Part 2 The service finished. The pallbearers carried the casket down the center aisle, and the congregation rose and moved toward the exits, murmuring, careful.
Part 2
The service finished. The pallbearers carried the casket down the center aisle, and the congregation rose and moved toward the exits, murmuring, careful. Riona reached for Anel’s hand.
“Was that the man who died?” Anel asked.
“Yes.”
“Did you know him?”
“A little. A long time ago.”
He considered this with the solemnity of a child applying genuine thought. “Was he nice?”
“He was trying,” she said, and the truth of it caught her somewhere she hadn’t expected.
She navigated them toward the side exit, head slightly down, reading the room through peripheral vision. She was eight feet from the door when the crowd shifted. Someone stopped ahead. A ripple of stalled movement. She sidestepped sharply right to avoid a collision and walked directly into Aldrich Ferrante’s path.
He was three feet away. His security man’s hand came up. Aldrich’s hand came up at the same moment and made a different gesture entirely—a small, sharp stop directed at the man beside him.
His eyes found her face.
The basilica continued to empty around them. People moved past on both sides. Riona held very still.
He said her name. Just that. “Riona.”
Her name in his voice after eight years was something she had not adequately prepared for. It sounded exactly as it always had. That was the part she hadn’t anticipated. Not the gray at his temples or the controlled flatness of his expression, but the specific way his voice shaped her name, unchanged, as though nothing had happened inside it. Some part of her nervous system had apparently been holding space for that sound for eight years and was now responding with a completely unhelpful flood of something she did not have time to feel.
“Aldrich,” she said. Her voice was level. She was grateful.
His eyes moved down. The trained, rapid assessment of a man who had survived by reading rooms. And found Anel.
Anel looked back up at Aldrich with the direct, unselfconscious curiosity of a child who had not yet learned to manage his own gaze in the presence of strangers.
Something crossed Aldrich’s face. She couldn’t name it precisely—not recognition, how could it be?—but something adjacent. A disturbance. The expression of a man encountering something that doesn’t fit the map he’s been using and knowing it.
He looked at the boy for two full seconds, then back at her.
“Is he yours?”
“Yes.”
“How old?”
It wasn’t a question by the time he finished it. She felt every cell in her body arrive at the same decision simultaneously.
“Seven,” she said.
The math was not complicated. She watched him choose not to do it, or do it and refuse the result. She couldn’t tell which. She had always been good at reading him. Right now she could read nothing except the slight tension along his jaw that meant something significant was happening behind it.
“I didn’t know you’d be here,” he said.
“I know.”
“Why are you?”
“I received a message from Cosmo before he died. Something I need to discuss privately. Not here.”
Something shifted in his expression. “What kind of message?”
“The kind that required me to get on a plane.”
“Tonight, if you’re willing. The reception at the estate.”
He looked at her, then once more at Anel, that same fractured, unreadable quality. Then his man touched his elbow and he moved toward the door without answering. She watched him go and concentrated on standing still until she couldn’t see him anymore.
Anel looked up at her. “Who was that?”
She crouched to his level. His gray-green eyes looked back at her, steady and unhurried.
“Someone I used to know.”
“He was staring at me.”
“I know.”
“Why?”
She straightened. She took his hand. She walked them out of the basilica into the cold November light and did not answer the question.
She had come for what Cosmo had left her. That was what she told herself on the cab ride back to the hotel. She was here because Cosmo’s message had referenced a ledger—a private record, the intermediary had said, *in the matter of what was done to you*—and because Anel was seven and was going to keep asking questions that deserved real answers.
She had not come to hear her name in that voice. She had not come to watch Aldrich’s eyes land on their son and do something she had no word for.
But here she was.
At the reception that evening, the Ferrante estate on Avenue Maplewood smelled of good food and too many people in wool. Riona moved along the edges of the main room, reading the crowd. The Bertolini contingent had taken a position near the fireplace. The third family, the Omont organization, clustered near the far windows, maintaining the specific distance of people who are present without being accessible.
Roland Vane found her before Aldrich did.
