Bound To The Devil’s Throne

Chapter 8

She arrived on a Tuesday.

Elena knew it was Tuesday because she had a clinical rotation scheduled and had been up since five-thirty organizing her materials with the specific focused calm of someone who needed one part of their life to remain exactly what it had always been. She had her bag packed. She had her lanyard on. She was standing in the kitchen drinking coffee with the quiet satisfaction of a morning that was, for once, proceeding on schedule.

Then the elevator opened.

She heard it from the kitchen — the particular sound of the private elevator that she had learned to register the way she registered all sounds in this apartment, categorized and filed. The elevator at this hour meant someone arriving, not Nico who used the stairs out of a habit he’d never explained, not Rosa who came up the service entrance, not Dante who was already here and had been since before she woke. The elevator at this hour on a Tuesday meant someone who had a key and used it without calling ahead.

Elena stayed in the kitchen.

She heard the footsteps — heels, confident, the rhythm of someone who had walked this particular floor many times. She heard the direction: not toward the study, not toward the main sitting room, but toward the kitchen. Toward her.

The woman who appeared in the kitchen doorway was the kind of beautiful that arrived in a room like weather. Dark auburn hair, precise and gleaming. A coat that was architectural in its construction, charcoal grey, the kind of garment that cost more than Elena’s monthly rent had. Eyes that were amber and currently doing to Elena what Lorenzo Vitale’s had done over breakfast last week — a rapid, comprehensive assessment — except that where Lorenzo’s had been careful and concealed, this woman’s was entirely open.

She was looking at Elena the way someone looked at a stain they had not expected to find on something that belonged to them.

“You’re smaller than I expected,” she said. Her English was unaccented and precise.

Elena set down her coffee cup. She thought about the fact that this was the second time in a week someone had opened a conversation with her by commenting on her size, and she thought about what that said about the expectations she was apparently failing to meet, and she filed it for later.

“You have a key to this apartment,” Elena said. Not a question.

“I’ve had a key to this apartment for three years.” The woman came into the kitchen fully — not in the way of someone entering a room but in the way of someone reclaiming territory — and set her bag on the counter. Elena’s counter. Or rather Dante’s counter that was for the moment also Elena’s, which was perhaps the precise nature of the problem. “I’m Sofia Conti.”

“I know who you are,” Elena said.

Something shifted in Sofia’s expression. The assessment sharpened. “Do you,” she said.

“Dante mentioned you.” He had not mentioned her — Gianna had, in a sentence and a half during the shopping trip, in the tone of someone providing necessary intelligence. But Elena was not going to explain the sourcing.

Sofia looked at her for a long moment. She was perhaps thirty, Elena thought. Maybe slightly older. The kind of woman who had learned very young how to make a room orient around her and had spent the subsequent years perfecting it. She was performing composure now — performing it well — but beneath it was something that Elena, who spent her days reading people who were performing wellness they didn’t feel, could detect quite clearly.

Sofia Conti was furious.

“Coffee?” Elena said.

Sofia blinked. A small recalibration. “What?”

“Would you like coffee.” Elena reached for the pot with the ease of a woman who was entirely at home in this kitchen, which she absolutely was not but which she had decided was the correct posture. “It’s fresh. Rosa made it twenty minutes ago.”

A beat. Then, with the quality of someone who had expected a different opening and was adjusting: “Yes. Fine.”

Elena poured two cups. Set Sofia’s on the counter across from her. Picked up her own. She was aware that this was a power arrangement — she was on the inside of the kitchen island and Sofia was on the outside, which was both accidental and useful.

Sofia looked at the coffee cup. Then at Elena. Then around the kitchen with a sweeping glance that took in Elena’s textbook on the table, her bag by the door, the small arrangements of a person who lived here — the photograph of Anna Moretti that Elena had moved to the kitchen windowsill because the light there was better in the mornings.

“You moved the photographs,” Sofia said.

“I haven’t moved anything of Dante’s.”

“His mother’s picture was on that windowsill.”

Elena looked at the window. Then back at Sofia. “It wasn’t there when I arrived.” She kept her voice level and her face open. “If it was moved during the transition, I’d like to know where it is so it can be put back.”

