CHAPTER FOUR

Dinner was quiet. Giuliana insisted the dining room be used. She said it was tradition. Said Dario wouldn’t have liked them eating in separate corners of the house. Alessia didn’t argue. She wanted to see what Giuliana would do when given a table and a stage. The staff served wine, sea bass, and conversation in small portions.

Giuliana dabbed at her mouth with a linen napkin before speaking. “You know,” she said, “toward the end, Dario refused to eat anything that hadn’t been tasted first.”

Alessia didn’t look up. “Was he poisoned?”

“No.” Giuliana’s smile was slow. “He thought he might be.”

A quiet clink as Alessia set her fork down.

“He kept the security team on shifts that made no sense,” Giuliana continued. “Watched the staff too closely. Hid documents in strange places. Once, he accused the housekeeper of spying. She was sixty-two and half-blind.”

“And you stayed?”

Giuliana sipped her wine. “I’ve lived through worse things than a man unraveling.”

“So you believe he was losing his mind.”

Giuliana met her gaze then. “I believe grief eats men like Dario from the inside. Slowly. Privately. You never saw him grieve, did you?”

“No,” Alessia said. “He didn’t.”

“Exactly.” She leaned back, calm and crisp. “But everything breaks eventually. Even stone.”

Alessia didn’t respond. But she filed it away — the phrasing, the precision, the timing. Giuliana wasn’t trying to share pain. She was trying to control the narrative and Alessia had just found the first crack.

Giuliana didn’t stay for dessert. She excused herself with a soft brush to Alessia’s shoulder and a comment about the wine being too dry. That was her way — knowing when to leave a conversation just before it turned real. Just before something broke. The staff cleared the table quietly. Alessia remained seated. Her fork untouched on the linen napkin, her wine warming between her fingers.

"Grief eats men like Dario from the inside."

The words stayed with her, trailing behind her footsteps as she moved through the house later that evening. They weren’t comforting. They felt placed. Intentional. Like a suggestion slipped into her mind under the guise of empathy. She walked the halls slowly, not looking for anything, but unable to sit still. The house felt too quiet, but not empty. As if it had grown ears in the walls, eyes in the cracks of the floorboards.

Giuliana’s voice echoed faintly in her head.

"You never saw him grieve, did you?"

No. She hadn’t. Dario Moretti didn’t grieve. He made decisions.

Alessia retreated to her bedroom long after the lights downstairs had gone out. She didn’t light the fireplace. The chill helped her think — or at least reminded her that she could. She undressed slowly. The black silk blouse slid from her shoulders like something being shed. She left it crumpled at the foot of the bed. Her hair smelled like jasmine and cigarette smoke. Giuliana’s perfume had lingered in the air longer than the conversation had. She lay down, eyes open to the ceiling. Listening. Always listening. Sleep came eventually. But it didn’t bring rest.

The dream came violent.

It began with breath — short, frantic. A woman panting, gasping. Then came the scream, ripped from deep inside the chest. It didn’t echo — it fractured. Followed by a gunshot, sharp and final. And then... the baby.

Wailing. Shrill. Lost.

The sound burrowed into her chest and pulled her up from sleep like a thread being yanked.

Alessia sat upright, drenched in sweat. Her breathing was uneven. Her fists had tangled themselves into the sheets. She forced them open, one finger at a time.

It wasn’t the fear that unsettled her.

It was the clarity.

The scream hadn’t felt like a stranger’s.

The baby hadn’t either.

She got up and walked to the mirror, touching her face as if looking for something the dream might’ve left behind. Nothing. Not on the surface. But the echo of that cry stayed with her, long after the house had gone silent again. She didn’t sleep again after the dream.

Alessia sat on the edge of the bed with her robe wrapped tightly around her, sleeves pushed up to the elbows. Morning came in slowly through half-open drapes. The sky outside was pale, the kind of colorless gray that gave nothing away. She ran cold water over her face in the bathroom sink. The reflection staring back at her looked unchanged, but something beneath her skin felt unsettled. She pressed her fingertips to her temples and tried to shake off the feeling. The scream still echoed behind her ears. That baby’s cry, too. By the time she stepped into the hallway, the house was awake. Not loud. Just aware. She passed the grand staircase, then turned into the north corridor — the older part of the villa, lined with dark wooden doors and portraits no one remembered hanging. She wasn’t sure what drew her to the far end of the hall. Something about the way the light pooled unevenly across the floor, how the dust swirled in that one corner like it hadn’t been disturbed in decades.

There was a door.

Heavy.

Iron handle. Different from the rest.

She tried it. Locked.

Her fingers lingered on the doorknob. It felt colder than it should have. She stepped back and looked up. The frame was thick with age with no brass nameplate, no signs of use and no smudges on the door. As if no one had touched it in years.

Downstairs, she asked one of the maids if the key to the room still existed. The girl hesitated, then replied quietly, “That room hasn’t been opened since before you were born, Signorina.”

Alessia returned alone. This time, with a ring of keys she found in her father’s study. She tried five before one turned stiffly in the lock. The click was reluctant, like the door itself had second thoughts. The hinges groaned when it opened. Inside, dust coated everything. There were no lights, just the soft spill of daylight from a half-shuttered window. The furniture was covered in white cloth. A large armoire stood in the corner, its edges ornate but worn. A cradle sat beside it.

She didn’t breathe.

The air was thick, frozen in time. There was something about the room that felt paused. Like it had been waiting for someone to press play again. She stepped inside slowly, her eyes adjusting. On the far wall, just above the headboard of a small iron bed, a name was etched faintly into the plaster. She moved closer, heart quiet but steady.

"Alba."

That was when she noticed the photograph on the vanity, partly hidden under a lace cloth. A woman with dark hair. Holding a child. But the face beside the woman had been scratched out, violently — the paper torn where the features should have been. Then something creaked behind her. She turned, but the doorway was empty.

Except… the door had closed itself.