She pressed her hands to her face then, and cried in earnest, with relief so violent it looked like grief.
Enzo let her cry. Outside the door, his house was preparing to celebrate his marriage into the family whose daughter had handed this girl a suitcase and begged him not to open it. Inside the room, he made a decision that would have astonished the man he had been that morning, and which already felt, even now, like the only decision available to an honest one.
Whatever it cost — the alliance, the wedding, the peace he had spent a decade bleeding for — he was not going to hand Clara Bennett to the people who had done this to her.
Chapter 6: Under His Protection
He gave her the guest rooms over the east wing, the ones reserved for family, with a door that locked from the inside and a bathroom of her own and windows that looked over the garden Tommy had planted. It was Mrs. Alvaro who understood first what the move meant, and who said nothing at all while she carried Clara's small bag — one bag, everything a woman of twenty-seven owned after two years in his house — up the main stairs in plain sight, with an expression that dared any soul in the hall to comment.
"This is too much," Clara said, standing in the doorway of the beautiful room with her bag at her feet, as if she were afraid to cross the threshold. "Mr. Valenti, the staff will talk. Miss Romano will —"
"Miss Romano," Enzo said, "is not going to come near you. Listen to me, Clara, because I will only explain this once, and I need you to believe it when it gets frightening later. You are under my protection now. That is not a kindness I am doing you. It is a position I am taking, in my house, with my name on it. It means no one questions you, no one summons you, no one sends you on errands, and no one moves you anywhere without going through me — and through Marco."
Marco Santi arrived within the hour: fifty, silent, a man who had guarded Enzo's mother for eleven years and whose loyalty had been tested in ways Enzo never discussed. He was given the chair outside Clara's door, a telephone, and simple orders. She was to have food, rest, and her real clinic's doctor if she asked for one. She was not a prisoner, and anyone who treated her as one would answer for it. She was not to be left alone with any Romano, any stranger, or any member of staff beyond Mrs. Alvaro. Marco nodded once and took up his post as if he had been sitting there for years.
Gia was handled differently, and everyone in the house felt the difference like a change in the weather. Enzo did not confront her that night. He did something colder. He dined with her and both families' representatives as planned, spoke of the party, raised his glass to peace between their houses — and all evening, two of his men remained, unobtrusively and without explanation, in whatever part of the house Gia occupied. Her telephone calls, the staff were quietly told, were to be announced before they were put through. Her car was no longer to leave without his driver knowing its destination. When she asked, smiling, why dear friends needed such ceremony in a house preparing for a wedding, Enzo smiled back and said, "Security, before Saturday. You understand." She understood a great deal more than security, he thought, watching her eyes. She said nothing. That silence, in a woman who had begged outside a locked door, was its own confession — though of what, exactly, he did not yet know, and he was careful, even in anger, not to mistake a part for the whole.
Frank Deluca came at midnight, when the house was dark. Enzo had finally made the call he had hesitated over that afternoon, and Frank's reaction to the hesitation, when they sat in the study with the suitcase on the desk between them, began the work of repairing it.
"You were right to wait," Frank said. He was sixty-three, silver, meticulous, a man who had advised Enzo's father and buried him and stayed. "Not because I might be part of this, Enzo. Because a thing like this, you want to watch the house for a few hours before you show your hand. Who gets nervous. Who makes calls." He put on reading glasses and went through the case in silence, item by item, lifting each bundle, each passport, with the tips of his fingers, laying everything in rows like a jeweler. "Now. What did you watch?"
"Gia begged me not to open it. Then she dined, and smiled, and asked about the men I put on her."
"And who else knows?"
"Mrs. Alvaro suspects. Clara knows what was in it. Marco knows only to guard her."
"Good. Keep it that small." Frank removed the glasses and looked at the passports a long time. "This is professional work, Enzo. Not the photographs — those are theft, anyone can steal a photograph. The documents. The laminates, the inks, the paper trail at a clinic that either exists and is dirty, or doesn't exist and has been invented completely. That takes a specialist, and specialists take payment, and payment leaves a trail even when it's cash." He tapped the clinic cards. "These are the weakest stitch in the whole garment. Someone got her blood type wrong. Someone got dates wrong. Careless people are findable people."
"Find them," Enzo said. "Quietly. Not through Romano channels — through nobody's channels. Yours alone."
"It will take time."
"Then take the time we have before Saturday and use all of it." Enzo looked at the open case, at the rows of another family's fortune and a young woman's stolen name. "And Frank. Consider what it was for. A bride smuggling money out of her groom's house, in her maid's hands, wearing her maid's face. If Clara had reached that car —"
"She would never have reached the car," Frank said quietly. "Or she would have reached it and never been seen again, her or the child. A woman cannot disappear herself and a baby and a fortune without help, Enzo. But paperwork can disappear her for other people. That is what those cards are. A story, written in advance, in case anyone ever came asking where Clara Bennett went."
The room was very still. In the east wing, behind a locked door and a loyal man in a chair, a girl who had hidden her pregnancy to keep a roof over her unborn son slept, at last, without counting anything. Down the corridor, behind another door, the woman Enzo was to marry lay awake under guard she could not acknowledge. Between them stood a brown suitcase that had been meant to travel, and had not.