The dinners became routine.
There was no formal agreement, no conversation about it. On the fifth night, Lina simply appeared at the dining room door, and Dante had already had two places set. On the sixth, he waited for her. On the seventh, when she was ten minutes late because of an analysis she didn’t want to interrupt, she found him standing by the window, his glass untouched.
“I thought you weren’t coming,” he said without turning around.
“I thought you wouldn’t notice.”
Dante turned. There was something in his eyes that Lina still didn’t know how to name—something that appeared only in moments like these, when the house was quiet and the guards remained outside the door.
“I notice,” he said. That was all.
They sat down. Dinner was served in silence by a middle-aged woman Lina had never seen smile, but who always left an extra serving of dessert on her plate.
That night, Lina asked the question she had been holding on to for days.
“Who was your father?”
Dante stopped his fork halfway to his mouth. Not in surprise—with calculation. As if he were deciding which version of the truth to offer.
“A man who believed power was the only form of protection.”
“And you agree?”
“I used to.” He set down his fork. “When I took over the family, I was twenty-three. My father had been killed two days earlier. There was no public funeral—public funerals are invitations to ambushes. I buried my father on a Tuesday morning, with six people present, and by Wednesday I was already sitting in his chair, receiving men twice my age and half as patient as I was.”
Lina stayed silent. Not for lack of words, but because anything she said would seem too small.
“For the first two years, I slept with a gun under my pillow,” Dante continued, turning his glass. “Not because I was afraid. Because I needed everyone to know I wasn’t.”
“And now?”
“Now I sleep with the door locked and an armed man in the hallway. It’s progress.”
It wasn’t humor. It was the truth wrapped in irony so it would fit into a dinner conversation.
“I’m sorry,” Lina said. “About your father.”
Dante looked at her for a long moment.
“That was a long time ago.”
“That doesn’t mean it stopped hurting.”
He didn’t answer. But his silence said more than any words could have.
The next morning, Lina found Tomás waiting outside the lab.
“Ms. Marchetti. Mr. Monteverdi asked me to inform you about a situation.”
His tone was the same as always—courteous, neutral, impenetrable. But there was something different in his eyes. Something that looked like concern.
“What situation?”
“The Cavalli made contact. They sent an emissary last night. They want to negotiate access to the diary.”
“Negotiate how?”
“The way the Cavalli always negotiate. With a generous offer and an implicit threat.”
Lina crossed her arms.
“And what did Dante say?”
Tomás raised an eyebrow—the first visible reaction Lina had ever seen from him. She realized what she had done. She had called Monteverdi by his first name. In front of his right-hand man.
“Mr. Monteverdi,” she corrected, unable to stop her face from heating up, “refused?”
“Mr. Monteverdi refused the emissary before he finished his first sentence.” Tomás paused. “But the Cavalli aren’t known for accepting refusals.”
“What does that mean in practice?”
“It means security at the estate will be reinforced. And that you are not to leave the villa grounds until further notice.”
Lina felt the cage close another notch.
“Further notice from whom?”
“Mr. Monteverdi.”
“And if I disagree?”
Tomás looked at her with something that, on any other face, would have been a smile.
“You always disagree, Ms. Marchetti. But this time, I’d ask you to consider agreeing.”
Lina didn’t go looking for Dante. She went down to the lab and worked.
The grid cipher was almost complete. After six days of meticulous mapping, she had transferred every symbol from page seventeen onto graph paper. The grid had six columns and fourteen rows. Of the eighty-four cells, thirty-one were filled and fifty-three were empty.
*The empty ones are the key. It isn’t what was written—it’s what was left blank.*
Lina reversed the logic. Instead of reading the symbols, she read the spaces. She superimposed the grid over the text on the previous page—page sixteen—and the empty cells acted as a reading mask, revealing specific letters from the original text.
The first words appeared.
*Sotto la chiesa di...*
Under the church of...
Lina’s heart raced. She took page fifteen and applied the same mask. More letters. More words.
*...San Vittore, nella cripta che...*
Under the church of San Vittore, in the crypt that...
It was working. The modified Cardano cipher used the previous pages as its base text, and the grid on page seventeen as a reading mask. Each page revealed a different fragment of the complete message.
Lina needed to apply the grid to every page of the diary. It would take hours of work. Maybe days.
But the message was there. Waiting for centuries to be read.
She was so absorbed in the discovery that she barely registered the sound. A sharp crack in the distance, coming from somewhere above. Then another. And another.
Gunshots.
Lina froze. The pencil fell from her hand and rolled across the table. The silence that followed was worse than the shots—a vacuum where anything could happen.
Rapid footsteps on the floor above. Muffled voices. The metallic sound of weapons being cocked.
The lab door flew open. It wasn’t Tomás.
It was Dante.
He was different from any version of himself Lina had ever seen. His face was a mask of absolute control, but his eyes—his eyes were burning. There was blood on the right sleeve of his shirt. It didn’t appear to be his.
“Come with me. Now.”
It wasn’t a request. It wasn’t a preference. It was the voice of a man who commanded an entire organization, and in that moment, all that authority was concentrated in a single order.
Lina didn’t argue. She grabbed her notebook, shoved it inside her blouse, and went with him.
Dante led her down a corridor she didn’t know—a narrow passage with no windows, its rough stone walls smelling of damp and age. A route that appeared on none of the house plans. A passage that existed for moments exactly like this.
“What happened?” Lina asked, nearly running to keep up with him.
“The Cavalli sent a message.”
“What kind of message?”
“The kind that comes with bullets.”
He stopped in front of a steel door. He entered a code. The door opened onto a small windowless room with a couch, water, a landline phone, and nothing else.
“Stay here. Don’t open the door for anyone except me or Tomás.”
“Dante.”
He stopped. Maybe because of his name. Maybe because of her tone.
“Are you hurt?”
He looked at the bloodstained sleeve as if he were only noticing it now.
“Not mine.”
“Whose is it?”
A pause. Brief, but heavy.
“Someone who tried to get into the lab before I did.”
The implication hit Lina like a punch. Someone had tried to reach her. And Dante had stopped them. Personally.
“I’ll be back soon,” he said. Then he closed the door.
Lina was alone in the room’s armored silence. She sat on the couch. Clutched the notebook to her chest.
*Sotto la chiesa di San Vittore, nella cripta che...*
The diary’s message pulsed through her mind like a second heart. Centuries of secrets, and she was days away from revealing it all.
But in that moment, with the echo of the gunshots still vibrating through the walls, she could think of only one thing.
*Not mine.*
The blood wasn’t his. But it could have been.
And for the first time since arriving at that villa, Lina Marchetti felt afraid. Not of dying.
Of losing him.