Irresistible Distance

Chapter Eight: Mother's Call

His phone rang again. He looked at the screen: “Mum.”

He stared at it for one second, the second of a man who was genuinely considering not answering and already knew he was going to and then picked up.

Before he could speak, her voice arrived like the weather.

“Dante, darling!”

He pulled the phone back from his ear by an inch. His mother had two volumes: loud and asleep, with very little in between.

“I heard you got married!” The delight in her voice was genuine and completely unstoppable, the enthusiasm of a woman who moved through the world as though it were mostly good news waiting to happen. “I leave you in peace for a few months, a few months, Dante and you become a husband without even a proper telephone call!”

“It was…”

“I saw the pictures,” she continued, rolling over his attempted contribution with the ease of twenty years of not particularly needing his input to reach her conclusions. “She is very pretty. Very soft-looking. That kind of quiet prettiness that doesn’t announce itself.” A brief, approving pause. “That’s good. That’s real.”

“Mum…”

“Those loud women,” she continued, with the tone of someone resuming a long-standing position on a familiar subject, “the ones who are always pretending around you and looking at you like they want to eat you, those vultures. I never liked any of them. Not one. I used to lie awake some nights thinking what if he brings one of those home, and I would just…”

“I need to…”

“Grandchildren,” she said, change the whole topic.

Complete silence on his end.

“Mum.” He said it the way a person says the name of something that is happening to them against their will.

“What?” She sounded genuinely innocent. “I’m allowed to be excited. I’m your mother. This is literally my job.”

“I got married yesterday.”

“And I found out this morning through a picture someone forwarded to me,” she said, her voice faking being hurt knowing his mum has chosen not to be truly hurt by something but wants it noted for the record. “You couldn’t have called? Just a small call? Hello Mamma, I’m getting married tomorrow, just wanted to mention it?”

“The situation was…”

“Complicated,” she finished for him. “It’s always complicated with you. Everything is always very serious and very complicated and very necessary.” A soft, familiar sound that was something between a sigh and a laugh. “Your father was the same way, you know.”

The name landed quietly. It used to be real dramatic before when his name was mentioned but not anymore, because neither of them were dramatic about it anymore, but with that persistent, specific weight that some things never entirely lost.

“Is she kind?” his mother asked, and her voice had softened. Not much, but genuinely. The question beneath the question clearly audible.

Dante was quiet for a moment.

“She’s quiet and different,” he said finally.

“That’s not the same thing.”

“No,” he agreed. “It isn’t.”

A pause. His mother, to her credit, didn’t push. She let it sit for a moment in the particular way she had the way that suggested she had heard more in those two words than he had intended to put there and was choosing not to say so directly.

“Don’t frighten her,” she said eventually. “Whatever it is you’re doing, whatever the situation is, be careful with her. Quiet people carry more than they show.” Another pause, and then lighter: “I have a spa appointment. I’m already late. I’ll call you later.”

“You don’t have to…”

But she had already gone.

Dante lowered the phone and looked at it for a moment with the expression of knowing his mum she never changes, always traveling it became worse since they lost his Dad.

And his mother's last words didn’t leave with it.

“Quiet people carry more than they show.”

He slipped the phone into his pocket.

And then, as it sometimes did in the particular silence of empty rooms, the memory came.

The Greco estate.

He had gone for the debt that Salvatore owed him. That was the entire reason, no personal reason and no secondary reason, simply the straightforward business of a significant amount of money owed to him by a man who had been avoiding the reality of that fact for three months longer than was reasonable.

Salvatore Greco was not the first man to borrow from Dante Rossetti and not the first to discover that grace periods in his world operated on a different timeline than grace periods in the world of legitimate business.

Dante had arrived alone. He preferred it that way for these conversations: two men, a closed room, no pretense required from either party.

Salvatore had opened the door personally, which told him everything about the state of things. Men who were comfortable didn’t answer their own doors.

The study had been large and expensive and immaculately cleaned in the way of rooms used to impress rather than work in.

Dante had looked around it with the automatic assessment he applied to all spaces exits, sight lines, the arrangement of furniture, the things displayed and the things conspicuously absent and then he had sat, and he had waited, and he had let the silence do the work.

“There have been delays,” Salvatore had begun, with a terrified voice he was trying to hide but it still showed he was panicking, and his opening statement felt rehearsed.

