he finds a way to reach you again."

"That's supposed to comfort me?" Tori's voice cracked. "Knowing I'm valuable to him only because of what I could give him against my will?"

Something shifted in Dante's expression, and when he spoke again, his voice had dropped into something low and absolutely certain.

"He will never get the chance," he said. "I don't care what my original reasons were for marrying you, Vittoria. I don't care what access I thought I was buying when I agreed to this arrangement. As of last night, that changed. You are my wife, and no man, regardless of how many years he's spent planning his revenge, is going to touch what's mine."

The word landed strangely in Tori's chest, warm and unsettling all at once. Mine. Not a possession claimed out of ownership, but something closer to a vow made in the wreckage of a wedding night that had already asked far more of both of them than either had bargained for.

"We should move you somewhere he doesn't know about," Salvatore said, breaking the moment, voice still shaky but regaining some of its old authority. "A safe house. Somewhere off the grid, away from both estates, until we can find him first."

"No." Dante stood, turning to face his father-in-law with the particular stillness of a man who'd already made his decision. "Running just gives him time to adjust his plan again, the way he adjusted after last night's failure. We're not going to hide Vittoria away like a piece to be protected. We're going to draw him out, on our terms, in a location we control and end this before those thirty days run out."

"You want to use my daughter as bait," Salvatore said, horror creeping into his voice.

"I want to use the fact that he's spent twelve years being patient against him," Dante said. "Patient men make mistakes when they're finally forced to move fast. And Rosa, wherever she is right now, has almost certainly already reported that we know about the trafficking files, that we know his real identity, that his entire twelve-year operation is unraveling faster than he planned. That makes him desperate, and desperate men are far easier to catch than patient ones."

Tori looked between her father's fear and her husband's cold certainty, and found herself, despite everything, trusting the man she'd married under duress far more than the man who'd raised her under lies.

"What's the plan," she said quietly and watched something like relief and respect flicker simultaneously across Dante's face.

"The plan," Dante said, "starts with making Alessandro Conti believe he still has the element of surprise. And that starts with you and I finishing what we started at that altar yesterday, convincing this entire city, and the man watching from its shadows, that this marriage is exactly what everyone believes it to be."

"A love story," Tori said slowly, understanding dawning.

"A performance good enough that even a man who's spent twelve years planning around us starts to believe it's real," Dante said. "Right up until the moment we prove him fatally wrong."

Outside the study window, the crooked fountain continued its imperfect arc, water spraying slightly left of where it should, a small and constant flaw that had somehow outlasted every lie this family had ever told, and Tori found herself wondering, not for the first time since the wedding, how many more secrets this house was still keeping from her.