Another recalibration. Another small defeat of whatever Sofia had been expecting. “It’s in the study,” she said, after a moment. “He moved it himself, months ago.”

“Then that’s where he wants it,” Elena said.

Sofia drank her coffee and looked at Elena and Elena drank her coffee and looked back and the kitchen was very quiet around them.

“How old are you,” Sofia said.

“Twenty-three.”

“A nursing student.”

“Final year.”

“And before this you lived in—” She paused. The pause was not uncertainty. It was deliberate. “Park Slope.”

“Yes.” Elena was aware of an echo — of Lorenzo’s questions, the same progression, the same inventory. She noted it and kept her expression pleasant.

Sofia set her coffee cup down. She turned it slightly on the counter, a small, precise gesture, and looked at it as though the conversation was happening there rather than between them. “I’m going to say something to you,” she said. “And I want you to hear it as information rather than threat. Because I could make it a threat if I wanted to, and I’m choosing not to.”

Elena waited.

Sofia looked up. The performance of composure had been set aside — not abandoned, but set aside deliberately, the way you set aside something you might need again and were handling carefully. What was underneath it was complicated. “I was with Dante for two years,” she said. “We were engaged for eight months of that. I know this apartment the way I know my own. I know every person in it and what they want and what they’ll do to get it. I know what Dante Romano is and I know what it costs to love him and I know what it costs not to.” She met Elena’s eyes. “You are twenty-three and you came from Park Slope and you have no idea — none, I’m sorry to be unkind about this but I think kindness here is a form of cruelty — no idea what you’ve walked into.”

“I walked into a contract,” Elena said.

“You walked into a war.” Sofia’s voice was very quiet. “Dante is a man that people want things from. Control of what he has, access to what he knows, the ability to say they brought him down or they built him up or they were the woman standing next to him when it finally ended. People will use you to get to him. People will hurt you to hurt him. People will tell you things that are true enough to be convincing and false enough to be lethal and you won’t always know which is which until it’s too late.” She stopped. Her jaw was tight. “I learned that. I learned it at a cost I’m still paying.”

Elena looked at her. At the anger beneath the composed surface and the pain beneath the anger and the complicated, real thing that had clearly happened to this woman in this apartment and that she was carrying with her still into a kitchen she had once treated as her own.

“Why are you telling me this,” Elena said. Genuine question.

Sofia looked at her for a long moment. “Because someone should have told me,” she said. “And no one did.”

The echo of Gianna’s words in a Park Slope sidewalk, the same sentence, the same quiet devastation in it.

Someone should have told me. And no one did.

Elena picked up her coffee cup. She thought about what Sofia had said and she thought about what Sofia had not said and she tried to map the distance between them — between the threat this woman represented and the information she had just offered, which were not the same thing and might in fact be in opposition.

“I appreciate you telling me,” she said. And she meant it, which she could see surprised Sofia.

“You’re not what I expected,” Sofia said. Sharply. As though it was an inconvenience.

“People keep saying that this week.”

“What were you expected to be?”

Elena put her cup down. She looked at Sofia Conti — the beauty and the anger and the grief all layered over each other — and said: “I think everyone expected someone who could be managed. Someone who would be frightened enough to be controllable and grateful enough not to ask questions.”

Sofia stared at her.

“I’m not frightened enough to be controllable,” Elena said. “And I’m not grateful. I’m here because I had no choice, and I intend to make that mean as little as possible going forward.” She picked up her bag from by the door. “I have a clinical rotation in forty minutes.”

Sofia said nothing for a moment. Then: “He won’t be faithful to you.”

Elena turned at the door. She looked at Sofia — the beautiful, furious, damaged woman who had come to this kitchen this morning for reasons that were not entirely what they seemed to be. “That’s a provision in the contract,” she said. “Mutual fidelity for the duration of the arrangement. He signed it.”

Sofia laughed. It was not a kind laugh but it was a real one. “A contract,” she said. “You made him sign a fidelity clause.”

“I made him sign a great many things.”

“And you think he’ll keep them.”

