Chapter 87: Matteos Blood

Vittoria's second son. The words hung in the gallery after Gabriel Vale's voice died, and Matteo's knees struck the stone bench hard enough to make Noah stir behind the pediatric glass. Elena was moving before I found air. She slid the little recorder into the inside pocket of her coat, pressed her body between Matteo and the glass, and looked at Maya through the door. "Keep him with you," she said. Maya had Noah against her shoulder. Dr. Hall's hand was still steady on Noah's back, counting the ragged rise and fall of a fever that had not given any of us permission to think about anything else. Maya nodded once. Elena turned to Matteo. "You heard it. You do not have to answer anyone. But if you know what that phrase was meant to do, tell me that. Not them." Not me. She did not need to say it twice. I stood three steps from the blue line she had set for me. The recorder was hers. Noah was hers to protect. Even Matteo's silence was not something I could purchase with the name I had been born wearing. Bianca gave a thin laugh from beside Vittoria. "A dead man's fear is not a fact. Matteo has always wanted to matter more than he does." Matteo looked at her, and something in his face went flat. "You said that at the villa," he murmured. "When she made me sit at the end of the table. You said I should be grateful for the chair." Bianca's color vanished. Vittoria moved toward him, all black silk and controlled impatience. "This is not the place for old injuries. The child needs quiet." Elena caught Vittoria's wrist before it reached Matteo's shoulder. It was not a dramatic grab. It was worse. Elena held her exactly where everyone could see it, one hand around the older woman's wrist, the other closed over the pocket holding her father's voice. "No," Elena said. "You don't get to touch him until he decides whether he wants you near him." For a beat, Vittoria's perfect mouth tightened. Then she pulled free, slowly, as if restraint were a favor she had chosen. Matteo bent forward. His hands covered his face. When he lowered them, his eyes landed on me and did not soften. "I am not your father's son," he said. The gallery did not move. Somewhere inside the room behind the glass, Noah made a small, hot sound against Maya's shoulder. I heard the sentence, but my body refused it. My father had given Matteo a room at Christmas. A place beside us in photographs. A last name that could be used like a lock on any door. I had hated him for the way adults always watched him after he left the room, as if he carried a question no one wanted answered. "Matteo," I said. Elena's glance cut to me. Not a warning I could argue with. A boundary. I shut my mouth. Matteo pushed himself upright with one hand on the bench. His palm slipped on the polished stone. He looked down at it as though he expected to find blood there. "Don't make a tree out of this," he said. "I don't have every answer. I don't know what papers she kept or what story she paid other people to repeat. I only know what she made me be." Vittoria said nothing now. "She placed me," Matteo went on. His voice steadied because Elena was still between him and the rest of us. "At dinners. At funerals. In rooms where men decided who came after them. She called me family when it bought her silence. She called me a mistake when it made me easier to move. An inheritance piece. That was all." The word landed harder than Gabriel's recording. I had spent my life thinking the Moretti name was a wall. Cold, ugly, sometimes cruel—but solid. I had believed I knew where I stood inside it, even when I hated what it asked of me. Matteo had been made to stand in that wall like a loose brick. Bianca folded her arms tight across her chest. "He is confused. He always was." Elena did not look at her. "Then you can explain why you went pale before he said a word." Bianca's eyes flicked to the recorder in Elena's coat and away again. That was her answer. Small. Human. Damning only of fear. I took one step forward before I caught myself. Elena saw it. Her chin lifted. I stopped at the blue line. "Did my father know?" I asked Matteo. "I don't know." His answer came fast, almost angry. "That is not mine to invent for you." It should have relieved me. Instead it left the floor under my feet thinner. Vittoria's gaze found mine at last. There was no comfort in it. No denial either. Just calculation, stripped clean because Elena had taken the recorder beyond her reach and Matteo had refused to keep playing the part she had given him. Elena turned toward the glass. Noah's breathing caught. Maya tightened her hold, and Dr. Hall leaned in close. Elena was at the door in two strides. Before she went inside, she looked back at Matteo. "You are not a piece. Not for her. Not for him. Not for any name in this room." Then she went to her son. Matteo watched her through the glass. When he spoke again, he did not look at Vittoria. He looked at me. "If she could place me as your father's second son," he said, "then your place was never as safe as she taught you to believe." The blue line remained between me and Elena's door. For the first time in my life, I did not know whether the Moretti name beneath my feet belonged to me at all.