RUIN ME, MR. DE LUCA

Chapter Two —The Man Behind the Name

Elias stayed behind the wine crates for what felt like an hour and was probably four minutes.

The gunfire had stopped somewhere below him. Now there was only the rain, drumming on the courtyard stones, and the sound of his own breath tearing in and out of his chest. His hands wouldn't stop shaking. He pressed them flat against his knees and watched them tremble anyway, still stained with Marco's blood, the rain turning it a thin, pink color that ran down his wrists and vanished.

He looked at the photograph again, because looking at it was easier than thinking.

Marco on a terrace, younger and grinning. Adrian De Luca beside him, not smiling at all. And on the back, in his uncle's cramped, impatient handwriting: "Elias, I lied about everything." Beneath it, an address in Posillipo, a street Elias knew only because tourists photographed the villas along it.

He wanted to laugh. He wanted to be furious. His uncle had spent eighteen years teaching him to be honest, to look people in the eye, to never leave a debt unpaid, and the man had apparently been lying through every Sunday dinner. Even now, even dead, Marco had managed to leave him one more question and no answers.

And the envelope. He pulled it from his jacket and turned it over in the dim light. Small, black, heavier than it looked, with a silver symbol stamped on the front: a crown wound round with a snake. Marco had said not to open it here. Elias ran his thumb along the flap and felt, distinctly, how easy it would be to tear it open and stop being afraid of the unknown.

His phone buzzed against his hip.

He nearly dropped it. The screen showed no name, only a single line.

UNKNOWN:

Don't go to the address on the photograph.

Elias went cold from the scalp down. He had not told anyone he'd found it. He had barely told himself.

UNKNOWN:

It is watched. You have ten minutes before they find you where you are.

He looked up at the dark windows ringing the courtyard. Every one of them suddenly looked like an eye. His thumbs moved before his fear could talk him out of it.

ELIAS:

Who are you?

The reply came at once.

UNKNOWN:

Someone who wants you alive.

ELIAS:

That's what everyone says right before they kill you.

There was a pause long enough for the rain to fill it. Then:

UNKNOWN:

Marco called me at 11:31. He said you would argue.

A sound came out of Elias that was half laugh and half sob. It was so exactly like Marco that for a second the courtyard blurred.

He wiped his face with a wet sleeve. "Don't trust anyone," his uncle had said. But Marco had also said "go to Adrian," and the one thing he had not said was why. Whoever was texting knew things only Marco could have told them. Either they were what they said, or they had taken the information out of a dying man, and Elias had already stopped being able to tell the difference.

ELIAS:

Where do I go?

UNKNOWN:

Stay where you are. A car is coming.

He read it twice. Then he stood up, shoved the phone into his pocket, and walked out of the courtyard, away from the place he'd been told to wait. If someone wanted him in a particular spot, then that spot was the last place he wanted to be.

He made it half a block.

Headlights swung into the end of the lane, slow and low. A black sedan, not the SUV he'd half expected. It idled at the mouth of the street with its lights on high, and a rear door opened.

The man who stepped out was the stranger from the alley.

Not the one who had been shot. This was one of the two who'd stood behind him, the one with the scar through his eyebrow, and he was not alone anymore. Five men fanned out from the sedan, coats open, guns in their hands.

"Elias Moretti!" the scarred one called. "Come here. We're not going to hurt you."

Elias had grown up in a restaurant. He knew what a man sounded like when he was selling something he had no intention of delivering. He turned and ran.

"Get him!"

Footsteps hammered behind him. He took the first left, then a right, then up a ramp of wet cobbles that spat him onto a wider street he didn't recognize. A hand snagged his collar and he twisted out of his jacket, the fabric ripping, and kept going without it, one arm clamped over the envelope hidden against his ribs. He had no plan beyond away.

Then a black SUV swung around the corner on two wheels and stopped broadside between him and the men behind him.

The doors opened. Two men stepped out, both in dark suits, one holding a pistol at his side with an ease that was almost casual. He didn't raise it. He just spoke, in a voice that carried perfectly over the rain.

"De Luca."

