Chapter 4
Amara had followed Fatima’s service cart into the west corridor.
Then Fatima was called back toward the kitchen.
Amara wandered three doors farther.
The music salon door was open.
She saw Genevieve.
She saw the gray-haired man.
And she heard one sentence clearly enough to repeat it.
Genevieve said:
“After the wedding, Alessandro won’t see it coming.”
That was the warning she gave me.
But there was more.
Children remember strange pieces.
Not necessarily the parts adults think matter.
Amara said Edmund had something shiny.
“A key?”
She shook her head.
“Circle.”
A ring.
Maybe.
Genevieve’s face changed.
I noticed.
“What ring?”
“No idea.”
“Another bad answer.”
She remained silent.
Fatima suddenly stood.
“I know.”
Everyone looked at her.
She had polished Genevieve’s jewelry tray that morning.
One item had been added.
An old black signet ring bearing a Rienzi crest.
My crest.
I went still.
Only five original rings like that had ever existed.
Mine.
My father’s.
My uncle Lorenzo’s.
And two issued to senior captains before I abolished the old inner council.
Three were accounted for.
One was buried with my father.
One disappeared twelve years ago.
My uncle’s.
I looked at Genevieve.
“Where did you get Lorenzo’s ring?”
Her face emptied.
There it was.
The male voice on the phone might have been Edmund.
But the operation reached deeper than Ashworth.
My uncle Lorenzo Rienzi died when I was twenty-two.
Car accident.
At least that was the story.
After his death, several of his loyal captains resisted my father, then eventually folded back into the family.
I always assumed grief and ambition.
Maybe they had been waiting.
Genevieve finally said:
“Your uncle gave that ring to my father.”
“When?”
“Years ago.”
Impossible.
My engagement to Genevieve began only eighteen months earlier.
But Edmund Ashworth had apparently possessed a Rienzi signet long before I knew his daughter.
I looked at Rafe.
He understood the same thing.
This marriage had not created the alliance.
It had been designed to finish one already started by the previous generation.
“What did Lorenzo promise Edmund?”
Genevieve’s silence answered enough.
Then Fatima whispered:
“I heard Mr. Ashworth say something else.”
I turned.
May you like
“He said the wedding would finally complete Lorenzo’s plan.”
My dead uncle had apparently been arranging my future before I was old enough to become boss.
