Chapter 40: What She Never Said
The lobby security log would later show that Pedro Moretti — the name he had been using for six years, the name that was not his, the name that had belonged to a boy buried in Genoa for twenty four years — entered the Moretti Group building at 1:58 PM on a Thursday in March and walked through the lobby with the particular unhurried confidence of a man who had decided, before he entered, that the building would receive him as an equal.
He did not rush.
He did not look around the lobby with the instinctive assessment of someone in unfamiliar territory. He looked around it with the inventory look of someone cataloguing what they intend to own — the marble floor, the reception desk, the elevator bank, the particular quality of light that came through the black glass facade and turned everything inside it into something between shadow and substance.
He was taller than Élise had expected.