The effect was instant. The scarred man skidded to a halt. Behind him, the others stopped as if the street itself had gone to concrete. Elias, gasping, saw what happened to their faces. It wasn't surprise. It was fear, plain and unguarded, the kind a grown man doesn't want anyone to see.

The scarred man took one step back. Then another. Then he turned, and all of them were running.

The man who had spoken holstered his pistol and walked toward Elias through the rain. He was tall and broad-shouldered, in a suit that cost more than Elias's tuition, and he did not look like a man who'd just frightened off five armed men. He looked like a man who'd done it before breakfast.

"Elias Moretti?"

Elias backed away. "Who are you?"

"My name is Luca. I work for Adrian." He said it plainly, the way a man says where he lives. "I'm the one who's been texting you."

"You were watching me."

"Since Marco called us. We were two minutes late to the restaurant." For a moment his expression flickered, and Elias saw something there that looked a lot like guilt. "Two minutes. I'm sorry."

The words hit harder than they should have. Elias looked down at his hands. "It was one of your men who shot the guy in the alley."

"Yes."

"You killed someone."

"He was about to take that envelope off you. He wasn't going to be gentle about it." Luca held his eyes. "You can hate us for it. You can do that in the car. It's warm and nobody's shooting."

Elias almost laughed. Almost. He looked at the SUV, its dark windows, the rain sliding down the glass. Getting into a stranger's car at midnight was exactly how people vanished, and every instinct he owned told him so.

But the other choice was a street full of men who wanted him alive for reasons he didn't understand, and his uncle's voice, saying one thing, over and over.

Go to Adrian.

"If I get in," Elias said slowly, "I keep what I'm carrying. Nobody touches it."

Luca raised an eyebrow. "Marco said you'd bargain."

"Marco said a lot of things."

"Fine." Luca opened the rear door. "It stays with you."

Elias climbed in.

• • •

The drive took forty minutes. The city thinned and fell away behind them, streetlights becoming scarce, the sea a dark presence to the left, until the SUV swung through a pair of iron gates that opened before anyone had touched a button. Beyond them, pines lined a long drive that climbed toward a house.

Elias had spent his life in a place where everyone knew everyone's business. He had never seen anything like this. The mansion sat behind stone walls, black stone, with tall windows spilling gold light onto a wet lawn. Men in dark clothes stood at intervals along the drive. Cameras turned silently on their mounts to follow the car.

"What is this place?"

"Home," Luca said.

"That's not a home."

"What is it, then?"

Elias studied the walls, the cameras, the way the guards stood with their backs to the house and their eyes on the dark. "A fortress."

Luca's mouth twitched. "Now you're beginning to understand."

Inside, everything was expensive and nothing was warm. No photographs on the walls. No flowers. Marble underfoot, a staircase like a surgeon's incision. It looked less like a place where someone lived and more like a place where someone waited. A woman in a black dress met them in the hall and led Elias down a long corridor without a word, stopping at a heavy wooden door. She knocked twice.

"Come in."

Elias's stomach dropped. He knew that voice. Deep, calm, with a cold edge under it. The man from the phone.

The door opened, and for the first time he saw Adrian De Luca.

He was not what Elias had expected. No bodyguards. No gun in his hand. He stood at a tall window with his back half-turned, looking out at the dark gardens, in a black shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow. He was younger than Elias had pictured, thirty-five, maybe thirty-seven, with dark hair that had been pushed back with an impatient hand and had not stayed. A thin white scar crossed one forearm. He wasn't the gray monster of the rumors. He was worse. He looked like a man who didn't need to be one.

Then he turned, and his eyes landed on Elias, and Elias understood the photograph.

They were sharp and unforgiving, the kind of eyes that made you feel every lie you'd ever told was already on file. They moved over him once, from the torn collar to the ruined shoes, and stopped on his hands.

"Leave us," Adrian said.

The door closed behind the woman. The silence afterward was heavy enough to lean on.

Adrian crossed the room, slowly, not threatening, which somehow made it worse. He pulled a folded towel from a side table and held it out. Elias didn't take it. After a moment Adrian simply took his wrist, turned his hand over, and began wiping the blood from his knuckles with an impersonal, careful thoroughness.

