Revenge and Roses

An Unlisted Number

Vane Tower, Palermo — Past Midnight

Silas's POV

The phone buzzed once against the desk, and Silas didn't reach for it immediately. He finished the line he was reading — a shipping manifest from the Conti network, three years old, routes that hadn't changed since before Enzo Conti had been fooled enough to think his niece would make a useful bargaining chip — and only then turned the screen toward him.

Unknown number. Sicilian prefix.

_This is Elara Conti. I believe you already know who I am, and why I'm contacting you without my uncle's knowledge. I would like to meet you. Alone. Before either of us agrees to anything further._

He read it twice. Whoever had given her this number, it hadn't been Enzo — the message said as much — which meant she'd gone around him entirely, through whatever means she had access to. That was the only fact he had. He didn't waste time speculating on the rest.

He typed a reply.

_Tomorrow. I will send the address once I have somewhere private arranged. Tell no one._

Then he opened a second message, this one to Vanessa. "Pull everything you have on Elara Conti. Financials, education records, anything from Zurich or Florence. I want it before ten tomorrow morning." Vanessa had spent four years building him a file on the Conti family thick enough to bury a man in; Enzo's debts, his routes, the shape of his fear. Somehow the niece had only ever been a footnote in it. That was about to change.

A knock sounded at the door a few minutes later — two short raps, then a pause, the pattern Angelo had used for fifteen years. Silas said nothing. Angelo already knew that silence meant enter.

"You're up late," Angelo said, closing the door behind him.

"I could say the same for you," Silas responded.

"I saw your light from the hall." Angelo crossed to the desk, and Silas turned the phone toward him without being asked. "The Conti girl."

"She's found a way to contact me directly. Without her uncle's knowledge," Silas said flatly, the way he reported any development that changed the shape of an operation. "She wants a meeting before the terms are settled. I've agreed."

"Without telling Enzo?" Angelo asked.

"He'll find out eventually. By then it won't matter." Silas set the phone down. "I've asked Vanessa to move up her report on the girl. If she's resourceful enough to go around her own uncle, I want to know what else she's capable of before I put her in this house."

Angelo was quiet for a moment, turning that over. "And what if Vanessa's findings say she's a problem?"

"Then I handle her the way I handle every problem." Silas's voice didn't change. "The wedding still happens. The routes still transfer. Whatever she turns out to be, this marriage was never built around her cooperation. It was built around her uncle's debt to me, and that debt doesn't disappear because his niece has opinions."

"You almost sound like you're looking forward to finding out which one she is," Angelo said.

"I'm not looking forward to anything." Something colder entered Silas's voice, close to a warning. "I have one reason for any of this, Angelo, and it hasn't changed since the day we started building toward it. Don't read curiosity into a man doing his due diligence."

"Understood." Angelo didn't look entirely convinced, but he let it go, the particular retreat of a man choosing his moment rather than losing the argument. "Where are you having the meeting?"

"Somewhere Enzo's people won't think to look. The back room at Alloro — Marco owes me enough favors to keep it quiet for one afternoon." Silas was already moving to the next problem in his head, the way he moved through every decision that required more than one step. "I want two men outside, an unmarked car, nothing that reads as mine if anyone's watching the street. If her uncle's smart enough to notice her missing for an afternoon, I don't want a trail leading back to me before I've decided what use she is," he says to Angelo.

"I'll arrange it." Angelo turned toward the door, then paused with his hand on the frame. "For what it's worth — if Vanessa's report comes back clean, and she's exactly what she looks like on paper, that still doesn't mean she's harmless. Sofia looked harmless too, once."

The name landed in the room like something dropped from a height. Silas didn't answer it. He didn't need to; Angelo had already said what he'd come to say, and let himself back out with the same quiet economy he'd let himself in, pausing only to add, from the doorway, "Try to sleep. You're less insufferable when you have."

"Get out, Angelo," Silas says.

"Goodnight to you too," Angelo responds.

Silas remained at the desk once the door had closed, the manifest still open in front of him, unread now, the numbers on it meaningless against the two things sitting in his chest at once — the old, familiar weight of Sofia's name in another man's mouth, and the newer, unwelcome fact that some part of him had wanted to know more about Elara Conti before he'd had a single reason that served the plan.

He thought about the drawer she'd have to have gone through to find his number, whatever it had been, and the particular kind of person who didn't wait to be handed permission. He had built an empire out of exactly that instinct in himself. He didn't yet know what it meant to find it staring back at him from the other side of a marriage he'd engineered for entirely different reasons.

He closed the file, and reached for his own phone one last time before the night was finished with him.

"Confirm the room is swept before she arrives. I don't want anything overheard that I haven't decided to let her hear."

Vanessa's reply came within a minute, brief and efficient, the way everything about her was. "It will be done by nine. I'll have the file to you before ten, as requested. There's more in it than you're expecting."

He read that last line twice, and felt the small, cold satisfaction of a man whose instincts had just been confirmed by someone whose judgment he trusted more than his own.

Whatever Elara Conti turned out to be, he intends to know it before she has the chance to become anything else.