Gilded Cage

CHAPTER THREE

The Villa

— ✦ —

She packed one bag. It felt important, somehow — a form of resistance she could not articulate but needed to practice. One bag said: I am not staying. One bag said: this is temporary, contained, a thing with edges that I can see from every side. She took her toothbrush and three changes of clothes and the novel she was halfway through and then stood in the middle of her flat for a long moment looking at her bookshelf, because the books were the only part of it that genuinely hurt to leave.

She took two. She told herself it was enough.

A car arrived at six in the morning — black, expensive, driven by a man who did not introduce himself and did not speak for the entire forty-minute journey. Aria sat in the back with her bag in her lap and watched Milan thin out around them: first the dense city blocks, then the quieter residential streets, then the open road north where the light came in low and pale gold across the flat Lombard plain and the world opened up in a way that felt, under any other circumstances, like breathing.

She did not find it beautiful. She tried, and failed, and gave up, and looked at her hands instead.

The villa appeared at the end of a long private drive flanked by cypress trees so old and straight they looked deliberately planted to make visitors feel small. The house itself was cream-coloured stone, three storeys, with arched windows that caught the morning light and threw it back in long warm rectangles across the gravel. There were roses climbing the southern wall, dark red, not yet in full bloom. Iron gates. A fountain at the center of the turning circle that was not running.

It was, objectively, one of the most beautiful things Aria had ever seen.

She hated it immediately.

✦

A woman named Giulia met her at the door. Fifties, efficient, with the particular manner of someone who had spent decades managing a large household and had long since stopped being surprised by anything it produced. She showed Aria to a room on the second floor — east-facing, she noted, with two tall windows that overlooked the gardens and let in a quantity of morning light that was almost aggressive in its cheerfulness.

The room was larger than her entire flat. The bed had four posts and linen the color of fresh cream. There was a writing desk beneath one window and a shelf unit beside it, empty, which Aria stared at for a moment before setting her two books on it with a precision that surprised even her. The shelf looked less desolate with them there. Marginally.

"Signor Moretti asks that you make yourself comfortable," Giulia said from the doorway. "Lunch is at one. He will see you at dinner, at eight."

"And between now and then?" Aria asked.

"The gardens are available to you. The library is on the first floor. The east wing sitting room." A brief pause. "The west wing is not available to you."

"Because that is where he is."

Giulia's expression did not change. "Because that is the west wing," she said, and left.

Aria sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress was perfect. She resented it.

✦

She lasted until two in the afternoon before the room became too quiet.

The gardens were large and formal, the kind laid out by someone with a precise mind and a great deal of money — clipped hedges, stone paths, a pergola at the far end draped in wisteria that was just beginning to open. She walked them twice, slowly, with her hands in her pockets and her mind doing the thing it always did when she was unsettled: cataloging. The number of cypress trees on the drive. The variety of rose on the south wall. The fact that the fountain in the turning circle was dry not from disuse but from a deliberate closed valve she spotted at its base. Small observations, meaningless, but they gave her mind something to hold onto while the larger situation pressed at the edges of her composure like water finding a crack.

She was not frightened, exactly. She had moved past frightened sometime around four in the morning when she had sat on her kitchen floor and thought it all the way through to its logical end. What she was now was something more manageable: alert. Watchful. A person in an unfamiliar environment, gathering information, because information was the only resource available to her, and she had always been good at gathering it.

She went inside at half past two and found the library without difficulty — first floor, east corridor, double doors that opened onto the kind of room that would have made her gasp under any other circumstances. Floor-to-ceiling shelves on three walls. A reading table at the center. Two deep armchairs by the window. The books were real — not decorative, not arranged by spine color for aesthetics as she had half expected from a man of this kind of wealth, but actually organized, by subject, with the slight disorder of a collection that was genuinely used.

She ran her fingers along a shelf. History. Political philosophy. Several volumes on Italian criminal law, which struck her as either brazen or practical, and she supposed with a man like Dante Moretti it was probably both.

She pulled out a novel — Lampedusa, The Leopard, a copy so old the spine had been repaired with tape — and settled into one of the armchairs and read for two hours without moving.

She felt, for the first time since midnight, almost normal.

