The first week at the villa taught Lina three things.
First: the house had rhythms of its own. In the morning, it was as quiet as a convent—only the sound of the guards changing shifts and the aroma of coffee rising from the kitchen. In the afternoon, it came alive with phone calls, quick visits from men in suits who entered through the side door and left without a trace. At night, it fell silent again, but it was a different kind of silence—denser, as if the walls held too many secrets to sleep.
Second: Tomás was more than a right-hand man. He was a shadow. He always appeared whenever Lina approached an area of the house she wasn't supposed to know about, always with the same polite, unshakable phrase: *Mr. Monteverdi prefers that you use the east corridor.* Never a direct order. Always a preference. As if there were a difference.
Third: Dante Monteverdi ate dinner alone.
Every night, at exactly eight, the table was set in the dining room for one person. Lina knew because she passed through the hallway on her way to her room and saw, through the half-open door, the scene that repeated itself—him seated at the head of the table, a glass of red wine, a plate he barely touched, and the silence of someone who had long since grown used to eating alone.
On the fourth night, she stopped at the door.
“Do you always eat dinner alone?”
Dante looked up. He didn't seem surprised—but he didn't seem to have expected the question, either.
“Usually.”
“Usually by choice or because you don't have a choice?”
A pause. The corner of his mouth moved—it wasn't quite a smile, but it was the closest thing Lina had ever seen from him.
“Sit down, Ms. Marchetti.”
“Is that an invitation or an order?”
“If it were an order, I wouldn't have said ‘sit down.’ I would've said ‘sit down, please.’”
Lina almost laughed. Almost. She pulled out the chair and sat.
Dinner was different from the first one. Less formal, less tense. Or maybe the tension had simply changed shape—instead of two strangers sizing each other up, they were two people who already knew each other's limits and were testing what lay between them.
Dante asked about the diary. Lina told him about the pages she'd set aside, the iron gall ink that was deteriorating unevenly, and the marginal notes that seemed to have been made by different hands over the course of decades.
“At least three people wrote in this diary,” she said. “The primary handwriting is from the eighteenth century. But there are later additions. Someone added notes, corrected dates, and on page seventeen...”
She stopped.
Dante waited.
“On page seventeen, someone inserted a pattern that isn't text. It's a code. And whoever did it knew exactly what they were doing.”
“Can you decipher it?”
“Not yet. I need to understand the system before I try to break it. If I force the wrong interpretation, I could lose the key forever.”
Dante watched her for a moment. There was something in his eyes Lina couldn't classify—it wasn't impatience, and it wasn't pressure. It was something closer to... respect.
“Work at your own pace,” he said. “I'd rather have the right answer a month from now than the wrong one tomorrow.”
“Careful. If you keep talking like that, I'm going to think you trust me.”
“And what if I do?”
The question hung between them like smoke. Lina didn't answer. She took a sip of wine and changed the subject.
“Tell me about the families. The ones after the diary.”
Dante turned the glass between his fingers.
“There are three. The Ferraro family, in the north. The Cavalli family, in Rome. And the Benedetti family, in Sicily. Each believes the diary contains information about a fortune that belonged to the founder of the original alliance—a fortune amassed after the war and hidden before the authorities could track it down.”
“And does it?”
“Maybe. Or maybe the diary contains something more valuable than money.”
“What?”
“Names. Dates. Connections. The kind of information that can destroy reputations, bring down governments, and rewrite the history of entire families.”
Lina felt a shiver run down the back of her neck.
“Including yours?”
Dante didn't look away.
“Including mine.”
After dinner, Lina couldn't sleep.
She sat on the bed with her notebook in her lap, redrawing the patterns from page seventeen from memory. There was something there she could almost see—a hidden logic beneath layers of ink and time.
*It's not a simple cipher. It's positional. The location of each symbol matters just as much as the symbol itself.*
At two in the morning, she went down to the laboratory. The villa was in absolute silence—only the hallway light and the sound of her own footsteps on the marble.
The guard at the basement door recognized her and let her through without asking questions. Lina turned on the work lamp, put on her gloves, and opened the diary to page seventeen.
This time, instead of looking at the symbols, she looked at the space between them.
And she saw it.
The gaps weren't random. They formed a grid—six columns, with a variable number of rows. Each cell in the grid contained a symbol or was empty, and the empty cells created a pattern of their own.
*It's a grille cipher. Eighteenth century, probably based on Cardano. But modified. Whoever created it knew far more about cryptography than was common at the time.*
Lina photographed everything. She began mapping the grid on graph paper, transferring each symbol to its exact position. The work was painstaking—one wrong cell would invalidate the entire decryption.
She was so absorbed that she didn't hear the footsteps.
“Can't sleep?”
Dante's voice came from the doorway. He was leaning against the frame, without his jacket, his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows. It was the first time Lina had seen him without his formal armor, and the difference was unsettling. Without the suit, he looked younger. More human.
More dangerous.
“Could ask you the same,” Lina said without taking her eyes off the diary.
“I rarely sleep before three.”
“Guilty conscience?”
“Too much responsibility. Same difference.”
He entered the laboratory. He stopped beside the worktable but kept his distance from the diary—as if he knew that was her territory.
“Did you find something?”
“Maybe.” Lina pointed to the graph paper. “It's a grille cipher. Someone hid a message using a coordinate system within the text itself. I need to reconstruct the complete grid before I try to read it.”
Dante looked at the mapping. Then he looked at her.
“You're shaking.”
Lina looked down at her hands. He was right. It wasn't fear—it was adrenaline. The same feeling she got when a restoration revealed something no one had seen in centuries.
“It's excitement,” she said. “This is what I do. I find things time has hidden.”
“And what happens when you find them?”
“Depends on what it is.”
“And what if it's something you would've preferred not to find?”
The question wasn't about the diary. Lina knew it. He knew she knew.
“I've never stopped looking,” she said. “Even when I should have.”
Dante remained silent for a long moment. Then he nodded, as if she'd confirmed something he already suspected.
“Good night, Ms. Marchetti.”
“Good night, Mr. Monteverdi.”
He left. Lina kept staring at the door he'd disappeared through.
*He came to check on me. At two in the morning. For no professional reason at all.*
She returned to work. But this time, her hands weren't shaking anymore.
They were shaking for another reason.