Rain on the study windows. Enzo Vitali sits behind his father's desk and watches the numbers climb on a ledger page. Four hundred seventy thousand, give or take. Plus interest. Plus a blood debt, because two of his men are dead and it was Conti guns that fired first.
Carlo Conti comes to the gate to settle. He brings his daughter.
*"My daughter. Giulia."*
Marco laughs at it from the fireplace, the way a brother laughs when he wants a room to hear him. Carlo keeps selling: the Conti name has weight, she kept his books for two years after her mother died, she can read and write contracts.
*"She's standing right here,"* Giulia says.
*"I'm not a horse to be traded." "No. You're a debt to be paid."*
So she takes a room in the east wing. She does not cry, she does not argue the terms, and she does not need showing the way, because her father had the blueprints of this house drawn up once, back when he was planning to rob it.
What Enzo does not know is what Giulia had in her coat pocket when she got out of the car. Or that she has a younger brother, Matteo, in a dormitory in New Brunswick, who is the entire reason she is standing in this study at all.
What Giulia does not know is how much of the house is already rotten. Marco's phone keeps buzzing and he never reads the message out loud. Donata knows things before they happen and will not say how she learned them. The Martelli family is circling the compound. And Enzo's father was found dead in this same study with the Martelli sigil cut into his chest.
There is also a loose panel in a guest room wall, and behind it a heating duct about eighteen inches square, cold air spilling out of it like a breath.
A dark mafia romance about a woman handed over as a payment, who spends her first night in the house working out what she can carry out of it. The romance is closed-door.
