Chapter 9 — Married to a Ghost
869 Words
The villa at Lake Como was the kind of beautiful that felt like a decision.
Not the natural beauty of the lake itself that was simply geography, the water grey-green in the afternoon light, the mountains above it white-capped and indifferent. That beauty required no intention.
The villa was different. It had been chosen and arranged and rebuilt across centuries to be exactly what it was: impenetrable and lovely in equal measure, a fortress that had learned to look like a home.
Stone walls the color of old honey. Gardens that were immaculate without appearing tended. Iron gates, electric and serious, flanked by men who were not visibly armed but absolutely were. Cameras in the trees, she noted, placed for angles rather than visibility.
Inside, a doctor was waiting.
Fiorella was somewhere in her sixties, white-haired, with the brisk practical competence of a woman who had seen much worse than a glass graze and was not going to make a production of it. She cleaned the wound efficiently, applied something that stung precisely once, and bandaged the arm with three strips of white tape.
"A small scar," Fiorella said. "Nothing to concern yourself with."
"My first," Valentina said.
"That you know of," Fiorella replied, and looked at her with eyes that covered more ground than the medical question.
She was shown to a room the size of her entire Milan apartment: high ceilings, windows full of lake, furniture that was antique and actually comfortable. Her clothes were already in the wardrobe — moved from her apartment while she was in the car, she realized. Efficiently. Without fuss.
She changed out of the wedding dress.
She hung it in the far corner of the wardrobe, facing the wall.
She sat on the edge of the bed in jeans and a grey sweater and looked at the lake and made a list in her head, the way she always processed things she couldn't otherwise hold.
I am married. Someone tried to kill my husband at the wedding. My family is safe that was the only reason I agreed to any of this. I am in a fortress at Lake Como with a man I've met twice and I have no plan.
The no plan was the item that required the most attention.
The knock came when the lake had turned from grey-green to gold.
"Come in," she said.
Luca opened the door. He'd changed — dark trousers, a charcoal shirt with the sleeves pushed to his elbows. She noticed his forearms for the first time. Broad. A scar on the left one she hadn't seen before. He stood in the doorway and looked at her sitting on the bed and she looked at him standing in the door and neither of them said anything for a moment.
"You didn't knock before entering my apartment," she said.
"I own this house," he said.
"I live in it," she replied. "That seems relevant."
Something shifted in his face. Nearly invisible. He stepped inside.
"The attack was anticipated as a possibility," he said. "Not a certainty. I want to be clear about that."
"You knew there was a chance someone would shoot at us on our wedding day and you didn't tell me," she said.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because telling you would have frightened you without changing the outcome."
"I'm not easily frightened."
"I know that now," he said quietly.
She looked at her bandaged arm. "Is the man who was hurt — your man—"
"He'll recover." His voice was certain. He knew his people the way he knew his property.
She nodded. "I need internet access and a phone that isn't monitored."
He raised an eyebrow.
"I need to email the gallery holding my friend's paintings for a showing next week," she said. "She needs to know whether I can attend. I also need to call my brother and my sister, separately, today." She looked at him steadily. "Those are not negotiable requests."
He studied her for a long moment — the reading look, which she was beginning to recognize.
"I'll have Marco bring you a phone," he said. "Your laptop is already in the wardrobe on the villa network."
"Thank you."
"Your calls will be monitored," he said.
"I assumed." She said it plainly, without resentment. "Is there anything else I need to know for tonight?"
He looked at her for one more second — just a second — and she had the strange, complete feeling of being genuinely seen rather than assessed. She didn't know what to do with that yet.
"Dinner is at eight," he said. "If you want it."
"I'll be there," she said.
He left. She sat for exactly five minutes and let the full weight of the day exist without trying to manage it — the church, the glass, the tunnel, the blood, the dress facing the wall.
Five minutes.
Then she stood up, opened her laptop, and wrote the email to Chiara's gallery.
She was not going to be passive. Not today. Not ever. She had chosen to stay and she was going to stay on her own terms, even if she had to construct those terms from nothing, moment by moment, as she went.
- Writer
