LUCIAN
826 Words
Matteo POV
Frustration hits me like a fist to the sternum.
Three damn months of keeping up with this lie. Matteo Rinaldi, elite contractor, discreet, professional, invisible and last night I finally found what I came here for.
Not entirely. But enough to keep pretending I care about this family's circus.
The scroll.
The one I had found in the study, wedged behind a panel that shouldn't have opened, guarded by a lock that took me forty minutes and a blade thin as conscience to pick.
Parchment. Old ink. Names I recognized and names I didn't.
The way it highlights something you don't want to forget, or something you want someone else to find.
Lucian.
The name my mother breathed when she thought I was sleeping, when the fever took her, when she pressed her palm to my forehead and whispered prayers I didn't understand.
The name she called me in the dark before the dark took her.
And beneath it, in Frederick's own hand or someone's close enough: Born Benedetti.
I knew something was wrong the moment I saw Fredrick, his resemblance to me was too impossible for me to ignore.
Yes. I'd noticed it in mirrors, in the angle of Frederick's jaw when he turned to dismiss someone, in the particular flatness of his eyes when he calculated a man's usefulness.
I'd told myself it was projection. The hunger of an orphan seeing fathers everywhere.
I need to get back in there. The study, then the ancestral room, the one they're all killing each other to reach, the one Frederick guards like a dragon over gold.
The pieces don't connect. My mother's death, her whispered warnings, the way she made me promise before the end: Never go back, Lucian. Never let them find you.
I came back anyway.
And now this.
I stood at the wall and watched Isabella Benedetti look at me like I was something she'd decided to own.
‘Eleven children wasn't enough, I thought. They had to produce this one too.’
"Him, Papa."
"I want him as my full time bodyguard."
I am a disguised bodyguard. A lie within a lie. The last thing I need is proximity to the family's brightest spotlight, its most entitled mouth, its most watchful eyes.
Spoiled motherfucker. Three months of invisibility undone by a daughter's whim.
"My assignment is Miss Charlie Benedetti." Flat. Final. "I don't transfer.” I say. My voice is level. Professional. The tone I use for men I'm about to kill.
"Can be reassigned." Isabella's smile doesn't waver.
"...requires continuity. The protection of…"
"Charlie." She says the name like she says my fake one. Like a servant. I like furniture. "She'll manage. She always manages."
“Isabella… you can't say that.” Charlie stood to speak but her words came off like she was about to tear up. “ Papa Matheo….”
"Enough." He doesn't look at Isabella. Fredrick studied me with those calculating eyes that missed nothing and revealed less.
“He declined Bella, I will find someone more... suitable.
Isabella's smile flickers.
Her eyes stay on me, traveling my shoulders, my throat. She looks at me like jewelry she has already purchased and simply needs to collect.
Such brat.
"Wait."
Alberto. Mouth full of bread, crumbs catching in his stubble, shirt still half-tucked.
He chews. Swallows.
"It's only me," he says, "or does Charlie's bodyguard look a lot like Lucien?"
The name hangs in the air.
"Lucien," Alberto continues, reaching for more bread, "the one that got rumors rolling off where we were younger.”
Heads turning. Eyes narrowing. The collective pivot of a family trained to scent weakness, to hear opportunity in the stumble of a name.
“Ohh…it was back then , the rumors that almost led papa company bankrupt.” one of the Romano cousins mentioned.
I looked at Fredrick and noticed his no reaction to this.
"If there's nothing else," I say, and my voice belongs to a stranger, "I'll return to my station."
I don't wait for permission. I never do.
★★★
The corridor was cool and empty.
I stood in it for a moment.
The corridor smelt of old dust and passed violence…litting up a cigarette butt I let the smoke kiss my lips before exhaling them.
The family was f****d up, it would be so unfortunate to found out if I'm actually part of it.
In the dim corridor I noticed little movement.
Charlie.
She was ahead of me in the corridor, walking slowly. I knew without looking directly that her eyes hadn't left me since I'd stood from the wall. I could feel it, that specific awareness I'd been failing to classify for three months.
Her arms are wrapped around herself, her posture small, her presence easy to miss
The Benedetti family will burn. That was the promise I made at my mother's grave, in the rain, with mud on my knees and grief like a stone in my throat.
- Writer
