Chapter 3 - Isabella’s Version
Isabella came to him after midnight.
No silk blouse.
No carefully chosen earrings.
She wore a gray sweater and held the gold necklace with the letter I clenched in her palm.
“I took the impression,” she said.
Dante remained seated.
She had expected surprise.
His silence unsettled her more.
“I didn’t steal the seal.”
“You entered my drawer.”
“Yes.”
“Without permission.”
“Yes.”
“And now you want the distinction to matter.”
She looked away.
“It matters to what happened.”
Dante indicated the chair across from him.
“Then explain.”
Before she began, he called Simone.
Isabella stared.
“You can’t be serious.”
“I’ve been serious since someone followed a three-year-old to her aunt’s building.”
“I didn’t send anyone.”
“Then say that to someone who can record it accurately.”
Simone advised that Isabella should have her own attorney.
The conversation stopped until morning.
Dante spent the remaining hours in the rose garden beneath a cold sky.
His mother’s yellow rosebush had been pruned for winter.
The bare branches looked fragile.
He remembered Marco at thirteen, bleeding from a thorn and insisting he had not cried.
He remembered Victor wrapping the boy’s hand.
There were memories that became almost unbearable when doubt entered them.
The next day, Isabella returned with a lawyer.
Her explanation was ugly.
It was also incomplete.
Her father’s businesses had accumulated debts through failed developments and private loans. The marriage alliance promised relief, but Dante had refused to combine assets before the wedding.
Victor offered another solution.
The warehouse would pass to a Costa company under a supposedly routine trust restructuring.
Later, after the marriage, the transfer could be described as part of a wider family arrangement.
“No one was supposed to lose anything,” Isabella said.
Simone looked up.
“The trust would lose a property.”
“It would receive shares.”
“In a company carrying substantial debt.”
Isabella lowered her eyes.
“My father said the refinancing would fix that.”
“And the false signatures?”
“Victor said the paperwork had already been agreed.”
Dante studied her.
“You knew I hadn’t agreed.”
She swallowed.
“Yes.”
There was the first answer he believed without qualification.
“Why the seal?”
“Victor wanted the impression for the trustees’ packet. He said people expected to see it.”
A symbol.
A reassurance.
The familiar hawk persuading busy people not to ask another question.
“And Sophia?”
Isabella’s face tightened.
“She came in while I was putting it back.”
“What did you say to her?”
“To leave.”
“Anything else?”
“No.”
Dante waited.
Her lawyer glanced at her.
Isabella’s voice dropped.
“I told her that taking things that weren’t hers got people sent away.”
Dante felt anger rise so quickly that he had to place both hands flat on the desk.
“You frightened her.”
“I panicked.”
“She’s three.”
“I know.”
“No,” he said quietly. “You knew her age. You used her fear.”
Isabella began to cry.
For eleven months, he had mistaken her refusal to cry for strength.
Now he refused to mistake tears for innocence.
Simone asked about Victor’s role.
Isabella described meetings, calls, instructions to use a personal courier rather than the household office.
She supplied messages.
Some supported her account.
Others showed her suggesting ways to make the transfer appear ordinary.
She had not been merely obeying.
She had helped.
By the end of the meeting, her lawyer looked exhausted.
Dante stood.
“The engagement is over.”
Isabella’s face crumpled.
“Dante.”
“You can arrange the return of your property through counsel.”
“My father will see this as an insult.”
“Then tell him what you did.”
She stared at him.
“You know that isn’t how our families work.”
For years, that sentence had ended arguments.
Dante looked at the bronze hawk resting beneath a clear protective cover.
“Then something needs to change.”
After she left, Simone remained.
“Her account implicates Victor in attempted fraud. It doesn’t establish why he’s willing to risk so much.”
“The property is valuable.”
“Valuable enough to destroy an alliance he spent years building?”
Dante considered that.
Victor owned expensive things.
He also had access to money in amounts that made one warehouse almost ordinary.
“Find everything connected to the trust,” Dante said.
Simone opened another file.
“We already began.”
Inside was a list of historical payments.
Several went to companies that no longer existed.
The largest cluster dated from seven years earlier.
The month before Marco died.
Dante read the dates again.
May you like
Then he looked toward the portrait above the fireplace.
For the first time, his brother’s murder felt less like an old wound than a question someone in the house had been preventing him from asking.
