Page 25 of The Rook’s Obsession

The faintest twitch at the corner of her mouth when I look over my shoulder. Not a smile, not yet, but close enough that I’ll take it.

I pull out ingredients and start setting them on the counter. Ground beef, onions, garlic, canned tomatoes, pasta. The basics for a bolognese. Not just any bolognese, her mom’s bolognese, the recipe she made so often that the smell of garlic and simmering tomatoes is probably encoded in the DNA of anyone who ever set foot in this cabin. Myself included, and I didn’t come here nearly as much as the family did. I was only a guest a few times.

“Your mom used to make this,” I explain, keeping my voice casual. “It was one of her staples. She’d start it in the afternoon and let it simmer for hours. The whole house would smell like it by dinnertime.”

She watches me from the other side of the counter, arms folded. “And I suppose I loved it.”

“Everyone loved it. It was one of those things you couldn’t help loving. Even Liam, and he complained about everything your mom cooked because he thought it made him sound tough. He’d clean his plate twice.”

No reaction to Liam’s name this time. Progress, maybe. Or maybe she’s just too tired to fight every detail.

I move to the small speaker on the shelf by the window and connect my phone. I’ve had a playlist saved for months of songs Laura used to love, pulled together from memory and cross-referenced with Liam. Old stuff, mostly. The kind of music a teenage girl in the early 2010s would’ve had on repeat. When the first song fills the cabin, something soft and acoustic, I watch her face for a response.

Nothing obvious. But she doesn’t ask me to turn it off, either.

“No offense,” I say, returning to the counter and picking up a knife to start on the onions. “But your cooking skills were not your strong suit.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

“I’m just saying. You tried. You had enthusiasm. But the results were... inconsistent.”

“I cook all the time,” she says, and there’s a sharpness to it that’s more defensive than hostile. “I learned from the Russo family cook. She was one of the best in Rome.”

“Then you’ve upgraded.” I slide a cutting board and a second knife toward her. “Show me what you’ve got.”

She looks at the knife, then at me. I can see the calculation; I just handed a trained assassin a blade, fully aware of what she can do with it. The fact that I did it without hesitation isn’t lost on her. Her expression changes, opening up a little. It’s not trust, exactly. But something close to it.

She picks up the knife and starts dicing the onion with a speed and precision that puts my work to shame. Her cuts are uniform, mechanical, perfect. Of course they are. Everything this woman does with a blade is perfect.

“Tell me about it,” I urge, though gently, while browning the beef in a pan. I angle myself to keep her in my periphery, since I’m not stupid enough to turn my back on her while she’s holding a knife. “Your life in Italy.”

She glances at me sideways. “Why?”

“Because I want to know.”

“You want to know about the life the Russos gave me? I thought you hated them.”

“I hate what they did to you. That doesn’t mean I hate everything about who you’ve become.” I stir the meat after seasoning, keeping my eyes on the pan. “You spent a long time there. I want to know what it was like.”

She’s quiet for a while, focused on the garlic now, mincing it into pieces so small they’re almost invisible. When she speaks, her voice has lost some of its edge. “Rome is beautiful. I lived there for the first few years, in a house near the Villa Borghese. Vincenzo had a place there. It was... large. Cold, mostly. Marble floors. The kind of house where sounds echo, and you can’t really get away with anything. I’m sure he liked it that way.”

I scrape the onions and garlic into the pan with the beef. The smell fills the kitchen immediately—rich, familiar, warm. I can’t help but give her a hopeful glance, but she’s as far away as ever. Lost in her memories.

“The cook was named Elena,” she continues. “She was the closest thing I had to a mother figure. She taught me how to make fresh pasta when I was seventeen. How to debone a fish. How to make a proper risotto.” A pause. “She was kind. One of the few people in that house who was.”

“What happened to her?”

Her face hardens. “Vincenzo let her go when I was twenty. He said she’d gotten too attached to me.” Her voice is flat when she says it, but I hear the loss underneath. Another person taken from her by the man who stole everything.

She talks more as we cook, and even more while we sit at the counter with our wine as the sauce simmers. About the training—not the killing, not the missions, but the physical conditioning. The hours of hand-to-hand combat, the language lessons, the tradecraft. She describes it the way a soldier might describe boot camp: brutal but formative, the thing that made her who she is.

She tells me about the safe houses she’s lived in across Europe. The cities she knows like the back of her hand. The languages she speaks. Italian, French, Czech, enough Russian to get by. I won’t bother telling her she barely passed basic Spanish in high school.

I listen to all of it, and while I’m listening, a thought takes shape that I haven’t really let myself consider until now.

What if I’m not going to help Laura get her memory back? What if, instead, I’m going to get to know Ivy?

The doctor’s words circle back. Dr. Feld was careful not to promise anything. He said long-term amnesia, especially trauma-induced, is unpredictable. There’s no guarantee. There’s no timeline.