HIS BELLISSIMA

OLD GHOSTS

He didn't look back.

He heard her footsteps fall into step behind him anyway, a few seconds later than he'd have liked, but there, which was the part that mattered. He kept his pace even, unhurried, the same easy stride he used for everything in this house, because if she saw him relax even a fraction over one small, hard-won victory, she'd probably turn around out of sheer spite just to deny him the satisfaction.

He led her back through the courtyard without a word, and for the length of that walk his mind drifted, unbidden, back to the moment he'd first walked into her room that afternoon.

He'd knocked once, out of habit more than expectation, and let himself in without waiting for an answer. He'd found her curled against the headboard, pale and hollowed out in a way that had nothing to do with the light, the lunch tray already gone cold on the little table where Clarise had left it hours before. She'd looked up at him like he was just one more thing this house had decided to inflict on her, and something in that look, underneath the exhaustion and the guardedness, had struck him harder than it should have.

He knew that face.

Not her, exactly. He was certain he'd never laid eyes on Alondra Rosario before that afternoon. But something underneath the specifics of her, the shape of her eyes, the particular gold-brown of her skin, the way her jaw had set the moment she noticed him staring, struck a chord he couldn't place, faint and distant, like a song he'd heard once as a child and never learned the name of.

He hadn't said anything about it then. He'd simply talked her out of bed and into a walk instead and told himself the feeling would fade once he stopped paying attention to it.

It hadn't. If anything, walking beside her now, he felt it again, quieter this time but just as insistent.

Instead of leading her back up to her room, he turned down the corridor toward the dining hall, the same room where she'd sat across from Matteo that first night, gold and shadowed and lined with the portraits of men who'd been dead longer than she'd been alive. Dinner was already laid out on the long mahogany table, waiting, untouched, exactly the way things in this house always seemed to be waiting for her whether she wanted them to or not.

Dante pulled out a chair, not for her, just for himself, and dropped into it across from the place setting like he had every intention of staying.

"Sit. Eat." He said it easily, like it wasn't a request. "I didn't spend half an afternoon talking you into a walk just to watch you skip dinner and undo all my hard work."

"You could just leave and let me eat in peace."

"I could but I won't." He settled back, unbothered. "Consider me quality control."

She sat, finally, dragging the plate toward her with the enthusiasm of someone approaching a chore rather than a meal. But she ate, small bites at first, then steadier ones, and Dante counted that as a win worth savoring quietly.

"So," she said eventually, not looking up from the plate. "Who is he. Really."

Dante considered several answers, discarded most of them. "Complicated."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I've got that won't get me in trouble." He leaned back, arms folded. "Look, I'm not going to sit here and tell you Matteo's story. That's not mine to give away, and frankly, you'd get the wrong idea from me anyway. I have twenty-five years of bias."

"He threatened to hurt the only people I have left in the world." Her voice was flat, controlled in the specific way that meant it was costing her something to keep it that way. "I don't really care about your bias."

"Fair." He held up both hands. "For what it's worth, and I know this isn't much, he's not actually the cartoon villain you've built in your head overnight. Ruthless, yes. Terrifying when he wants to be, absolutely. But not cruel for the sake of it. There's usually a reason, even when the reason is bad."

"That's supposed to make me feel better?"

"Not really, no. I just find it's easier to survive a place like this if you understand the rules instead of just being afraid of them." He shrugged. "Consider it a professional courtesy. I don't extend it to everyone."

"Give me one good thing about him, then. Since you're so determined to defend him."

Dante considered this with the exaggerated seriousness of a man being asked to solve a genuinely difficult equation. "He's loyal. Brutally, inconveniently loyal, the kind that gets people killed for the wrong reasons sometimes, but it's real. He doesn't forget who stood with him. He also tips extremely well, if that means anything to you, which I'm guessing it doesn't, given the circumstances."

"That's the best you've got? He tips well?"

"I did say it was a short list." He spread his hands. "Look, if it helps, think of him less as a monster and more as a very expensive, very dangerous force of nature. You don't ask a hurricane to be reasonable. You just try not to be standing in the wrong place when it decides to move."

"Comforting."

"I contain multitudes." He gestured at her plate again. "Eat. You've made excellent progress and I'd hate for you to stall out now over my terrible bedside manner."

She studied him for a long moment, something calculating behind the exhaustion in her eyes, and he had the distinct sense of being evaluated and found only partially trustworthy, which was, he supposed, the correct read.

"You're avoiding the actual question," she said.

"I'm aware."

She set her fork down, done with the food or done with pretending to care about it, he couldn't tell which. The light shifted as a cloud passed outside, and for a second her face caught it at a different angle, and that same unplaceable familiarity hit him again, harder this time, insistent enough that he actually leaned forward without meaning to.

"What," she said, wary.

"Nothing." He shook his head slowly, still looking at her. "It's going to sound strange."

"Stranger than everything else that's happened to me this week? I doubt it."

"You look familiar to me." He said it plainly, watching her reaction. "I can't place it. I've never met you, I'd remember that, but there's something about your face that feels like it belongs somewhere in the back of my head, and I can't for the life of me find where."

Her wariness sharpened into something else, something closer to hope, though she tried to bury it fast. "Familiar how? From where?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know, or you won't say?"

"I genuinely don't know." That much, at least, was true. "If I could put a name to it, I'd tell you. I'm not in the business of being cryptic for fun, whatever you might think of this family by now."

"Try. Please." Something raw slipped into her voice, some fragile thread of a woman looking for anything, any thread at all, that might connect this nightmare back to a world that made sense. "Anyone. Anything. I need to know if this is connected to something,why he's doing this."

He wanted to give her more. He noted that wanting, filed it away as something to examine later, when he had the luxury of examining anything that wasn't currently on fire. "I wish I had more for you than a feeling I can't explain. I don't. Not yet."

She didn't push further, though he could see it costing her not to. She turned back to the window instead, and he let the silence sit, grateful for it, because he needed a minute to think without her watching him do it.

He'd been digging for years into things that refused to stay buried, trying to find whoever was responsible for the death of Matteo's mother and his two younger siblings all those years ago, chasing threads that kept dissolving the moment he pulled on them. He'd interviewed men who claimed to remember nothing, paid for records scrubbed clean before he'd thought to look for them, followed money that vanished into accounts under names that had never been real. Every lead had gone cold. He was no closer now than when he started, and the not knowing had begun to sit in his chest like something rotting slowly from the inside, worse today than most.

He thought of Leonardo, unbidden, the way he sometimes did when his mind wandered somewhere it hadn't been invited. Dante had been young, seven or eight, small enough that the men around the family had spoken freely in front of him like he was furniture. He remembered fragments from that time the way children remember things, in pieces without context: Leonardo, younger then, sharper somehow, talking about a woman with a kind of hunger in his voice that even a child could recognize as dangerous. A photograph glimpsed once on a desk he hadn't been meant to see, snatched away too fast to study properly. A name he couldn't fully summon now, soft and foreign on his tongue, gone as quickly as it surfaced.

He didn't know why his mind kept circling back to it, or if he was simply a tired man looking for patterns because he badly wanted an answer to appear somewhere, anywhere, after months of finding nothing.

But something about the woman across the room had reached into that old, half-buried memory and pulled, and Dante had learned a long time ago not to ignore the feeling that came right before something started falling apart.

He just wished, for once, he knew which direction to brace for.