Dante had listened without expression while Salvatore explained the delays. Then he had asked for the number. When Salvatore gave it, Dante had exhaled once almost a laugh, but not quite and told him that the amount was not a debt but an insult, which was true.

Salvatore was shaking at this point and with desperation with the speed of a man who had been holding it at bay and had now run out of room to do so. “I can offer alternatives,” he had said. “Assets. I have assets.”

Dante had paused. “Assets” was an interesting word.

And then Salvatore had said it. “My daughter.”

The room immediately turned cold.

Dante’s expression went cold, nothing in his posture had moved, the quality of light in the study had not altered. But something in the air had changed with the room temperature dropping. Something that arrived from a different category than ordinary business.

Dante responded coldly.”Salvatore, are you insulting me?”

Salvatore, shaking and sweating even under the cold room because the air condition turned to the highest, started stuttering.” I… I am so…”

“So you think that daughter of yours is worth my money.”

“Valentina,” Salvatore said immediately, picking up speed in the way of men who mistake silence for invitation. “She is educated. Obedient. She will not be in trouble. She could be your bride or whatever you want her to be.”

“Whatever you want her to be.”

Something had moved in Dante’s chest. Not emotion, but the cold tightening of a man whose understanding of value and the treatment of it had been shaped by watching what happened when it was disobeyed.

And then Dante stood and walked to the study window and immediately the gate opened and she walked in without knowing what she was walking into.

She was wearing a loose T-shirt and faded jeans, dressed simply and without effort. A plain tote bag hangs from her shoulder, slightly weighed down. She looks tired, her posture low and her face quiet, like the day has taken more from her than she has to give.

She had paused in the doorway talking to a maid calmly, Dante noticed that even with how tired she looked she still looked pretty and the awareness had registered in him with a clarity he hadn’t expected.

Salvatore had seized the moment with the tone of a man presenting inventory. “If you want her, I can give her to you.”

Dante had moved before the sentence finished.

One step, fast enough that Salvatore had gone still before he’d registered the movement. Dante’s hand came down on the desk between them not a blow, but a statement, the c***k of it cutting through the room with total effectiveness.

“You don’t offer people,” he had said, very quietly. “You expose how little you understand value.”

Salvatore had frozen.

“And you,” Dante had continued, “have just demonstrated to me that you would trade your own daughter for your own survival.” A pause. “That’s information I’ll remember.”

The silence after that had been the particular kind that comes when a room understands that something has been decided.

Dante had straightened. He had looked once, briefly at the girl still standing in the doorway.

He had turned away.

“Prepare her,” he had said. Not to him. To the room. “Three days.”

He had walked toward the door. Stopped at the threshold with his back to him. Then, almost as an afterthought or something that wore the clothing of an afterthought while being nothing of the kind: “She becomes my wife.”

He had left. Then stopped once more, just outside the door, without turning.

“If you speak of her as though she is disposable again,” he had said, at a volume Salvatore would have to strain to hear, “I will take everything you own before I take your life.”

Then he had walked away and not looked back.

Dante returned to the present. The city moved below him, indifferent and continuous.

“She looks innocent, " his mother had said. “Don’t stress her too much.”

He stood at the window and let the memory settle back into wherever memories went when they weren’t being examined, and he did not interrogate what it meant that it had surfaced today, specifically, in the quiet of a room that still held a faint trace of her perfume.

His phone buzzed.

“Update.” His man’s voice was low and businesslike. “She’s at the cemetery. Standing in front of a grave.”

Dante’s hand tightened slightly on the phone. “Alone?”

“Yes, boss. Completely alone.”

He stared at the city for a moment. Via Centrale. Eastern cemetery. Her father. He knew the file. Marco Marchese. Died when she was eight.

“Keep watching,” he said quietly. “Don’t approach her.”

He ended the call.

Something moved in his chest low and carried the particular quality of things he didn’t examine too closely. Not concerned. He told himself it wasn't a concern, and mostly believed it. “Attention”, he told himself instead. Simply attention.

His phone rang.

Unknown number. Different from the previous one.

He answered. “Speak.”

Half a second of silence. The silence of someone who had prepared their words and was choosing them slowly.

“You should not have taken her.” The voice was calm and carried the confidence of someone who was not afraid of the person they were calling. “She was not yours to take.”

Every other thought cleared from Dante’s mind instantly. He was still with the focused rate of a predator that has heard something in the dark and is now pointing out its direction.

“Who is this? And Do you have a death wish” he said calmly.