Lina considered not going.
She stood motionless in front of the bathroom mirror in the laboratory—the only private room they had offered her—and seriously considered asking the driver to take her home. Go back to her apartment, lock the door, and pretend none of it had happened.
But she knew it was already too late for that.
She washed her face, let down the tight bun she wore while working, and tried to smooth the wrinkles from her blouse with her hands. She hadn't brought clothes for dinner. She hadn't brought clothes for anything beyond restoring a diary and leaving.
*He said it wasn't mandatory.*
But the way he'd said it—that absolute calm, as if he knew she would come—turned the invitation into something else. It wasn't an order. It was a test.
And Lina Marchetti didn't run from tests.
Tomás appeared at exactly eight. He knocked twice on the laboratory door, two sharp taps, and waited. When Lina opened it, he studied her for half a second—taking in her loose hair, work blouse, and bare hands—and said nothing.
“I'm dressed to restore parchment, not attend a dinner,” Lina said before he could think anything of it.
“Mr. Monteverdi doesn't care about clothes.”
“And what does he care about?”
Tomás didn't answer. He simply started walking.
He led her down a hallway Lina hadn't seen before—wider than the others, with dark marble floors and wood-paneled walls. There were paintings here too, but they were different from the ones she'd seen at the entrance. These were older, more valuable. A Renaissance portrait that might have been a Bronzino. A landscape with the unmistakable light of Claude Lorrain.
*He doesn't collect art. He accumulates it. Like territory.*
Tomás stopped in front of a double oak door and opened it without knocking.
The dining room was smaller than Lina had expected. It wasn't a banquet hall—it was an intimate room, with a table set for six, low lighting, and an unlit fireplace. The windows looked out onto the garden, where the fading light still lingered among the trees.
Dante stood by the window with a glass in his hand. He had traded his linen shirt for a dark one, almost black, and the effect was of someone merging with the shadows around him. When he heard the door, he turned slowly.
He looked at Lina. At her loose hair. At her work blouse. And something passed through those dark eyes—too quickly to name, but present enough to feel.
“I thought you wouldn't come,” he said.
“I thought so too.”
He indicated the chair to his right. Not the opposite head of the table, not the other side. The chair beside him.
Lina sat. Not because he told her to, but because refusing that particular seat would have seemed cowardly.
The food was absurdly good.
Bruschetta with tomatoes that tasted like sunshine. Saffron risotto so creamy Lina wanted to close her eyes. Red wine that probably cost more than her rent.
They ate in silence for a few minutes. It wasn't an uncomfortable silence—it was the kind of silence that happens when two people are sizing each other up and neither wants to be the first to show their cards.
Dante ate slowly, with the same controlled precision he applied to everything. Lina noticed that he held his utensils in the classic European style—knife in his right hand, fork in his left, without switching them. A small detail that said a great deal about his upbringing.
“The diary,” Dante said at last, without raising his eyes from his plate. “How is the restoration coming?”
“Slowly. The damage is extensive. I'll need at least three weeks for the fused pages.”
“Three weeks.”
“If you want it done faster, you can hire someone less careful.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. It wasn't quite a smile, but it was the closest thing Lina had seen.
“I don't want it faster. I want it done right.”
“Then let me work at my own pace.”
He raised his wineglass and looked at her over the rim.
“Do you always talk to the people who pay your salary like that?”
“You said I'm not your employee. I'm your guest.”
“Touché.”
Another silence. Lina took a sip of wine and felt the warmth slide down her throat. She needed to keep a clear head, but she also needed to seem relaxed. It was a difficult balance.
“Can I ask you a question?” she said.
“You're going to ask it either way.”
“Why are you having dinner with me? You have a house full of people. Ferraris, Tomás, the guards. Why me?”
Dante set down his utensils. He wiped his mouth with his napkin. Then he looked at her with that complete attention that made Lina feel as though she were being read like one of the documents she restored.
“Because none of those people would have told me my restorers were dead in our first conversation.”
“That was reckless of me.”
“It was honest. And honesty is rare in this house.”
