Reina POV
The pasta is getting cold.
That is what I am thinking about when my world ends. Not something important. Not something worth remembering. I am thinking about cold pasta and whether it would be rude to reheat my plate while my father is still talking.
Lorenzo Moretti does not like to be interrupted.
He sits at the head of the table the way he always does back straight, wine glass in hand, voice filling the room without effort. He is telling Marco about a deal he closed this afternoon. Something about a shipping contract on the east side. Marco is nodding and smiling and cutting his steak, and I am half-listening the way I have learned to half-listen at these dinners enough to answer if someone asks me something, not enough to actually be present.
I am twenty-four years old and I have sat at this table for every important meal of my life. I know every scratch on the wood. I know the way the chandelier flickers slightly when the wind is strong outside. I know that my father will talk for another twenty minutes before he asks me how my week was, and I will give him a neat, acceptable answer, and he will nod and love me in his contained, armored way.
It is a Tuesday. It is completely normal.
I reach for my wine glass.
The windows explode.
The sound is enormous glass and wood and cold night air hitting everything at once. The chandelier swings. The lights die. I am on my feet before I understand what is happening, my chair scraping back, wine spilling across the white tablecloth in a dark red wave.
Men come through the smoke.
Four of them. Maybe five. Moving fast, dressed in black, faces covered. They know the layout of the room. They move like they have been here before, in their heads, a hundred times.
I freeze.
One second. One terrible, useless second where my brain cannot catch up with my body and I stand there like a child while the world falls apart.
Then my father's hand grabs my wrist.
His grip is iron. He does not look at me he is already scanning the room, already calculating but his hand finds mine like it has always known where I am. He shoves me hard toward the floor and I go down behind the table, hands hitting marble, and I hear him shout something to the guards and then I hear the first shot.
And then another.
And then my father makes a sound I have never heard him make before.
It is small. That is the worst part. Lorenzo Moretti is not a small man. He fills every room he walks into. But the sound he makes is very small, and something about that smallness tells me, before I even look, what it means.
I do not look.
I crawl.
My mother made my father promise, before she died, that he would always have a safe room. A place for me. He built it into this house before we moved in a door in the dining room wall, disguised as paneling, with a handle only visible if you know exactly where to press. He showed me when I was seven. He made me practice finding it in the dark until I could do it in ten seconds.
I find it in eight.
I press. The door gives. I fall inside. I pull it shut behind me.
The lock clicks.
Silence.
Not real silence I can still hear things through the thick walls. Movement. Voices. More shots, farther away now. But in here it is close and dark and small, and I press my back against the cold wall and pull my knees to my chest and breathe.
My hands are wet.
I look down, which I should not do, and I see that my father's blood is on my dress. On my hands. On the cuffs of my sleeves.
I close my eyes.
I stay in the dark for six hours.
When I come out, the house is full of people.
Moretti soldiers line the walls. Two men I recognize from my father's inner circle stand near the door, talking quietly. Someone has turned the lights back on. Someone has covered the broken windows with plastic sheeting that moves in the draft.
Someone has put a sheet over my father.
I know it is him from his shoes. Brown leather, perfectly polished. He polished them himself every Sunday morning. He said it kept him humble.
I stand in the doorway of the panic room and I do not move for a long moment. I feel like I am watching the room from very far away. Like I am at the bottom of deep water, looking up.
Then I make myself look around.
The guards. The advisors. Faces I have known my whole life, all of them wearing the same careful expression grief, shock, controlled panic. All of them looking at the sheet on the floor or at each other or at their phones.
I find Marco.
He is standing in the far corner of the room.
He is on the phone.
His suit is clean. Not a mark on it, which means he was not near the table when the windows broke. His hair is in place. His face is calm not the blankness of shock, not the tightness of a man holding grief together with both hands. Just calm.
Calm the way you are when something is happening that you already knew was going to happen.
He is not looking at our father's body on the floor.
He is not looking at me in the doorway, covered in blood, having spent six hours alone in the dark.
He is looking at his watch.
Like he is checking whether things are running on time.
My mind goes very quiet. The kind of quiet that comes just before something cold and permanent settles in.
I have spent my whole life reading people across dinner tables. My father taught me without meaning to watch the hands, watch the eyes, watch what people choose not to look at.
Marco chooses not to look at our father.
He chooses not to look at me.
He checks his watch one more time.
And then he looks up, and across the room our eyes meet, and for just one half of a second one tiny, unguarded half second his expression is not grief.
It is relief.
He covers it immediately. His face crumples. He lowers the phone. He walks toward me with his arms open and says, "Reina thank God, Reina "
I let him hug me.
I do not hug him back.
Over his shoulder, I look at the sheet on the floor. At my father's polished shoes pointing at the ceiling.
I will find out who did this, I tell him, silently.
I will find out everything.
Marco holds me tighter. His grip feels less like comfort and more like something else entirely. Like he is checking that I am real. Like my being alive is a problem he has not yet decided what to do with.