His hands were warm. Elias hated that he noticed.

"That's Marco's," Elias said, and his voice cracked in the middle.

"I know." Adrian didn't look up. "He was the only man in Naples who ever told me no to my face."

The words undid something in Elias's chest that he had held shut for an hour. He pulled his hand away and stepped back, furious at himself. "You called me. You said I had something that belonged to you."

"I wanted to see if you'd answer. People who run from a call like that are usually guilty or stupid." The faintest pause. "You answered."

"You could have just said who you were."

"No. I couldn't have." Adrian folded the towel with precise fingers and set it aside. "You look like him."

"Like who?"

"Your father."

Elias went very still. "Don't."

"He's standing in your face. Around the eyes. You frown the same way."

"My father died when I was six."

"Yes." Adrian went to his desk and opened a drawer. "I was there."

He set a small photograph on the blotter, and Elias crossed the room without meaning to. A man in his thirties, laughing, a hand on the shoulder of a skinny, scowling teenager who was unmistakably Adrian. The teenager looked ready to bite the camera.

"Your father took me in when I was sixteen," Adrian said. "He's the reason I'm alive. He was the closest thing I ever had to a brother."

"Then why didn't you come for me?"

For the first time, Adrian's composure slipped. He looked at the window. "Because he made me promise I wouldn't. If I ever came near you, they would know you were still alive."

"Who's they?"

"The people who killed your parents."

The room tilted. Elias gripped the edge of the desk. "They died in a crash."

"That's what Marco told you. It's what Marco was meant to tell you." Adrian's voice was quiet. "It wasn't an accident. They were betrayed, and I was twenty feet away when it happened, and I've spent eighteen years finding out who did it."

"Who?"

"I'll tell you when I can prove it."

"That's not good enough."

"It's what I have."

Elias laughed, a short, raw sound with nothing funny in it. "My uncle's dead. Men with guns chased me across the city. One of yours shot a man in front of me, and now you're telling me my entire life was a story someone else wrote." He drew a breath that shook. "I'm not standing here asking politely. I want answers."

"You'll get them."

"When?"

"When you're ready."

"I'm ready now."

"No." Adrian's eyes were steady on him. "You aren't. Because you still think you know who you are."

Elias's hand moved on its own, closing over the envelope under his shirt. Adrian saw it, and his expression sharpened.

"Marco gave you something. That is the reason he's dead."

"I made a deal with your man. It stays with me."

"Luca has no authority to make that deal."

"Then you'll have to take it from me." Elias heard how it sounded, small and stubborn and absurd in this room, against this man. He did not move. "Marco said to come to you. He didn't say to hand myself over."

Something unexpected moved across Adrian's face. Not anger. Something nearer to reluctant respect, and then, quickly, something sadder. "He told me you'd say exactly that."

"Stop quoting him."

"Then understand this." Adrian stepped closer, until Elias had to tilt his head to hold his gaze. "Moretti is the name Marco gave you. It isn't your name. Your father was not an ordinary man, Elias. And neither are you."

The air left the room.

"What is my name?"

Adrian opened his mouth.

The first explosion came from the east wing.

The whole house shook. Windows rattled in their frames. A chandelier somewhere down the hall began to chime, and a second blast followed it, closer, and then gunfire cracked outside, flat and fast, the sound a house makes when it is being taken apart. Shouts rose in the corridor. Boots pounded toward the door.

Adrian moved before Elias had finished flinching. He caught Elias by the arm, hauled him away from the window and behind the heavy bulk of the desk, and the lights went out.

In the darkness, Elias heard the quiet slide of metal. When his eyes adjusted, there was a gun in Adrian's hand, and everything about the man had changed. The warmth, the unguarded flicker, the careful hands. They were gone. What stood in front of him now was the thing the city whispered about.

"Stay behind me," Adrian said.

"What's happening?"

"Whatever you do next, you do it at my side. Do you understand?"

"Why?"

Another shot cracked through the walls. Adrian's eyes met his in the dark, and they held something Elias hadn't expected to see there. Not rage. Dread.

"Because those men didn't come for me," he said quietly. "They came for you."