The Rossi vow

Episode11

What We Both Knew

Camille

Damian read the photograph and the note on the back of it three times before he said anything at all, and I watched something move behind his eyes that I recognized, because I'd felt it myself an hour earlier, standing in the study with my father's handwriting burning against my wrist. The specific, sickening vertigo of a floor you thought was solid turning out to be paper.

"V.R.," he said finally, quiet. "Vincent Rossi."

"That's what I thought too."

"The numbers don't match what he told the board." He read it again, like repetition might change the words. "My father sat on the board of three different holding companies with Vincent in the years before he died. If Manny found a discrepancy—"

"Then your father would have needed to know about it. Which means your uncle needed your father to either not find out, or not be able to do anything if he did." I watched the sentence land on him, watched him go very still in the particular way I was starting to recognize as the space right before Damian Rossi let himself feel something. "Damian. Your father's death. Was it ever actually investigated?"

"Heart attack," he said, and the words came out flat, rehearsed, like something he'd said so many times it had worn a groove in him. "Sixty-one years old, under constant stress, no history of drug use, no signs of foul play. Nobody questioned it. Why would they? He was the head of a family everyone already assumed would kill him with stress eventually."

"But you're questioning it now."

He didn't answer right away, and when he did, his voice had lost some of its careful control. "I asked Marco to pull the records this morning. Before you showed me this. I've been sitting with the same ugly feeling you have, Camille, for exactly as long as you have, and neither of us said a word to the other because we were both too afraid of what saying it out loud would make real."

Something in my chest loosened, just slightly, at the confirmation that I hadn't been carrying this alone after all — that somewhere in this enormous house, behind his own careful silences, he'd been circling the same dark center I had. "So what do we do?"

"We don't confront him." His voice sharpened into something closer to the Don I'd first met in my bakery, cold and strategic and utterly certain. "Not yet. Not until we know exactly what he's capable of and exactly who else might be involved. If he finds out we're looking, he'll bury it — or bury us. I need Marco to keep pulling threads quietly. And you—" He hesitated, and I watched him choose his next words with unusual care. "You need to stop investigating alone. Whatever you find, you bring to me first. Not because I don't trust you. Because I can't lose you to whatever he's willing to do to protect this."

It should have felt like a cage. It felt, instead, like the first time in three years someone had offered to help carry something instead of just watching me struggle under the weight of it, and I hated how much that undid me.

"There's one more thing," I said, because I'd been putting it off, dreading it, since I found it folded into the back of the same envelope. "There's a name on one of my father's later notes. Not Vincent's. Someone else's."

I handed him the second slip of paper — a scrap I'd almost missed, tucked behind the photograph, my father's handwriting even more hurried than the rest, like he'd written it fast and hidden it faster. Confirm with T.R. before going further. He knows more than he lets on.

Damian went very still, the particular stillness of a man recalculating everything he thought he understood about the people closest to him. "T.R.," he said slowly.

"Do you know who that is?"

He looked up at me, and for the first time since I'd met him, I watched real fear cross Damian Rossi's face — not for himself, I understood immediately, but for someone else entirely.

"Teddy Russo," he said. "He's been with this family since before I could drive. He's been in this house, around you, around Bella, every single day since our wedding."

The floor tilted again, the same sick lurch I'd felt in the bakery three weeks ago reading a folder that changed my life. I thought of Teddy's easy smile, his coffee orders memorized, his hand steady on the wheel every time he drove my sister to the train station and back — and I thought, too, of the flicker I'd caught in his face in the study that afternoon, gone so fast I'd told myself I imagined it.

"He caught me," I whispered. "In the study. This afternoon, right after I found the envelope. He said he was just dropping off mail."

Damian was already moving, already reaching for his phone, his face gone entirely to ice. "Did he see what you were holding?"

"I don't know. I don't think so. I hid it fast, but—"

"But you don't know for certain." He was dialing before he finished the sentence, jaw tight, and I heard, in the careful, controlled fury of his voice as Marco picked up, exactly how dangerous the next few days were about to become. "Marco. Pull everything we have on Teddy Russo. Financials, phone records, everything. Tonight. And get someone on Camille and Bella both, quietly, starting now."

He hung up and looked at me, and for a moment neither of us said anything at all, the enormity of what we'd just uncovered sitting heavy and unspoken between us.

"We're going to need to be very careful," he said finally, "about who we trust in this house from this moment forward."

I thought about Teddy's warm, easy smile, the coffee made exactly the way Bella liked it, the humming off-key in the car, and felt something cold and certain settle into my stomach — the understanding that the most dangerous person in this house might be the one who'd been trying hardest, all

along, to seem harmless.