Three weeks passed the way Elena imagined a held breath might, if a held breath could last that long — careful, watchful, every day layered with wedding preparations on top of a quiet, grinding investigation that turned up frustratingly little beyond what they already knew.
Aldo behaved, on the surface, exactly as he always had. Warm at family dinners. Attentive to Sofia. Solicitous toward Elena in a way that now made her skin crawl every time he asked after her arm, her sleep, her nerves before the big day. Damian's men, quietly rotated in around her without explanation to anyone who didn't need one, found nothing more concrete than a pattern of late-night calls from Aldo's private line to numbers that led nowhere traceable. Renata's contacts had gone quiet on the subject of Yuri Volkov
