CHAPTER 3: SANDRO
899 Words
I've run this family since I was twenty-six. Eight years now. Long enough that most people stopped surprising me. The past eight years have taught me how to read a person quickly, accurately, and interpret without emotion.
Right now, I look at Isabella De Luca across the dinner table and come up empty. Not completely. I could tell she was intelligent, way more than her father had implied. Controlled. Prepared. And she'd chosen to open with the one thing most likely to unsettle me.
Chess. Of everything she could have led with.
I didn't let it show, I couldn't. I simply moved on. And now standing in my own drawing room, I'm ndering why a woman I'd known forty minutes had landed in a corner of my mind I generally kept empty.
Matteo appeared at my shoulder.
"Well?" he said.
"She's sharp."
"She's De Luca's daughter."
I turned to face him. Isabella was across us, near the window, speaking to one of the older capos with composed attention that looked like interest and might have been performance. I couldn't tell. That was the problem, I was usually very good at telling.
"She noticed every exit when she came in," Matteo said. "In exactly four seconds. Then the staff. Then you." A pause. "In that order."
"She's being thorough."
"I'd rather say she's being tactical."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive with a useful marriage."
He made the sound he made when he disagreed but knew the decision was final. A controlled exhale he'd been aiming at me since we were twenty-two. "Just don't get attached, I saw your face while you were talking to her."
“And what about my face?”
“It was the face you make everytime you notice an interesting problem.”
"I don't have an interesting problem face."
"You absolutely have one." He straightened his cuff. "You had it on the entire time you were talking to her. I don't like it."
The signing took twenty minutes.
Isabella stood slightly behind her father. When her turn came, she signed without ceremony, without visible emotion. Clean signature. Pen down. Hands folded. Waiting.
I watched her through the process.
She knew I was watching. I could tell by the specific quality of her stillness because choosing not to look at someone is different from simply not looking. You can feel the difference if you're paying attention and I was paying attention.
Later, in the study, Vittorio came in without knocking. He never knocked.
"She's going to try something," he said.
"Obviously."
"You don't seem concerned."
"A De Luca who doesn't try to leverage her position is either incompetent or broken. She's neither." I set down my glass. "I'm going to watch what she tries and learn from it."
Vittorio was quiet. Then: "She got to you."
"She's interesting."
"Yes." He moved towards the door, then paused. "Your father said the same thing about your mother, you know. Right before she—"
"Good night, Vittorio."
Three days later as I passed the library I found the door open. It was never open.
Isabella was in my chair with Sun Tzu open in her lap and the focused, faintly-arguing expression of someone who was disagreeing with the text.
She didn't look up.
"Are you going to come in or just stand there?"
"I haven't decided."
"It's your house."
"It's my library specifically."
"You said I could use it." She looked up then. The window light did something to her face that I didn't have a name for. "So we're both right."
I came in, and sat in the other chair.
"What are you reading?"
She held up the spine. The Art of War. Then, preempting me: "Research."
"For what."
"Understanding how people think. You do it with chess. I do it with dead generals."
"Same thing," I said. "What have you concluded?"
She tilted her head. "That the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting." A pause. "I'm still working out the application."
I looked at her for a long moment.
"Don't annotate the books," I said, standing to leave.
She turned to the front cover, where I could already see, from where I stood, small precise handwriting in pencil, then she looked up at me.
"Too late," she said.
I went back at eleven, after she'd gone to bed.
Found the book. Opened it.
She'd written one line inside the front cover:
The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
And underneath, a question she hadn't asked out loud:
But what if the enemy is the only interesting person in the room?
I stood there longer than I'm going to admit and then I found a pencil and wrote underneath hers:
Then you're already losing.
I put the book back exactly where she'd left it and told myself that was the end of it.
In the morning, before six, I went back.
She'd written back already.
Two words, underneath mine, in that same small careful hand:
Define losing.
I stood there in the empty library in the early morning quiet and understood, with the clarity of a man who'd spent eight years being certain about everything, that I was in considerable trouble. And it wasn't the kind of trouble that came because I thought I thought she was dangerous, it was because I was already looking forward to answering her.
- Writer
