Reina POV
The house smelled like flowers and lies.
Every surface had bouquets on it. White lilies, white roses, white everything like someone had ordered a hundred arrangements the moment her father hit the floor. Reina walked through room after room of them and thought: who called the florist? Who had time to think about flowers?
She already knew the answer. She just was not ready to say it out loud.
The Moretti house had been full of people since six this morning. Soldiers standing at every door. Advisors in the dining room with their jackets on and their voices low. Family allies filing in one after another to press her hand and look at her with sad eyes and say the same four sentences in different orders. He was a great man. The family will survive this. You have our full support. Stay strong.
Reina said thank you to every single one. She kept her face calm and her back straight and her eyes dry. She had learned this at age nine how to stand inside a room full of people and feel nothing on the outside. Her father taught her. The face you show the room is a tool, Reina. It is not the same as the face inside your chest. Keep those two things separate and no one can touch you.
She kept them separate now. Outside: composed, gracious, the perfect grieving daughter. Inside: watching. Counting. Filing everything away.
And what she was watching most was Marco.
Her brother had been up before dawn. She knew because she had not slept she had sat in her room in the same clothes she wore when her father died and stared at the wall until gray light came through the curtains and she heard Marco moving through the house at four in the morning. Confident steps. No hesitation. Like a man who knew exactly where he was going and why.
By seven he was running the room.
He knew which advisor to put in which chair. He knew which allies to call personally and which ones to handle through a intermediary. He knew where the family's emergency financial accounts were accounts Reina had never been shown, accounts she did not even know existed until she heard Marco reference them casually to the family lawyer.
He had answers for everything. His father died last night and Marco Moretti had answers for everything.
Reina watched him from across the room and felt something cold and heavy settle in her stomach. Grief, yes. But something else underneath it. Something that tasted like the moment before you understand something terrible.
She kept her face calm. She said thank you to more people. She waited.
At nine o'clock she slipped away to her father's study.
She told herself she needed his private phone. His contacts. There were people who would need to be reached, people her father communicated with outside the official channels, and someone had to handle it. That was the reason she gave herself.
The truth was she needed five minutes inside the one room in the house that still felt like him. Dark wood desk. Books he actually read, spines cracked and pages bent. The photograph of her mother on the corner of the desk that he never moved in twenty years, not even to dust behind it.
She stood in the middle of the room and breathed for a moment. Then she got to work.
His phone was in the top right drawer, where it always was. She found it immediately. She scrolled through the contacts, noted the names she did not recognize, and set it aside.
Then she sat in his chair and opened the other drawers. Looking for his paper files. Looking for anything that would help her understand the last few weeks of his life whether he had been worried, whether he had seen anything coming.
The third drawer had the files she expected. She flipped through them. Nothing unusual.
She almost missed it.
Almost.
A tiny gap at the back of the drawer. A place where the wood sat slightly wrong, a sliver of space that should not exist. She would not have noticed it except that she caught her nail on the edge and the panel shifted.
Behind it: a phone.
Cheap. The kind you buy with cash and throw away. The back was scuffed like it had been handled often. She turned it on with hands that were completely steady she made them be steady and waited for it to load.
One saved number. No name. Just digits.
Three messages sent in the last two weeks. She tapped the thread.
Deleted. Every single message, gone. But the phone remembered that they existed, remembered the timestamps. The last one sent three days before he died.
She sat very still in her father's chair holding a phone he had never shown her, hidden behind a panel he had never mentioned, containing messages she could not read.
Her father did not keep secrets from her. He kept things timed things he would tell her when she was ready, when the moment was right but he did not hide things. Not from her.
Someone else put this phone here. Someone who needed Lorenzo Moretti to have a private line they could reach him on. Someone who knew this house well enough to know about the hidden panel in the third drawer of his desk.
She pocketed the phone. She straightened the drawer. She stood up, smoothed her clothes, and put her face back on.
She was almost to the hallway when she heard Marco's voice just outside, finishing a call. She stopped two steps from the door. He ended the call. He walked in.
They almost collided. He stepped back, surprised for just a fraction of a second. Then the surprise was gone and the grief-face was back the one he had been wearing all morning, the careful sorrow of a devoted son.
"Reina." He opened his arms. "How are you holding up?"
She let him hug her. She kept her right hand the hand with the phone in her pocket pressed flat against her side.
Over his shoulder she saw nothing. She felt nothing. She just noticed.
And then she felt it. His hand, briefly, moving to her side during the hug. Not her back. Her side. Right where the pocket was.
It lasted half a second. Maybe less. Then he was pulling back and looking at her with warm, sad eyes.
"You don't have to do anything today," he said. "I have everything handled. You just rest."
"Thank you, Marco," she said.
He smiled. It was a perfect smile.
It was the most frightening thing she had ever seen.
She walked to her room. She locked the door. She took the phone out of her pocket and looked at it.
Her brother had just checked whether she was carrying something.
Which meant he knew the phone existed.
Which meant he knew where it was hidden.
Which meant her father had not hidden it from Marco.
Marco had hidden it from her father.