The sentence hung between them. Lina felt its weight—not as a confession, but as a door left ajar. A glimpse of something Dante Monteverdi probably showed no one.
She should have stayed silent. She should have accepted the moment and changed the subject.
She did neither.
“Pietro Conti,” she said. “You said he asked the wrong people questions. Which people?”
The air changed. Not dramatically—Dante didn't stiffen, clench his jaw, or make any of the gestures Lina expected. He simply stayed quiet for a moment longer than was natural.
“There are other families,” he said, choosing his words like someone choosing where to step in a minefield. “Families that also know the diary exists. That know there's something hidden inside it. Conti was approached by one of them. They tried to buy him. When he refused, they tried something else.”
“They killed him.”
It wasn't a question. Dante neither confirmed nor denied it. He only looked at her.
“And now those families know I'm here,” Lina said, feeling the cold creep up her spine.
“Not yet. But they will. It's only a matter of time.”
“And when they find out?”
Dante leaned forward. Only a few inches, but enough for Lina to feel his proximity as something physical.
“When they find out, Miss Marchetti, no one will touch you.”
“How can you guarantee that?”
“Because anyone who tries will have to get through me first.”
There was no bravado in his voice. No exaggeration. It was a statement of fact, delivered with the same casual certainty someone might use to say the sky was blue. And it was that very calm that made Lina believe him.
She didn't want to believe him. Believing meant trusting, and trusting meant depending, and dependence was the one thing Lina Marchetti refused to do.
But there, in that dining room with its low light and red wine and a man who spoke of death the way other people spoke of the weather, she felt something she hadn't felt in a long time.
She felt protected.
And that frightened her more than any threat.
Tomás took her back to the laboratory after dinner. Lina asked to stay another hour—she wanted to get ahead on the photographic documentation of the pages she'd separated during the day.
She worked in silence, but her mind was somewhere else.
*Other families. Other organizations. All after the diary.*
She looked at page seventeen, still untouched, protected between sheets of Japanese paper.
*The code. That's what they all want.*
Her phone vibrated. Sofia.
Lina answered with trembling hands.
“Lina, where have you been?” Sofia's voice was a mix of concern and irritation. “I looked into what you asked. Pietro Conti. And listen, I don't know what you're involved in, but I need you to hear me.”
“I'm listening.”
“Conti didn't die of a heart attack. I mean, officially, he did. But I spoke with a colleague who works in the forensic medicine department in Bologna. The family challenged the report. They requested a second autopsy. Do you know what happened?”
“What?”
“The body was cremated before the second autopsy could be performed. *Cremated*, Lina. Without the family's authorization.”
The laboratory seemed to shrink around her.
“Sofia, thank you. I'll call you tomorrow.”
“Lina, wait—”
She hung up. Leaning back in her chair, she stared at the ceiling.
*Cremated without authorization. Someone destroyed the evidence.*
Dante had said Conti was approached by another family. That they had tried to buy him. That when he refused, they tried *something else*.
But who had ordered the cremation? Who had that kind of power—the power to make a corpse disappear before the truth came to light?
Lina stood, put away her equipment, and turned off the laboratory light.
Tomás was waiting in the hallway to take her to the car.
“Tomás,” she said, stopping in front of him. “How many families know about the diary?”
He looked at her with that stony expression.
“That is a question for Mr. Monteverdi.”
“I'm asking you.”
Silence. Then, almost imperceptibly, something changed in Tomás's face. Not sympathy—something closer to respect.
“Three,” he said. “As far as we know.”
Three families. Three criminal organizations. All after what was hidden in that diary.
And Lina was the only living person capable of finding it.
She got into the car, and as the villa disappeared in the rearview mirror, she made a decision.
She wasn't going to run. She wasn't going to pretend she hadn't seen the code. And she wasn't going to blindly trust Dante Monteverdi, no matter how much those dark eyes and that promise of protection did something stupid to her heart.
She was going to decipher the diary. She was going to uncover the truth. And she was going to do it on her own terms.
*Even if it killed her.*