He Canceled Our Wedding Ninety-Nine Times, So I Joined His Enemy novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: What She Took

Massimo's POV

Paola came into my study at ten that night without knocking.

She carried no tea.

She shut the door behind her and turned the lock.

"Come here," I said. "You look tired."

"I'm not tired," she said.

Her voice was different.

It was lower, with no lift at the end of it, and it did not ask me anything.

I put down my pen.

"Sit down, Massimo."

"This is my desk."

"I know whose desk it is."

She walked past it to the window and stood with her back to me.

"I've been in your house four months," she said. "I spent two years before that learning who in it needed money."

"Two years?"

"Your drivers, your guards, their wives. You never asked how a girl from the typing pool knew all of them."

I stared at her narrow back, and something cold started low in my stomach.

"Paola."

"Benvenuti," she said. "Say it."

I did not.

She turned.

Her eyes were dry and wide, and there was nothing soft in them at all.

"Carlo Benvenuti was my father," she said. "You had him killed on a stairwell with a pipe, so that you could sit in his chair."

I stood up.

"You were a child. You were in another state."

"I was twenty-one, and I was in a library," she said. "A man called to tell me my father had gone off the harbor road. The funeral was closed, and three men from your house stood at the back of it."

"I was told you were no threat."

"Renata wrote that line," Paola said, and for the first time her mouth moved. "She wrote it in such a neat hand. I read it on Monday night, and I thought, it's a pity she's the good one."

I went around the desk.

I had a pistol in the second drawer, and I was already reaching for it.

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