Too late, she understood the saying had never been a saying. It was a schedule.
The front door opened.
The men bowed.
And walking in came Valerio Le Sabre, with Aislinn beside him, phone still in her hand.
Warm as ever, on that phone, thirty seconds ago. Warm like eleven years hadn't passed. And she'd been standing in the hallway the entire time.
Something in Stephanie snapped clean through. She went for her, no plan in it, nothing but eleven years of it finally off the leash, and got exactly one step before Valerio tipped his chin, the smallest nod in the world, and hands closed on her arms from both sides and hauled her clean off her feet.
"Why?" It tore out of her, ugly, at the woman standing there in her decent coat with her stricken face. "Why do you always have it so easy?"
Aislinn looked at her, and there was no triumph anywhere in it, which was the worst thing, the very worst thing, she'd come to watch Stephanie end and she'd brought sorrow to it.
"You know I never did?"
"I hate you." It came up her throat like blood. "I fucking hate you!"
Valerio tilted his head toward Aislinn, and when he spoke it was to her alone, in the tone of a man explaining gravity.
"You never complain like they do. That's what kills them—"
Stephanie started to laugh.
It came out of her from somewhere low and broken and it kept coming, rising, because she'd just seen it, the whole shape of it, the one card she was still holding in a room full of guns.
"I get it now." She was laughing so hard the men had to hold her up. "You still don't know. You still don't know, and that's why you're helping the bitch."
Valerio didn't ask. He simply looked at his men, done, bored, final.
"Get rid of her." Two words in Italian first, quiet and absolute, and only then the English, as though the sentence needed saying twice to be real.
The hands tightened. Her feet left their positions on her beautiful floor, and Stephanie kept laughing, high and wrong, laughing the way you laugh when the house is already on fire so why not, and she threw it at them as they dragged her, threw it across the whole lovely apartment her silence had bought.
"Her brother is Viktor Biancardi! He was hiding her from you!"
The room stopped.
"I don't have a brother," Aislinn said.
"Your brother killed his father!"
Chapter Fifteen
THE PACKERS WORE SUITS.
That was the detail Aislinn's mind kept snagging on, three days after the worst night of her new life, as a team of polite men in charcoal wool wrapped her son's chessboard in tissue paper like it was being prepared for a state funeral. Everything in the penthouse was being wrapped that way. Everything was leaving. They were leaving, for New York, tonight, on a plane that belonged to a man who had not been seen since a twelfth-floor apartment went silent around one sentence.
Your brother killed his father.
She'd stopped hearing Stephanie scream it, mostly. What she couldn't stop hearing was what came after, which was nothing. Valerio had not said one word. Not in the apartment, not in the car, not at their door, where he'd touched Louis's hair with a hand that wasn't quite his own and looked at her for a long, long moment like a man memorizing something, and by morning there had been coffee made, and a folded note that said only Minna will see to everything, and no Valerio anywhere in the world.
"The white king travels with us," Louis informed the packers, appearing with the hand-carved piece already in his fist. "He doesn't like tissue paper."
"Of course, young sir."
"Also my aunt is coming and she cheats at chess, so count the pieces after."
