Chapter 6
She found the door by accident, or told herself it was an accident, which was its own kind of lie.
The estate’s basement level wasn’t on any floor plan the Bureau had managed to source, not through the county records office or the contractor who’d done renovations six years ago or the two informants who’d been inside the house before and hadn’t lived long enough to draw a useful map. Maya had spent four nights working her way down there anyway, one flight of service stairs at a time, cataloguing what she found and reporting nothing that felt urgent enough to risk the trip again. Mostly wine cellar. Mostly boring. Exactly the kind of boring that made her suspicious enough to keep going.
The door was at the end of a corridor that smelled like dust and old stone, unmarked, with a lock that looked newer than everything around it. Maya had a kit for locks like this, small enough to hide in a lipstick case, and she was two pins into it when she heard footsteps behind her and understood, with the particular cold clarity of a person whose cover is about to end, that she’d made a mistake.
She turned around already building the story. Lost. Looking for the wine cellar, got turned around, these old houses all look the same in the dark. The story died in her throat when she saw who was standing there.
Not a guard. Nico.
He looked at the lock pick still in her hand, and Maya watched three seconds of silence do more damage to her operation than any interrogation could have. Then, instead of anything she’d braced for, he reached past her and turned a key she hadn’t noticed hidden in the doorframe’s molding, and the door swung open on its own.
“You could have just asked,” he said.
The room beyond wasn’t what she’d built herself to expect, not a second set of books, not a hidden armory, not anything that would have justified the risk she’d just taken. It was a workshop. Warm light from a bank of lamps, sawdust on the floor in soft drifts, a workbench crowded with tools she recognized and a dozen she didn’t, and instruments in every stage of becoming, ribs of curved wood clamped in jigs, a scroll half carved, two finished violins hanging from the ceiling like something between trophies and ghosts.
“You make these,” she said, because it seemed important to say it out loud, to hear whether it sounded as impossible aloud as it did in her head.
“I make these.” Nico moved past her into the room, running a hand along the edge of the workbench with the same unconscious tenderness she’d seen him use exactly once before, on her arm, the night of the alley. “Started in prison. There was a program. Most guys did woodshop for the yard credit and never touched a saw again once they were out.” He picked up an unfinished scroll, turned it in the light. “I couldn’t stop.”
“Does your father know?”
“He knows I have a hobby. He doesn’t know it’s this.” Something moved across his face, brief and unguarded. “He thinks weakness is contagious. A man who spends his evenings coaxing something delicate out of a piece of wood instead of closing deals or breaking legs, that’s not a son to him. That’s a liability with a pulse.” Maya thought of the file photograph that had started all of this, the flat careful eyes that hadn’t told her anything true, and looked at the man standing in front of her now, sawdust on his sleeves, something exposed in his face that she hadn’t earned and didn’t deserve. It occurred to her, with the force of something physical, that this was the realest thing she’d learned about him yet, and that she had found it by breaking into his house with a lock pick.
“Don’t tell my father,” Nico said quietly. It wasn’t quite a request.
“I won’t,” Maya said, and the words came out easier than they should have, easier than any lie she’d told in this house, because for once it wasn’t entirely a lie.
He showed her the rest of it without her having to ask. The wood he preferred, spruce for the top, maple for the back, the particular grain he looked for and rejected nine boards out of ten to find. The varnish recipe he’d built himself over six years of failure, amber and something he wouldn’t name, a formula he kept in his own head because writing it down felt like admitting it might not survive him. He talked about all of it the way other men talked about the things they were actually proud of, quietly, like the pride itself was fragile enough to need protecting.
Maya asked questions she didn’t need answers to, because she wanted to keep him talking, because some traitorous part of her recognized this room for what it was, the one place in this entire fortress where Nico Marchetti stopped performing for anyone, including her.
It was nearly midnight when she finally climbed the service stairs back to her wing, and she sat on the edge of her bed for a long time afterward with her phone open to Reeves’s contact, the report half composed in her head. Workshop, basement, luthier, possible leverage point, possible insight into subject’s psychological distance from the family business.
Her thumb hovered over send.
She thought about the way he’d said don’t tell my father, not as a command but as something closer to a wound offered up for safekeeping, and she thought about every operation she’d ever run, every informant she’d ever turned, and how none of them had ever made her hesitate like this, not once, not for eleven minutes with her thumb over a button that would turn a man’s one unguarded place into a line item in a federal file.
She sent it anyway.
She had a job. She had a sister who’d died four hours too late for a phone call to matter, and a case board with Vittorio Marchetti’s face pinned dead center, and none of that changed just because a man had shown her a room full of half-finished violins and let her see something true.
She set the phone down, turned off the light, and lay awake a long time hating herself for both the hesitation and the sending, in exactly equal measure, unable to decide which one told her more about who she actually was.