RUIN ME, MR. DE LUCA

By 11:47 the rain had been hammering Naples for three hours, and Elias Moretti had stopped pretending he wasn't worried. It wasn't the gentle kind of rain that sent people home to coffee and blankets. This rain came sideways off the bay and threw itself at the windows of Trattoria Moretti as though it wanted in. Elias stood behind the counter with his statistics notes spread across the zinc top, a highlighter going dry in his fingers, and read the same line of the same page four times. The chairs were already upturned on the tables. The kitchen was scrubbed, the register locked, the lights dimmed to a low amber. should have gone up to bed half an hour ago. But Marco had said, "Wait for me. I'll be back before midnight." Marco kept his word the way other men kept their breath. In the eighteen years since Elias had come to live above this restaurant, his uncle had never once been late to close without calling. He dialed again. Three rings, then Marco's recorded voice telling him to leave a message, in the tone of a man who resented the entire concept. Elias hung up without leaving one. He had a rule about not panicking over a late uncle. Marco was fifty-six, built like a refrigerator, and had once chased a pickpocket four blocks through the Spanish Quarter on a bad knee. Men like that did not simply disappear. Still, the feeling in his stomach refused to settle. "Where are you?" he muttered to the empty room. Thunder cracked directly overhead and the lights flickered. In the half second of darkness, something struck the back door. It wasn't the wind. It was a heavy, deliberate thud, followed by a second one, like a body leaning against the wood. Elias set down the highlighter. He told himself it was a delivery driver, a drunk, a stray cat the size of a dog. Then he reached under the counter and came up with the only weapon he owned: Marco's wooden rolling pin, worn smooth by forty years of dough. It was absurd. He gripped it harder anyway. The kitchen smelled of garlic and bleach. At the back door, the handle turned slowly, once, twice. Someone was trying it from outside, someone without a key. Marco had a key. "Who's there?" His voice came out smaller than he wanted. He tried again, lower. "I'm calling the police." The door burst inward and a man fell through it. Elias raised the pin, saw the face, and let it clatter to the tile. "Marco!" His uncle collapsed against him, all that bulk suddenly a dead weight, and Elias caught him under the arms and lowered them both to the floor. Blood had soaked the front of Marco's white shirt and was running over the hand pressed to his stomach, shockingly warm where it slid across Elias's fingers. "Who did this? I'm calling an ambulance." "Lock the door." "Marco, you're bleeding, you need” "Lock it." Marco's hand clamped around his wrist with a strength that didn't belong to a dying man. "Now, Elias." Something in that voice moved his legs before his mind caught up. He crossed the kitchen in three strides, slammed the bolt home, and dragged the steel prep table across the door. When he got back to his knees beside his uncle, he finally saw where Marco was looking: past him, through the swinging door, toward the front windows. Elias had known this man his whole life and had never seen that expression on his face. It was fear, and not the fear of dying. It was fear of whatever was outside. "They found me," Marco breathed. "After all this time." "Who found you?" Marco didn't answer. His free hand fumbled inside his coat and came out with a small black envelope, creased and damp at one corner. He pressed it into Elias's palm and folded his fingers over it. "Take it. Don't open it here." "What is it?" "Not here. They're watching." He coughed, and the sound was wet. "If I don't make it through tonight, you leave Naples. Don't go home. Don't call anyone. Don't trust ” "Stop talking like that." Elias already had his phone out, thumb over the emergency number. Marco shoved his hand down, hard. "No. You don't know who's listening. You don't know who's been paid." Elias stared at him. Eighteen years of Sunday dinners, of burned pasta and bad jokes and a man teaching a grieving six-year-old how to hold a knife properly, and now his uncle was looking at him like a stranger he had to convince. "Then tell me what's happening." "Go to Adrian." "Who?" "Adrian De Luca." The name sat in the kitchen like a word from a foreign language. "Marco, I don't know anyone called" "You were never supposed to know his name." Something crossed his uncle's face, regret or an old apology. "I should have told you everything. I thought I had more time." Outside, an engine rumbled to a stop, then another, then a third. Headlights swept across the ceiling and slid down the wall. Elias crawled to the swinging door and looked through the gap. Three black cars sat across the street with rain streaming off their roofs, and men were stepping out of them, all in dark coats, all moving with the unhurried ease of people who had done this before. "Marco, they're here." "I know." Marco shoved him toward the back. "Go." "I'm not leaving you." "I'm already dead, ragazzo." He said it gently, which was worse than shouting. "Don't waste it." Elias's eyes burned. He wanted to hoist his uncle over his shoulder and carry him out like they did in films, and he knew, with a cold and practical clarity, that he couldn't. He shoved the envelope inside his jacket against his ribs. Then he bent and pressed his forehead to Marco's, just for a second. "I'll come back for you." "No, you won't." Marco smiled with bloody teeth. "Go." The front window exploded. Glass sprayed across the dining