Chapter 4
The Locked Room Husband
Morning did not bring relief. It brought clearer shapes to fear.
The injured guard survived. Ryan remained confined under watch in a guest suite on the lower floor, stripped of his phone and denied visitors except Luca. Linda was kept separately in one of the smaller salons, furious and silent by turns. Carlo arrived again with a face like carved sympathy and offered to help question the staff. Salvatore declined.
Emily should have rested. Mirella told her so twice. But the old numbness had broken, and what replaced it was harder to control. If there was a hand inside the house, waiting quietly while Ryan bruised her and Linda planned for her baby, then hiding in a chair with blankets around her would not keep her child safe.
She found Salvatore in his private study just after noon. Luca stood outside the door. Inside, the room smelled of tobacco and cedar and the faint iron tang of Salvatore’s temper.
“I want to see Ryan,” Emily said.
Her father did not even look up at first. “No.”
“He’ll talk to me before he talks to you.”
“He has talked with his hands long enough.”
Emily moved closer. “Dad.”
Now he looked at her. “You are carrying a child and bleeding fear through your skin, and you still think you have to walk back into the teeth of it alone.”
The words hit too close. Emily swallowed and kept going. “I think he’ll tell me something if he thinks I’m still afraid of him.”
Salvatore stared for a long moment, then pressed his thumb against his signet ring once, a habit he had when deciding whether to yield or dominate. “Luca will be in the room.”
“No. Outside the door. If Ryan sees an audience, he’ll perform.”
That earned her a grim half-breath that might have been reluctant respect. “Five minutes.”
Ryan was in the green guest room, not tied down, not beaten, not even disheveled beyond the purpling bruise across his upper body where Salvatore had struck him. He stood when Emily entered. For an instant, seeing her there alone, some old reflex lit in his eyes—ownership, calculation, charm preparing itself.
Then he saw the guard at the door and adjusted.
“Emily,” he said softly. “You shouldn’t be here.”
The softness nearly made her sick.
She stayed by the far chair, one hand resting lightly under her belly. “Why was there bleach in the nursery?”
His expression did not change. “I have no idea.”
“Why was Linda recorded talking about taking my baby before dawn?”
At that, something flashed and vanished in his face. Not surprise. Annoyance.
“She hates me,” he said. “She says things.”
Emily took another step forward. “Who is Carlo to you?”
This time he smiled, but there was no warmth in it. “Now you sound like your father.”
“Answer me.”
Ryan’s gaze went to her stomach, then back to her face. “Did he tell you I married you for your last name? Is that what the old man wants you to believe?”
“He doesn’t need to tell me what you’ve done.”
For a second the pleasant mask slipped. “What I’ve done?” he said quietly. “You think this was about bruises? Emily, you never understood the house you were born into.”
She felt the room tighten around the sentence. “Then help me understand.”
His eyes sharpened. He stepped closer, enough that she caught the smell of the soap the Moretti staff had given him after confining him like any other guest. “If you tell your father everything you think you know,” he murmured, “he dies before your child is born.”
Emily held her ground by force. “Who kills him?”
Ryan’s mouth twitched. “That’s the wrong question.”
The guard opened the door then, just as Salvatore appeared behind him. Perhaps he had heard enough. Perhaps he knew his daughter well enough to sense the precise second her fear turned into something usable.
Ryan stepped back at once. Salvatore did not look at him. He looked only at Emily, reading her face, seeing whatever answer he needed there.
As Salvatore turned to leave with her, shouts broke out at the far end of the corridor.
Luca’s voice. A body hitting the wall. Running footsteps.
They reached the west stairwell in time to find one of Salvatore’s younger guards on the floor with blood spreading through his shirt. Ryan’s door guard was down too, unconscious from a blow to the head.
Ryan had not escaped.
May you like
But Linda Hale had.
And in the injured guard’s open hand was a torn strip of silk from Emily’s own baby-shower shawl.
