For a heartbeat, neither of them moved. Looking into Mara’s eyes, an old memory rose through him like something surfacing from deep water. His mother had looked at him that way.
He looked away first. “Go back to work,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
Mara turned toward the servants’ corridor — and that was when it happened. As she moved, the collar of her uniform shifted, and something small and silver slipped free and caught the morning light.
A pendant. Tiny, delicate, old.
Alessandro stopped breathing. That pendant. That exact symbol, etched into silver he had not seen in eighteen years.
“Where did you get that?” Alessandro asked.
Mara stopped. Her hand flew to her throat. “It belonged to my mother.”
“What was her name?”
“Isabella,” she whispered.
The name hit Alessandro like a physical blow. Isabella. The name the family never spoke. The woman whose disappearance eighteen years ago had lit the fuse on the bloodiest internal war the Romano organization had ever survived.
Alessandro took a step closer. “What is your mother’s full name?”
Mara’s fingers tightened around the silver. “I can’t tell you.”
“She told me never to say it inside this house.”
“Why?” Alessandro asked.
Mara’s voice dropped to almost nothing. “Because she said the person who destroyed her still lives here.”