MASSIMO
The house was too quiet.
At first I thought it was just the hour—late, the sky already bruising into night, the way the villa folded into shadow when business had kept me longer than I'd planned. My shoes still had dust on them from the road, my jacket smelled faintly of coffee and paper, and for a moment I let the usual aches of a long day slow me down.
Then the silence landed on me like a weight.
Something was wrong. It took the smallest breath to know exactly what, a hollow where there should be life.
Chiara.
Her presence had a shape to it. You could feel it in a room the way you feel a pulse under a wrist. The small, stubborn noise of her reading in the library, the soft, nervous padding of her feet when she thought she could move without being seen, the scent of her body