Elena considered this honestly, the way she considered things she wasn’t certain about. “I think,” she said carefully, “that he’s a man who keeps his word when he gives it. And I think he doesn’t give it unless he means it.” She paused. “I could be wrong. But it’s what I’ve observed so far.”

Sofia looked at her with an expression that was still complicated but had changed in some way — something in it had moved, shifted from one category to an adjacent one. She picked up her bag from the counter.

“He was faithful to me,” she said. Very quietly, as though admitting something she hadn’t planned to. “For two years. Whatever else happened, I want you to know that.”

Elena nodded.

“That doesn’t mean he’s safe,” Sofia said.

“I know.”

“It doesn’t mean this ends well.”

“I know that too.”

Sofia walked to the kitchen doorway and then stopped. Without turning around, with her back to Elena and her hand on the doorframe in an echo of a gesture Elena recognized from her own first night here: “Enjoy this while it lasts,” she said. “He’ll tire of you the same way he tired of me. Except I survived it.”

Then she was gone. Heels on marble, the sound of the elevator, and then the particular quality of quiet that followed a presence like that — not silence exactly, but its aftermath.

Elena stood in the kitchen for a moment.

She thought about the word survived. The specific weight Sofia had put on it. Not got over it or moved on or any of the other language people used for the end of relationships. Survived. As though the love itself had been the dangerous part.

She picked up her lanyard from where it had slid off her bag strap and put it around her neck.

She was halfway to the elevator when Dante appeared from the direction of the study. He had clearly heard the elevator — or perhaps had known Sofia was coming, which was a different question with a different set of implications. He stopped when he saw Elena. His eyes went to her bag, to the lanyard, to whatever was on her face.

“Sofia was here,” he said. Not a question.

“She had coffee,” Elena said. “She was very direct.”

His jaw tightened. “Elena—”

“I’m going to be late,” she said. She pressed the elevator button. The doors opened immediately, which she had noticed they did for her now — someone had arranged it, pre-called to her floor. Another adjustment made without comment.

“What did she say to you,” Dante said.

Elena stepped into the elevator. She turned and looked at him — standing in the hallway in the morning light with his sleeves already rolled to the elbows and his expression doing the contained, complex thing it did when he was processing something he hadn’t fully anticipated. She thought about a woman who had been in this apartment for two years and was still coming back to it. She thought about the word survived.

She thought about an engraving on the inside of a ring.

“She told me this world is dangerous,” Elena said. “And that I don’t understand it yet.” The doors began to close. “She wasn’t wrong about either of those things.”

She held his gaze until the doors finished closing.

In the elevator, alone, she allowed herself exactly the length of the descent to process what had happened. Sofia’s warning — which had been real, she thought, underneath the performance of it. The fidelity clause comment — which had surprised Sofia in a way that told Elena something about what Dante’s previous relationships had and hadn’t included. The word survived, doing its slow work.

And something else. Something smaller, that she hadn’t let herself look at directly while it was happening.

The last thing Sofia had said — he’ll tire of you the same way he tired of me — was delivered as cruelty. Elena had received it as intended. But she had also, walking to the elevator, begun to examine it with the same discipline she applied to everything.

The same way he tired of me.

Which meant there was a way. A specific way that Dante Romano’s relationships ended, a pattern Sofia knew from the inside. And Sofia had almost told her what it was before she caught herself and turned it into a warning instead.

What had she been about to say?

The elevator doors opened into the lobby. Nico was waiting — he was always waiting, she had come to understand that the security was continuous and present even when invisible — with his coat and his coffee and the manner of a man who had also, she suspected, been aware of Sofia’s visit.

“Clinical rotation,” he said. Not a question.

“Lenox Hill,” she confirmed.

They walked out into the October morning, and the city received them with its usual indifference, and Elena thought about Sofia Conti’s amber eyes and the thing she’d stopped herself from saying, and she filed it alongside everything else in the careful, growing inventory of what she knew and didn’t know yet.

Behind them, forty floors up, she thought about Dante Romano standing in a hallway looking at closed elevator doors.

She thought about him standing there for a moment longer than he needed to.

She kept walking.