room. Elias threw himself behind the counter with his arms over his head as boots crunched through the wreckage. Marco, impossibly, heaved up onto one elbow and hurled the cast-iron skillet from the stove across the room. Someone grunted. Someone else shouted in Italian, "Take him alive! Alive!" and the last word followed Elias like a hand on his collar. He couldn't tell which of them it meant. He dragged the table aside, wrenched the bolt, and stumbled out into the alley, and the rain hit him like a wall. • • • He ran the way you run when your body has stopped taking instructions. Past the dumpsters, past the bolted shutters of the bakery, away from the main road and its headlights. Marco had taught him that years ago, without ever explaining why a restaurant owner needed to know it: a car can chase you down a street, but it can't follow you up a staircase lane. So Elias cut into the old quarter and climbed. The stone steps were slick as glass and he took them two at a time, past laundry lines sagging with soaked sheets, past windows that stayed dark, past a door where a dog barked once and thought better of it. When his lungs finally gave out, he was ten minutes away, under the dripping roof of an abandoned shopfront, bent double with his hands on his knees and rain running into his mouth. Marco was lying on the kitchen floor. Elias had left him there. The thought arrived with its own cold weight, and he made himself set it aside, because there was no room for it yet. He checked behind him. The stairs were empty. The only sound was water drumming on tin. He thought for one stupid, hopeful moment that he had gotten away. Then his phone rang. The screen read Unknown Number. Elias stared at it through three rings. Every sensible instinct told him to throw it in a gutter. But a voice in his head was already asking who knew he was here, and the only way to find out was to answer. "Hello?" Silence, and then a man's voice, deep and unhurried, with an edge like cold steel. "You have something that belongs to me." Elias's hand tightened on the phone. "Who is this?" "You know what I'm talking about." "I don't know you." "You will." The line went dead. He had lowered the phone when he heard the footsteps: slow, unbothered, coming up the stairs behind him. He turned. A tall man stood at the bottom of the steps beneath a black umbrella, black coat, black suit, his face half swallowed by the dark. Two men waited a pace behind him. They had not even bothered to hurry. Elias backed up until the shutter was cold against his spine. "Stay away from me." "Elias Moretti." It wasn't a question. "How do you know my name?" "We have been looking for you for a long time." The man reached into his coat. Elias flinched, but what came out was not a gun. It was a photograph, which he held out like a card he expected to win with. "Look." Elias should not have looked. He looked anyway. It was Marco, younger, with less gray in his beard and no limp in his posture, standing at the edge of a terrace with a man Elias had never seen. The stranger in the photo was perhaps twenty-five, in a dark shirt, with a face that seemed carved to be admired and feared in equal measure. His eyes were the problem. Even through the grain of an old print, they were cold enough to chill the rain. "Who is that?" "Adrian De Luca." Go to Adrian. Marco's voice, half a breath from the end. Elias's pulse hammered in his throat. "You know him?" "Everyone in this city knows him." The man's mouth thinned. "Where he goes, people stop being safe." "Where's my uncle?" The man said nothing, and the silence told him everything. "No." "I'm sorry." "No. He was alive when I left him." "He was shot, Elias. He died twelve minutes ago." The rain did not stop and the city did not go quiet. Somewhere beyond the stairs a scooter whined through the wet streets and a church bell struck the quarter hour. Elias heard none of it. Marco, who had taught him to cook, to fix a sink, to ride a bike, to survive. Marco, gone, while he stood here like an i***t with his back against a wall. He wanted to scream. Instead, he went very still, because the man's eyes had dropped to the front of his jacket. "The envelope," the stranger said softly. "Give it to me." "No." "You don't understand what you're carrying." "Then explain it to me." "I can't." The man took a step up. "But if Adrian learns that you have it, he will come for you himself. And you will wish it had been us." Elias's fingers closed over the envelope through the wet fabric. Anger, finally, was burning through the grief, hot and clean and useful. "Why should I be afraid of him?" The stranger smiled without any humor at all. "You should be afraid of everyone." The shot cracked off the stone walls. The man folded, the umbrella tumbling from his hand and rolling down the steps like a dropped flower. His two men dragged out their guns, shouting, swinging toward the rooftops, and Elias did not wait to learn who had fired or at whom. As the stranger fell, the photograph slid from his fingers. Elias lunged, snatched it out of the puddle, and ran. He took the stairs up, not down, away from the guns and the headlights, toward the maze of lanes he had never been allowed to walk at night. Behind him, a second shot split the dark. Then a third. He did not look back. It was only when he reached a narrow courtyard and ducked behind a stack of wine crates, chest heaving, that he looked down at the photograph still crushed in his fist. Marco, the terrace, the cold-eyed stranger, Adrian De Luca. He turned it over. On the back, in his uncle's cramped handwriting, were five words. Elias, I lied about everything. And beneath them, an address.