Chapter 98: No Cheap Scapegoat

The black envelope was still waiting on the pew when Luca De Luca told me I had until dawn. It looked too clean for the chapel. Rain had been carried in on his coat. Anna's knuckles were gray around the edge of the bench behind me. The envelope alone had no crease, no damp spot, no sign that it had ever belonged to a person with a pulse. "Bianca says enough," Luca said. "She tells the world what she did at your wedding. You get your apology. We stop feeding each other to the cameras. You stop the audit question before it becomes a fire neither house can put out." He kept saying it as if the bargain had been built for me. I did not touch the envelope. "Say the part you left out," I said. Luca's mouth tightened. I turned enough that Anna could hear me too. I wanted no soft version of this to follow us out of the room. "Bianca gives them one woman to blame. Then your old men get to say the wedding lie was one jealous bride's mistake. Vittoria gets to say the old papers were a misunderstanding. And everybody who helped make a sick child into a family prize gets to walk away clean." Anna looked from him to me. Her bruise had yellowed at the edge of her jaw, but her eyes were awake now. "That isn't what I offered," Luca said. "It is exactly what you offered. You wrapped it in the word peace because you think I will mistake quiet for truth." The chapel bell above us gave one dull knock in the wind. Luca did not flinch. Men like him did not have to raise their voices. The damage arrived before the sound did. "Your son is sick," he said. "You have an auditor who disappears and a woman behind you who has already paid for asking questions. There is wisdom in ending a war before it collects more names." My hand found the back of Anna's pew. Not her shoulder. Not a promise I had no right to give. Just the worn wood between us and the door. "You don't get to use Noah's fever as a coupon," I said. "And you don't get to call what happened to Anna a threat while asking me to be grateful you sent it politely." For the first time, Luca looked past me at her. Anna's breath caught. I stepped fully into his line of sight. "No." The word landed small. It still changed the room. Luca's gaze came back to mine. "No to Bianca confessing?" "No to making her the ending." My throat hurt, but my voice did not. "Bianca hurt me. She helped ruin my life. If she has something to say, she can say it because it is true—not because two families need her to carry every hand that signed, paid, watched, or looked away." The envelope stayed where he had placed it. Untaken. Unopened. "You would rather protect her?" he asked. "I would rather not let you buy your way out with her." I held his eyes. "Those are not the same thing." Behind the chapel doors, a heel struck the stone landing and stopped. Once. Then nothing. Luca heard it too. A muscle moved in his jaw. "You think this keeps the question alive," he said. "It does." I did not need a courtroom or a vote to know that much. "You want everyone to believe the story ends when Bianca cries. It doesn't. Not until the people behind her have nowhere left to hide." His smile had no warmth in it. "There will be a cost for making that choice." "There already was." I looked at Anna's bruised face. I thought of Noah burning under white sheets while Maya and Dr. Hall kept his room closed to anyone who thought blood gave them a claim. "The difference is that I am done paying it for you." Luca picked up the envelope at last. He did not crush it. That would have made him look angry. He slipped it back inside his coat as if he had simply decided to keep a receipt. "Dawn," he said. "After that, I make no promise about what Bianca chooses." "You never promised anything worth taking." He left without looking at Anna again. The doors swung shut behind him, and the chapel seemed to release one breath at a time. Anna rubbed her thumb over the torn skin beside her nail. "You could have made them say it," she whispered. "At least some of it." "No." I crouched beside the pew, keeping my voice low. "I could have let them tell a version that made them safe. That's different." She watched me for a long second, then nodded once. It was not trust. It was not forgiveness for anyone. It was only a living woman choosing not to look away. I walked her to the chapel threshold and waited until the staff member assigned to her nodded from the lit corridor. Anna went with her own feet. I stayed behind long enough to make sure the doors did not close on her again. Then I headed for the stairs to Noah's floor, my chest tight with the choice I had made and the cost I could not yet see. At the turn of the landing, Bianca stepped out from the shadow beside the old votive stand. She wore no white, no diamonds, no careful smile. Her hands were empty. She looked at the chapel door, then at me. "Please," Bianca said. "Help me."