Which was precisely when she got lost.

✦

It was not entirely her fault. The villa's first floor was a series of corridors that turned at angles she had not fully mapped, and the light was different in the interior passages — lower, amber, cast by wall sconces rather than windows — and when she took what she believed to be the turning back toward the main staircase she found herself instead at the end of a hallway she had not seen before.

A door stood open at its far end. Just slightly — a hand's width, enough to throw a bar of warmer light across the stone floor tiles.

She knew, in the way that one always knows these things a moment too late, that she should turn around.

She pushed the door open instead.

It was a study. Large, wood-panelled, with a desk at its centre that was the most intensely ordered surface she had ever seen — papers in precise stacks, a pen laid parallel to the desk's edge, a lamp positioned at an exact angle. One wall was entirely glass, overlooking the south garden from an aspect she had not seen before. A second wall held a single painting, enormous, of a storm over water, and Aria stood in front of it for a moment before she could help herself because it was extraordinary — dark and violent and somehow, underneath the violence, unbearably lonely.

She should not be here. She knew this with complete clarity.

She looked at the desk anyway.

There was a photograph in a plain dark frame, half-obscured by a folder — a young man she did not recognize and a boy of perhaps ten who wore the same jaw, the same straight-edged quality to his face, and who was looking at the camera with an expression of such fierce, concentrated distrust that she almost smiled in spite of herself. The boy was obviously Dante. The man beside him was obviously someone he had loved and obviously someone who was gone, from the way the photograph was placed — visible but not displayed, present but turned slightly away from the room, like a thing kept close but not quite looked at directly.

She reached for it without thinking.

"I would recommend against that."

Aria spun around.

Dante was standing in the doorway. He had changed from the suit of last night into something darker, more casual — still immaculate, because she suspected immaculate was simply his natural state — and he was leaning against the frame with his arms crossed and an expression on his face that she could not read at all. Not angry, precisely. Something colder than angry, and more controlled.

She lowered her hand. She did not apologize. She was not sure why — some instinct told her that an apology would cost her something she could not afford to lose this early.

"I got lost," she said.

"The west corridor has a red runner," he said. "All other corridors have stone. The red runner means you have crossed into the west wing."

She considered this. "You might have mentioned that this morning."

"Giulia mentioned it."

"Giulia mentioned the west wing was unavailable. She did not mention a color-coded navigation system."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. There and gone so quickly she could not be certain she had seen it at all.

"Now you know," he said.

He moved into the room, and she stepped back without meaning to — not from fear, or not entirely, but from the way he occupied space, as though the room's geometry quietly rearranged itself to accommodate him. He picked up the folder that had been half-covering the photograph and the photograph disappeared beneath it, smoothly, without comment.

"Touch nothing in this room," he said. He was not looking at her. He was straightening the folder's position against the desk's edge, a millimeter adjustment that he apparently found necessary. "The rest of the house is yours. This is not."

"Understood," she said.

She moved toward the door. She was nearly through it when she stopped — some mechanism in her that had never learned to leave things alone — and turned back.

He was watching her. Arms still at his sides. That unreadable expression sitting on his face like a mask he had been wearing so long he had forgotten it was there.

"Especially me," he said, before she could speak.

She blinked. "I wasn't going to —"

"You were going to ask about the photograph."

She had been going to ask about the photograph.

"Goodnight, Miss Russo," he said. And he turned back to his desk, and she was dismissed as cleanly and completely as if a door had been closed in her face — not the one behind her, but the one inside him, the one she had spent approximately four seconds glimpsing before it shut.

She walked back down the corridor and found the stone floor and followed it to the main staircase and climbed to her room and sat on the edge of her beautiful, resented bed.

She thought about the painting. About the photograph. About the boy with Dante's jaw and Dante's eyes who had looked at a camera with the fierce distrust of someone who had already, at ten years old, decided the world was not to be trusted.

She thought about how a person became the man she had met in that alley.

And then she made herself stop thinking about it, because thinking about it was the beginning of understanding him, and understanding him was something she could not afford to do.

Not yet.

Not here.

Not in his gilded cage, where the walls were beautiful, and the doors were open, and she was not, no matter what she told herself, entirely free.