They Arranged My Marriage, So I Arranged My Terms novel · Chapter 2 of 3

Chapter 2: Renata Keeps the Good Books

Valentina brings a freight discrepancy to Renata at the Caruso Imports archive, where Renata helps her trace it to a coded account number in an old customs file and produces her father's access authority to reverse Bruno's attempt to remove her, after which Dante intercepts her at the door to warn that the person who ordered her removal is inside the building.

The archive box was heavier than it looked.

Val had both arms around it, her heels catching on the uneven concrete of the loading dock, when the door to the back office swung open and a voice came out of the dark.

'Put that down before you break both your wrist and the evidence.'

Renata Fiorvanti stood in the doorway with her thermos in one hand and a look on her face that said she had already decided how this was going to go.

Seventy years old, and she still filled a doorway like a customs officer.

'It's not that heavy,' Val said.

'You're listing to the left. Put it down.'

Val set the box on the nearest worktable.

Renata crossed the floor, unscrewed the thermos, and poured espresso into a chipped cup that had been sitting on the same shelf for as long as Val could remember.

She held it out.

'Sit.'

Val sat.

The back office of Caruso Imports smelled of cedar and old paper and the particular sharpness of espresso that had been kept hot too long.

It was the only room in her father's world that had never felt like a stage.

'You came alone,' Renata said.

'I always come alone.'

'That's what worries me.'

Renata settled into the chair across from her and folded her hands on the table.

The hands were knotted with arthritis now, but they still moved with the precision of a woman who had balanced ledgers for forty years.

'Show me,' Renata said.

Val opened the box.

Inside were the legitimate shipping manifests for the last quarter, the ones the elder council had been waving at her for weeks as proof that the family's affairs were in order.

She had brought the box because it was the only thing she could carry through the front door without anyone asking questions.

But she had not come for the manifests.

'There's a freight payment,' Val said. 'A shipment that left the port in November. The fee was paid twice.'

Renata's eyebrows went up.

'Twice?'

'Once through the standard account. Once through a routing number that doesn't appear anywhere else in the legitimate books.'

Renata was quiet for a moment.

Then she reached for the cedar pencil behind her ear.

It was a habit Val had watched since she was a child, the pencil appearing and disappearing like a magician's coin.

'Which shipment?' Renata asked.

Val gave her the manifest number from memory.

She did not give her the photograph.

She did not tell her about Dante.

She gave Renata only the smallest piece, a single thread, and then she watched to see whether the woman pulled it or cut it.

Renata pulled it.

For the next hour, the two of them worked through the manifests side by side.

Renata moved through the pages the way Val's father had moved through a room full of rivals, slowly, without wasted motion, seeing everything.

'Here,' Renata said.

She laid a customs file on the table.

The routing number had been typed into the margin, half-hidden under a stamp from the port authority.

'That's not a routing number,' Val said.

'No,' Renata said. 'It's an account number. Coded. You see the prefix?'

Val saw it.

She had spent three years learning the family's financial structures from Bruno Fera, and she knew exactly what that prefix meant.

It was not a Caruso account.

It was not a Marchetti account.

It was something else, something that had been buried in the legitimate books so carefully that only a woman who marked disputed entries with a cedar pencil would ever have found it.

The door to the loading dock banged open.

Two men came in.

Val knew them both.

They were Bruno's men, the kind who did not carry guns because they did not need to.

'Ms. Caruso,' the first one said. 'You're needed at the house. The elders are waiting.'

Val did not get up.

'I'm working,' she said.

'The council has asked that you leave the archive.'

'The council doesn't own the archive.'

The second man took a step toward the table.

Renata stood.

She did not raise her voice.

She reached into the drawer beside her and took out a single sheet of paper, thick and cream-colored, with her father's signature at the bottom.

'This is the access authority Enzo Caruso left with me,' Renata said. 'It gives his daughter unrestricted access to every file in this building, at any hour, for as long as she requires it. Signed and notarized.'

She laid the paper on the table between them.

'You can tell the council that the next time they send someone to remove her, they should send someone who can read.'

The two men looked at the paper.

Then they looked at each other.

Then they left.

Val let out a breath she had not known she was holding.

No.

She had known.

'You've been protecting the books,' Val said quietly.

'I've been protecting your father's daughter,' Renata said. 'There's a difference.'

She picked up her thermos and refilled Val's cup.

'Drink your espresso. You're going to need it.'

Val copied the coded account number onto a scrap of paper and folded it into her coat pocket, next to the photograph.

Forty-one days left.

She did not say it out loud.

She did not have to.

The number was a thread, and the thread led somewhere, and somewhere was where Bruno Fera had been hiding whatever it was he could not afford for her to find.

She stood.

'Thank you,' she said.

Renata waved a hand.

'Don't thank me. Just don't die before you use it.'

Val walked out through the loading dock into the cold.

The snow had started again, fine and dry, catching in her hair.

She was halfway to her car when a figure stepped out from the shadow of the warehouse wall.

Dante Marchetti.

He was not wearing a coat.

Snow dusted the shoulders of his dark suit, and his hands were in his pockets, and he was watching her the way he had watched her across the dinner table, like she was a ledger he was still reading.

'You found it,' he said.

It was not a question.

'What are you doing here?' Val asked.

'I came to make sure you left through the right door.'

Val stopped.

'Meaning what?'

Dante looked past her, toward the warehouse, toward the back office where Renata was still sitting with the access authority laid out on the table.

'The person who ordered your removal,' he said, 'is already inside the building.'

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