Lina waited for Dante to return.
Not in the laboratory, where she could hide behind her work. Not in the bedroom, where she could pretend to be asleep. She waited in the dining room, sitting in the chair that had become hers without anyone deciding it should, with the folder open on the table and the documents spread out like pieces of a puzzle she didn't want to put together.
Each page was a stab wound.
Gianluca Marchetti, external consultant, 1989. Gianluca Marchetti, present at the meeting on March 12, 1991. Gianluca Marchetti, last recorded entry: November 1994. After that—nothing. As if her father had simply ceased to exist.
Lina had been seven when he disappeared. She remembered the smell of coffee and pen ink. She remembered his large hand holding hers on the sidewalk. She remembered her mother crying on the phone, weeks later, months later, years later, always repeating the same phrase: *no one knows anything.*
And now, thirty years later, sitting in the house of a man who led the same family her father had worked for, Lina knew that someone had always known.
Dante arrived at eleven that night.
Lina heard his footsteps in the hallway—she recognized their rhythm now, which was disturbing in itself—and straightened in her chair. When he appeared in the dining-room doorway, he stopped.
He looked at her. At the documents. Then back at her.
“You read it,” he said flatly.
“I did.”
Dante walked in slowly. He didn't sit down. He remained standing on the other side of the table, as if he knew the distance was necessary.
“Lina...”
“No.” Her voice came out sharper than she'd intended. Or maybe exactly as she'd intended. “You don't get to start with my name in that tone, as if it will soften anything. You knew. From the beginning. You knew who I was before you hired me.”
“Yes.”
His honesty was so direct that it disarmed her for a second. She'd expected evasions, half-truths, the kind of calculated answer Ferraris would have given. Not that clean, undefended yes.
“So all of this”—Lina gestured around them, encompassing the room, the villa, the dinners, the late-night conversations—“what was it? Guilt? You brought me here because you feel guilty about what your family did to my father?”
“I brought you here because I needed someone capable of reading the diary.”
“And you just happened to choose the daughter of the man your family made disappear?”
“It wasn't an accident.” Dante placed his hands on the table. “Conti recommended you. When I saw your last name, yes, I knew. And yes, I could have chosen someone else. I didn't.”
“Why?”
“Because you deserved to know what happened to him.”
Lina stood. The chair scraped across the marble floor, a sound that cut through the silence.
“Then tell me. Now. What happened to my father?”
Dante looked her in the eyes. Lina saw something she'd never seen in him before—not exhaustion, not calculation, not control. Pain.
“Your father discovered the diary before anyone else. He understood what was hidden in its pages and wanted to destroy everything—the diary, the records, the evidence. He believed that secret would only bring death.”
“And your family wouldn't let him.”
“My father wouldn't let him.” The distinction mattered. Lina realized that. “The old Monteverdi considered it a betrayal. Gianluca knew too much and wanted to eliminate the family's most valuable asset.”
“So they killed him.”
“I don't know.”
“You don't know, or you don't want to say?”
“I don't know.” Dante walked around the table. One step. Two. He stopped less than a yard from her. “My father died six months after yours disappeared. It took me years to put the pieces together. When I took over the family, the men who knew the truth were already dead or had disappeared too. Everything I found is in that folder.”
Lina looked at the documents. At him. Then back at the documents.
“You expect me to believe that?”
“I expect you to know me well enough to tell when I'm lying.”
The silence between them was so dense Lina could almost touch it. Every breath seemed to take up too much space.
“I trusted you,” she said, and her voice finally cracked. Not from anger. From something worse. “I trusted you, Dante. I had dinner with you. I told you things I don't tell anyone. And all this time, you knew who my father was and you didn't tell me.”
“If I'd told you on the first day, would you have stayed?”
“No.”
“And you would have died. Like Conti.”
The words hit her like a slap. Because they were true. Because he was right. And because being right didn't erase the betrayal.
“You had no right to decide that for me.”
“No. I didn't.” Dante lowered his voice. “But I would do it again.”
Lina felt the tears before she realized she was crying. No sobs—just heat in her eyes and a warm trail running down her face. She hated crying. She hated crying in front of him even more.
She turned her face away. Dante raised his hand—slowly, like someone approaching something that might break—and touched her chin. Gentle. Firm. He brought her face back to his.
“Don't hide this from me,” he said, almost in a whisper. “You're the only real person in this house. Don't take that away from me.”
Lina looked at him through her tears. She saw the man who commanded an entire family with a single word. She saw the twenty-three-year-old boy who slept with a gun beneath his pillow. She saw someone who had never asked anything of anyone—and who was asking now.
She didn't think. She didn't calculate. She didn't weigh the consequences.
She closed the distance between them and kissed him.
The kiss tasted of salt and anger and something neither of them knew how to name. Dante's hand found her waist as if it already knew the way. Lina's hand grabbed the collar of his shirt as if she needed an anchor. The kiss wasn't gentle. It wasn't calculated. It was honest—the most honest thing that had happened between them since the first day.
When they pulled apart, they were both breathing hard. His forehead rested against hers. His eyes were closed.
“This complicates everything,” Lina murmured.
“It was already complicated.”
“I'm still angry with you.”
“I know.”
“And I still want answers.”
“I know that too.”
Lina opened her eyes. Dante opened his. They were so close she could see every detail—the dark line of his irises, the shadows beneath his eyes, the thin scar through his left eyebrow that she'd never noticed before.
“If I find out you lied about my father,” she said, her voice firm despite everything, “I'm leaving. And no army will stop me.”
“If I lie about your father, I'll open the door myself.”
She released the collar of his shirt. She smoothed the fabric with her fingers, an absurdly domestic gesture in the middle of all this.
“Good night, Dante.”
“Good night, Lina.”
She left the dining room without looking back. She climbed the stairs. Entered the bedroom. Locked the door.
She leaned against it—exactly as she had the night before, in exactly the same position—and touched her fingers to her lips.
She could still taste him. Coffee and something bitter, like dark chocolate. She could still feel the warmth of his hand on her waist, the pressure of his fingers, the way he'd held her without restraining her.
*This complicates everything*, she'd said.
But the truth—the truth Lina Marchetti wouldn't admit even under torture—was that things had already been complicated since the first night he'd appeared at the laboratory at two in the morning, with no professional reason, just to see if she was all right.
In the empty dining room, Dante Monteverdi stood still for a long time.
Then he sat in her chair. It was still warm.
He looked at the documents scattered across the table. At the name *Marchetti* repeated on every page. At the story of a man who had tried to do the right thing and disappeared because of it.
He touched his lips. Once.
Then he picked up the phone and called Tomás.
“I want everything about November 1994. Every person who was on the property, every driver, every guard. Everything.”
“Sir, those files were destroyed by your father.”
“My father destroyed the ones he knew about. Look for the ones he didn't.”
He hung up. He stared at the empty chair on the other side of the table—the chair opposite his, where Lina never sat, because from the very first dinner, she had always chosen the seat beside him, never across from him.
Beside him. Not against him.
Dante Monteverdi had spent his entire life surrounded by people who sat across from him—opponents, allies, subordinates, all measuring distance, calculating angles. No one sat beside him.
Until her.
And now he had to uncover the truth about her father before the truth destroyed them. Because for the first time in his life, Dante Monteverdi had something he couldn't afford to lose.