Giulia left the house at eight-thirty in the evening.
She told her mother she was going to a friend's. Annalisa watched her from the kitchen, hands in the sink, and said nothing. Maybe she believed her, maybe not. Giulia didn't stop to find out.
She got in the car and took the road toward Fiorano. Five minutes, maybe six. The fog hung low, crawling across the asphalt like a slow animal, and the headlights barely cut through the first few yards ahead of the hood. Fiorano at night was a town that shut down early. Houses with closed shutters, a few lights behind curtains, the bar on the corner of the piazza already half empty.
The industrial district lay past the town, beyond the roundabout, where the road widened and the houses gave way to warehouses. Giulia had driven through it a thousand times in daylight. At night it was a different world. The warehouses were dark shapes against a gray sky, the lots deserted, the company signs dark. Only a few sodium streetlights threw out an orange glow that illuminated nothing — it just made the shadows longer.
Warehouse 7.
She found it at the end of the road, the last building before a plowed field that disappeared into the fog. It was smaller than the others, with a rusted roll-up door and a number painted by hand on the wall. No sign, no name. A warehouse that belonged to no one, or that someone wanted to look that way.
Giulia cut the engine. She sat in the car with her hands on the wheel. Her heart was pounding — she could feel it in her ears, her neck, her fingers. She checked the clock on the dashboard. Eight fifty-two.
She could still leave. She could start the car, go home, tell her father everything, let him handle it. Renzo would know what to do. Renzo always knew what to do.
But Giulia didn't start the car.
She got out. The air was freezing, filling her lungs like broken glass. The silence of the industrial district was different from the silence of the town: it wasn't quiet, it was absence. No dogs, no voices, no television murmuring behind a window. Just the distant hum of an electrical transformer and the sound of her own breathing.
She walked toward the warehouse. The side door was ajar. A gray metal door, paint peeling off in strips. Giulia pushed it and it swung open with a creak that, in the silence, sounded like a scream.
Inside it was dark. A thick darkness with a smell to it: old oil, damp concrete, iron. Giulia pulled out her phone and turned on the flashlight. The beam cut through the space and revealed an empty warehouse. Stained concrete floor, corrugated metal walls, a few metal shelves along the sides holding nothing. At the far end, a desk. A chair. And on the desk, an envelope.
Giulia moved closer. Her footsteps echoed in the emptiness like drumbeats. The envelope was yellow paper, large format, nothing written on the outside. She picked it up. It was light, almost empty. Inside was a single sheet.
She pulled it out.
It was a photocopy. A page from a technical document, dense with diagrams, numbers, and formulas that meant nothing to her. In the upper left corner was a logo she recognized: the prancing horse. Ferrari. And next to it, written by hand in blue pen, a name.
Luca Ferretti.
Her hands trembled. Not from the cold.
She turned the page over. On the back, typed, were three lines.
*This is one page. Your father has the rest. Bring them to us. Same time, same place, Tuesday. Don't make the mistake of talking.*
Giulia read it again. Then once more. The words spun through her head like shrapnel.
Her father didn't have any documents. She was sure of it. Renzo had nothing to do with Luca's project, knew nothing about hydrogen engines, had never seen those formulas. Someone was making a mistake. Or someone was lying.
Or someone was using her to get to her father.
A sound.
Giulia spun around. It came from the far end of the warehouse, the side the phone's flashlight didn't reach. A metallic sound, brief — like something falling, or someone moving.
"Is someone there?" she said, and her voice came out thinner than she would have liked.
Silence.
Then another sound. Closer. A footstep, maybe. Or maybe the wind shifting something. But there was no wind inside the warehouse.
Giulia didn't wait for a third sound. She turned, crossed the warehouse almost at a run, pushed through the side door, reached the car. She started the engine with shaking hands, threw it into gear, and drove. In the rearview mirror she watched the warehouse shrink into the darkness and the fog, and for one instant — just one — she thought she saw a shape standing still in front of the door. A dark figure, motionless, watching her go.
Then the fog swallowed it.
She drove home without turning on the radio, barely breathing. She parked, sat in the car for a minute, two. She looked at her hands. She was still holding the yellow envelope.
She went inside. Annalisa was in the living room in front of the television, volume low. Renzo was in his study with the door closed.
"Everything okay?" her mother asked without turning around.
"Yeah. I'm going to bed."
She went upstairs. Locked her bedroom door. Sat on the bed and took the sheet out of the envelope.
The prancing horse. Luca's name. The incomprehensible formulas. And those three lines on the back that pinned her to an impossible choice.
Someone believed her father had the project documents. Someone was using her as a courier. And someone had been in that warehouse with her, hidden in the dark, watching.
Giulia turned off the light. She lay down on the bed fully dressed, the envelope tucked under her pillow.
Tuesday. She had five days.
And now she had to decide whether to keep lying to her father or tell him the truth and drag him into something that might be bigger than all of them.