CHAPTER TWO

Alessia escorts the last of the guests outside and into the lot. The night was finally over and she couldn’t wait to go to bed. After bidding everyone farewell, she returns to the house and bolts the doors shut behind her. The air inside was still, pressed flat by time. Every surface wore a thin film of silence, the high ceilings held onto the last breath spoken here, like even sound had been asked not to return. Clocks ticked steadily in distant rooms, as if no one had told them her father was gone. Their hands moved =, dutiful and precise, marking minutes that meant nothing anymore. Photographs lined the walls in perfect arrangements, but every frame had been turned face down, like the house was ashamed of remembering. Even in stillness, it guarded its secrets. Smiles hidden. Eyes erased. The mirrors were worse. Removed from walls, draped in black cloth, or shifted to face corners instead of people. As if the house itself couldn’t bear to reflect what had happened inside it. Alessia passed one in the hallway — covered with thick velvet, as if mourning required blindness. She didn’t touch it. The furniture remained immaculate. Leather worn but polished. Books shelved in alphabetical order, spines uncracked. A crystal ashtray still held a stubbed-out cigarette, the filter yellowed with age. Nothing had been cleaned, but nothing had decayed. It was as if time had been locked in with the body — and refused to leave. She stepped into the study. The desk remained closed, the chair pushed in. A glass of scotch stood on a tray beside it, half full, its surface unbroken. No dust. No fingerprints. Just stillness, dignified and chilling. This wasn’t a house grieving. It was a house holding its breath — like it knew she was coming, and wasn’t sure whose side she was on.

She wanders around the house till she reaches the balcony. The night sky held no stars and the moon had gone into hiding. The balcony smelt of petrichor and held nothing but what looks like a pianoforte covered with a black cloth. She drags the cloth off to see the black and white beauty beneath.

“I won’t hurt to play something,” She helped herself onto the velvet-cushioned stool, her movements quiet, almost reverent. The old grand piano greeted her like an old friend, its surface cold under her fingers. She settled her hands on the keys and inhaled — just once — before beginning.

Con te partirò.

The first notes slipped into the air like silk, rising and circling above her head before falling into the corners of the room. Her fingers moved with ease, familiarity wrapped around muscle memory. She nodded slightly, half-smiling at the precision still hidden in her hands. She hadn’t played in years — but the song remembered her.

Until it didn’t.

A low note cracked mid-chord — a sour, broken sound that stopped her short.

She frowned, struck it again.

Worse. Hollow. Metallic. Wrong.

Alessia stared down, then slowly stood. She raised the lid, expecting to see nothing more than a misaligned hammer or swollen string. But something else caught her eye. Just beneath the discolored felt , wedged between the frame and the inner casing, something was out of place. A piece of paper, yellowed and folded into the shape of a square no larger than a cigarette carton. She slipped her fingers in carefully, heart quiet but sharp. Out came a journal page, brittle and ink-stained. Folded inside it: a tarnished brass key and an old, grainy photograph. The image showed three figures: a man with a sharp, unsmiling face, standing beside a woman whose face had been scratched out with something sharp and angry. The gouges ran deep, almost tearing through the print. Alessia’s eyes dropped to the third figure.

A child. Small.

She ran a finger along the edge of the photo. Whoever had done this hadn’t been careless. They had been cruel. Next, the brass key, small, ornate, a little rusted around the teeth. Not for a door. A drawer? A box? Her hand moved to the paper last. The folded sheet crackled as she opened it, revealing the edge of a journal page torn clean from its binding. The handwriting was jagged and deliberate, written in black ink that had slightly bled with time. She read the first line aloud, the words curling off her tongue like smoke.

“She wasn’t supposed to live.”

Alessia stared at the words. For a moment, the room felt colder. The lights didn’t flicker, but the shadows seemed to breathe. She looked back at the photo.

Who was the “she”?

Who wrote this?

And why had it been hidden — not burned, not thrown away — but placed inside the one thing that still made her feel alive?

The piano sat silent now, as if it too had said too much. Alessia folded the note slowly, set it beside the photo, and picked up the key again.

There were answers in this house.

She had just turned the first one.

She arrived at the lawyer’s office without calling ahead. The receptionist didn’t ask questions. One look at her, dressed in black still, with gloves she hadn’t removed and a face that didn’t invite conversation, and the door to Signor Vallenti’s office was opened at once. The office was high above the city, glass on one side, walls of books on the other. Everything about it was clean, understated, professional. The kind of space designed to comfort old money and quiet shame. Vallenti rose as she entered. He was in his late sixties, with a face carved by years of discretion and neutrality. He gestured for her to sit, but Alessia remained standing.

