Chapter 213

• GUSTAVO
• I sat in the study with the morning light cutting across the desk, turning the leather files a dull gold. The coffee was still hot in my hand, black and bitter the way I always took it. I let the steam rise while I looked out the window at the garden below. Everything down there was perfect—trimmed hedges, stone paths, the fountain throwing water in steady arcs. Routine. Control. The kind of quiet I built this place to have.
• But my mind wasn’t on the view. It kept going back to last night’s dinner. Valentina had been sitting across from me, the candlelight catching the side of her face while she read one of the old reports I’d left on the table. She didn’t just glance at it. She stopped, frowned, and asked about a name buried in the middle of a paragraph most people would have skipped.