Chapter 6 - The First Translation
I didn't answer right away. I walked over to the mahogany table, laid my mother’s ledger down beside the ancient parchment, and pulled reading glasses from my coat pocket.
For twenty minutes, the private library was completely silent except for the rustle of old paper and the steady ticking of a grandfather clock in the corner.
I leaned over the parchment, tracing my fingers across the faded iron-gall ink.
"This isn't a nineteenth-century port concession," I said quietly, without looking up.
Matteo stopped pacing near the window. "Explain."
"Your rivals didn't find an old loophole," I continued, pointing a finger at a specific paragraph written in cramped, cursive script. "They forged it. Look at the spelling of porto franco. The spelling they used here—with the double 'ff' and the archaic syntax—was standardized out of Italian maritime law in 1842. But the watermark on this paper is from a mill in Paterson, New Jersey, dated 2014."
A heavy silence settled over the room.
Matteo slowly walked over to the table, leaning down beside me. His shoulder brushed against mine, sending a sudden, unexpected wave of warmth through my coat. He stared down at the document, his dark eyes narrowing as he recognized the implications.
"A modern forgery," Matteo muttered, his jaw tightening. "Planted in our municipal archive to look like a historic land claim."
"Planted by someone who has access to your secure facility," I added, looking up at him. "Someone who knows archival formatting well enough to fake the ink, but not well enough to get the linguistic timeline right. They used nineteenth-century vocabulary with twentieth-century spelling anomalies."
Matteo looked down at me, a slow, dangerous smile spreading across his face—not a smirk, but a look of genuine, predatory respect.
"You're incredible, Miss Lane," he said softly.
"I'm an academic, Mr. Moretti," I corrected him, stepping back slightly to put some distance between us. "And it turns out my grammar is good for more than just correcting your restaurant insults."
He let out a short, rich laugh that echoed off the oak panels.
"Alright, Miss Lane. Name your terms."
"Two thousand dollars a week," I said without missing a beat, looking him straight in the eye. "Paid in advance. Full health insurance coverage back-dated to cover my mother’s outstanding hospital balance. And I keep my apartment."
Matteo didn't even blink. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a thick black fountain pen, slid a blank contract across the table, and pushed it toward me.
May you like
"Done," he said. "When can you start?"
"Right now," I said, picking up the pen.
