Chapter 33 - The Hermit of Amalfi
Forty-eight hours later, the storm had moved south, leaving the cliffs of the Amalfi Coast wrapped in an eerie, suffocating blanket of low-hanging sea fog.
Dr. Ferri had successfully extracted the bullet from Matteo’s abdomen. The heir of the Moretti family was alive, resting in a fortified, heavily guarded private medical suite in Rome, guarded by twenty of the family’s most trusted men. Matteo had begged Claire not to go alone, but she knew this was a reckoning that could not be settled by proxy armies or hired guns.
This was a blood debt thirty-four years in the making.
A solitary dark-gray helicopter landed on the private pad of an isolated promontory three miles outside Positano. The estate, Villa La Fenice, was an ancient limestone fortress carved directly into the vertical cliff face, three hundred feet above the churning, razor-sharp rocks of the Tyrrhenian Sea.
Claire stepped off the skids, wearing a simple black cashmere coat, her hair tied back severely, her face pale and carved from stone. She carried no weapons, no backup. Only the hard drive from Milan and the titanium keycard.
The massive bronze gates of the villa stood wide open. There were no armed guards at the perimeter, no dogs, no electronic checkpoints. The courtyard was overgrown with wild lavender and twisted lemon trees whose yellow fruit lay rotting in the stone troughs.
Claire walked across the ancient flagstones, her boots clicking with deliberate, echoing steps.
She pushed open the heavy oak double doors of the villa’s grand salon.
The interior was magnificent and grotesque at the same time. The high vaulted ceilings were covered in 17th-century frescoes of the fall of Icarus. But beneath the art, the room was packed with wall-to-wall surveillance arrays, glowing satellite maps, and complex automated financial trading terminals running continuous algorithms against European market indices.
Sitting in a massive high-backed leather chair before a panoramic floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the abyss of the sea sat a woman.
She wore a gown of heavy emerald silk. Her long silver hair was woven into an intricate crown pinned with antique pearl hairpins. In her hands, she held a delicate porcelain teacup, her fingers long, slender, and steady.
She did not turn around as Claire entered.
“You took the bait in Milan,” the woman said. Her voice was the exact voice from the tape in the Frascati crypt—cool, crystalline, and devoid of warmth. “I told Bernardo you were sharp, but predictable. You always had Arthur’s sentimental weakness for looking for answers where you should only be looking for weapons.”
“Hello, Mother,” Claire said, stopping ten paces behind the chair.
Genevieve Vance slowly turned the chair around.
Up close, the resemblance was terrifying. Genevieve was sixty-six years old, but her skin possessed the smooth, preserved tautness of immense wealth and clinical perfection. But where Claire’s eyes held the fire of humanity, Genevieve’s gray-green eyes were bottomless, dead pools of glacial calculation.
“You look well, Claire,” Genevieve said, taking a slow, delicate sip of her tea. “A bit bruised around the edges, perhaps. But the Moretti boy took the bullet meant for you, didn't he? Good. That is what men are for. Arthur was useless at taking hits. I’m glad you chose a husband with a sturdier spine.”
“You funded Victoria Bennett,” Claire said, her voice dropping into a deadly, vibrating whisper. “You reached into Otisville, fed Julian the offshore codes, and provided Victoria with the fifty million euros she needed to hire the hit squad in Milan.”
Genevieve smiled—a slow, terrible curling of painted crimson lips.
May you like
“Of course I did,” she said casually, setting her teacup down onto a silver tray. “Did you really think a dog like Victoria Bennett could mastermind an international hit without my money? I had to see if my masterpiece was finished, Claire. I had to know if you were ready to rule.”
***
