Mia POV
The island smelled like salt and night flowers.
That was the first thing I noticed when I stepped off the jet not the guards, not the stone walls, not the size of the compound spreading out in front of me like something from a magazine I had never been able to afford. Just that smell. Clean and real and almost beautiful, which felt like a trick my brain was playing on me because nothing about this situation was clean or real or beautiful.
Dante walked ahead without looking back. Two men fell into step beside me not touching, not threatening, just there and I followed him through a set of iron gates and into the compound.
I had expected stone floors and locked doors. I had expected bare walls and the feeling of a place designed to hold people.
What I got instead was warmth.
The main building was large and lit from inside, and the light coming through the windows was the warm amber kind, not the cold white kind. There were plants in the entryway real ones, not decorative. A table near the door had a bowl of fruit on it and a stack of folded linen and a glass of water with a small card leaning against it that I could not read from where I was standing.
I looked at Dante. He was already speaking quietly to one of his men, not looking at me. I looked at the stairs ahead. I looked at the doors to my left and right. I thought about running and immediately understood how pointless that would be on an island with no visible exit.
So I stood still and waited and tried to look like I was fine.
A door opened at the far end of the hall.
The woman who walked through it moved the way very few people move like she had decided a long time ago exactly how much space she deserved and she was going to take all of it. She was maybe sixty, with dark hair threaded through with silver, and dark eyes that took me in completely in one single look. Not a threatening look. Just a full one. Like she wanted to see all of me before she said anything.
She walked straight past Dante past him, like he was furniture and stopped in front of me.
"Mia," she said. Not a question.
"Yes," I said.
She took both of my hands in hers. Her hands were warm and dry and strong, and she held mine the way you hold something that matters to you, and I felt my throat close up completely without warning because it had been so long since anyone had touched me like that. Like I was worth being careful with.
"I am Renata," she said. "Dante's mother. You must be exhausted." She looked at my face the way doctors look at patients checking, assessing, kind about it. "Come. You need to eat before you sleep."
"I'm not really" I started.
"You are pregnant and you have had the worst day of your life," she said, in the exact tone of a woman who has heard every possible argument and is not interested in any of them. "You are eating."
She kept hold of one of my hands and walked me down the hallway. I glanced back at Dante. He was watching us go with an expression I could not read at all not relief exactly, not discomfort. Something careful. Like he was watching something he did not entirely know how to respond to.
Renata took me to a small kitchen at the back of the house. Not the main kitchen a smaller one, private, with a round table near the window and two chairs and a pot on the stove that had clearly been there for a while, kept warm and waiting. She sat me down and put a bowl of pasta in front of me without asking what I wanted, and then she sat across from me with a cup of tea and talked.
She talked about the island how the east garden grew better tomatoes than anything you could buy, how the wind off the water changed direction in October, how the stone walls of the compound were three hundred years old and had survived four different owners. She talked easily and without pressure, and she did not ask me anything, and after about four minutes of sitting rigid in my chair I realized my shoulders had come down from somewhere near my ears.
I started eating.
The pasta was the best thing I had put in my mouth in months. I ate the whole bowl and she refilled it without comment and I ate half of that too, which should have embarrassed me but somehow did not.
It was only when I put my spoon down that I realized something had been sitting in the back of my mind since she had said my name in the hallway.
She had said it before I told her what it was.
Dante had not introduced me. There had been no phone call in the hallway, no whispered conversation. She had walked through that door, looked at me, and said my name like she already had it.
Like she had been expecting me specifically.
I looked at her across the table. She was watching me with those calm dark eyes and I had the feeling she had been waiting for me to catch up.
"You knew I was coming," I said.
"Yes," she said simply.
"Dante called ahead."
"Dante called ahead this afternoon," she said. "I have known your name for longer than this afternoon."
The kitchen felt smaller suddenly. "How much longer?"
"A few weeks." She wrapped both hands around her tea cup. "I have been looking into that night myself. Quietly. Without telling Dante, because Dante handles information by acting on it immediately and I needed time to think first."
I stared at her. "You've been investigating what happened to me."
"I have been investigating what happened to my son," she said. "You were part of the same night. Your situation became part of what I was looking at." She paused. "I want you to know that nothing I found led me to believe Dante planned any of this. I know my son. He is many things. He is not that."
I had not realized I was holding my breath until I let it out.
"But someone did plan it," I said.
"Yes," she said. "Someone who knew both of you. Someone who had access and motive and was very careful about covering the evidence." Her voice was steady but something underneath it was not. "I do not have a name yet. But I am close."
We sat with that for a moment.
Then I asked the question I could not stop myself from asking, the one that had been underneath every other thought since the car, since the jet, since the island appearing out of the dark water below me.
"Did your son do this to me on purpose?"
The kitchen went completely quiet.
Renata set her tea cup down very carefully. She looked at her hands for just a moment one single moment of stillness that told me the question landed somewhere real. Then she looked up at me.
And the way she paused before answering told me that whatever she was about to say, it was not going to be simple.