“I want to see the will,” she said. No greeting. No condolences. She’d heard enough of those.

The lawyer didn’t flinch. He moved slowly, almost ritualistically, pulling a thick folder from his desk drawer. The Moretti family crest was pressed into the leather cover.

“I thought you might come,” he said, placing it in front of her. She sat at last, sliding the folder open.

The first page was what she expected: formal language, all sharp lines and polite detachment. Her father’s last will and testament. Assets, holdings, real estate, shares. Every item categorized and divided with clinical precision. There was no sentiment — no notes, no letters, no final thoughts. Just transactions. It felt less like a goodbye and more like a business closure.

“He left nothing personal,” she murmured, more to herself than him.

Vallenti cleared his throat. “Your father was… methodical.”

Alessia looked up at him. “You mean cold.” He didn’t answer.

She flipped further — line items, legal clauses, property inventories. Everything accounted for. Every corner of her life measured in numbers. Until she reached the final page. A blank sheet, save for a single line handwritten at the bottom in black ink — not typed, not notarized. Just a scrawl in her father’s distinctive, angular hand.

“Addendum sealed. Not to be opened unless Giuliana De Luca is compromised.” Alessia stilled.

“Where is it?” she asked quietly.

Vallenti opened his drawer again and produced a heavy envelope. Cream-colored, thick, sealed with deep red wax stamped with her father’s ring — the old Moretti ‘M’, barely visible beneath the hardened seal. He didn’t hand it to her.

“Your father was explicit,” he said, voice lower now. “The contents are not to be disclosed unless… circumstances meet the condition.” Alessia’s eyes didn’t leave the envelope.

“What condition?”

“His wording was intentionally vague.” Vallenti hesitated, then read from a separate slip of paper. “‘To be opened only in the event of Giuliana De Luca’s death, disappearance, or proven betrayal of my estate or bloodline.’” The words hit colder than she expected.

“Betrayal of his bloodline,” she repeated. “He made her sound like a threat.” Vallenti’s silence said enough. Alessia leaned back, crossing one leg over the other. The glove on her right hand creaked softly.

“And if she never dies? Never disappears? Never betrays?”

“Then this addendum dies with her.”

Alessia stared at the envelope. Her father’s seal looked like it had been pressed hard, as though he had something to prove — or something to hide.

“What’s in it?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Vallenti said honestly. “I was never given access. He delivered it himself and made it clear that any premature violation would forfeit the Moretti legal trust.”

Of course he did. Even in death, Dario Moretti was still orchestrating things, dangling answers just out of reach. She stood.

“If something happens to Giuliana,” she said, voice like stone, “you call me before you call anyone else. Do you understand?”

Vallenti nodded. “Of course.”

She didn’t wait for him to walk her out. She left the lawyer’s office without speaking to anyone. No elevator small talk. No backward glance. The streets of Florence were slick again with rain, the kind that didn’t fall, just hovered in the air like a held breath. Her heels echoed softly against the stone as she walked, but her mind was already drifting elsewhere. It wasn’t the envelope that haunted her, not yet. It was the name in the clause.

Giuliana De Luca.

Again. Always.

The woman who had filled the rooms her mother used to walk in. The woman who smiled too often, and never at the right time. The woman her father never defended, never dismissed — simply tolerated, like a shadow he had decided not to chase away. The memory came uninvited.

She was eight. Maybe nine. The house had been quieter than usual that day. Curtains drawn. Staff whispering. A silver crucifix placed on the table beside a single candle, flickering in the stillness. She remembered pressing her face to the staircase railings, watching the grown-ups walk in black.

Her mother was gone, they had told her.

An accident. Sudden. Nothing to be done.

But it wasn’t the silence of grief that unsettled her, it was her father’s eyes. Dry. Focused. He hadn’t held her. Hadn’t spoken, not even to the priest. Just nodded when spoken to, one hand in his coat pocket, the other holding a glass of something amber. She hadn’t cried then either. Not because she wasn’t sad. But because grief, in that house, had no mirror. Later that night, she crept into his study. Found him where he always was — by the fire, alone. Not crying. Not even looking at the flames.

Just… waiting.

Like someone expecting a knock that never came. When he saw her, he didn’t say a word. Just poured himself another drink and gestured for her to go back to bed. She did. She never asked where they buried her mother. He never offered to tell her.

Now, walking alone through Florence, Alessia let the memory go. But its weight stayed with her, tucked in beside the envelope and the name Giuliana De Luca, growing heavier with every step.