RUIN ME, MR. DE LUCA

Chapter Three —The Name They Buried

For three seconds, nothing in the study moved but the sound.

Then Adrian's hand closed around Elias's wrist and he was being pulled, fast and wordless, across the room. Elias heard a section of the bookshelf swing inward on a hidden hinge, felt cool air from a passage that smelled of old stone, and then Adrian's palm settled between his shoulder blades and pushed him through.

"Walk. Don't stop. Don't touch the walls."

"Why not the walls?"

"Because there are things in them."

Elias decided not to ask. He walked.

The passage was narrow and black, lit only by thin strips of red emergency light along the floor. Behind them the panel sealed with a heavy click that he felt in his teeth. The gunfire reached them through the stone, muffled and flat, like a radio playing in another house. Adrian stayed so close that Elias could feel the heat of him at his back, and when the floor dipped without warning and Elias stumbled, a hand caught his elbow before he had finished falling.

"I've got you."

Two words, said without any weight at all. Elias would think about them later, when he had room to think.

They rounded a corner and nearly collided with Luca coming the other way, one hand clamped to his shoulder, blood black in the red light, his pistol hanging loose in the other.

"East wing's gone," Luca said, breathing hard. "Twelve men, maybe fifteen. They came through the old service gate. Somebody opened it from inside."

Adrian's face didn't change, but something behind it went very cold. "Inside."

"Yes."

Luca swayed, and Elias caught him before he thought about it. "Sit. Sit down." He lowered him against the wall, tore the hem off his own shirt, folded it into a thick pad, and pressed it hard over the wound. Luca hissed through his teeth. "Through and through," Elias said, feeling for the exit. "It missed the bone, I think. Keep pressure on it and keep breathing."

Marco had made him renew the restaurant's first-aid certificate every single year. Elias had always thought it was the hobby of an overcautious man. Now he wondered, with a small cold turn of the stomach, what Marco had been expecting.

Luca looked up at him, gray-faced. "Steady hands."

"They're not," Elias said. "I'm just good at hiding it."

Above Luca's head, Adrian was watching him. It lasted a beat too long, and there was something in it Elias couldn't name. It wasn't gratitude, exactly. It looked more like a man recalculating.

"Can you walk?" Adrian asked Luca.

"Walk, yes."

"Then walk."

• • •

The passage ended at a steel door as thick as Elias's forearm. Adrian pressed his palm to a panel, typed a code too fast to follow, and the door swung open on a windowless concrete room: a table, a cot, shelves of water and medical supplies, and an entire wall of monitors. Luca collapsed onto the cot. Adrian sealed the door, and the sound of the house, the shooting, the shouting, the distant roar of fire, vanished all at once, leaving a silence so complete that Elias could hear his own pulse.

On the monitors, the mansion was coming apart in twelve grainy squares. Men in black moved through the corridors in pairs, methodical, unhurried. In the east wing, flames licked the edge of a curtain. In the hall where Elias had been led an hour ago, a woman in a black dress lay very still on the marble.

Elias looked away fast. Adrian's jaw tightened, but he said nothing.

One of the screens showed a man crouched at the foot of the stairs, tying off a wound on his own arm. His sleeve had ridden up. On the inside of his wrist, dark against the skin, was a tattoo: a crown wound round with a snake.

Elias's hand went to his ribs, to the envelope. "That's the symbol on this."

"Yes."

"Whose is it?"

Adrian didn't answer. His eyes were on the screens, and Elias saw him counting doors, men, exits, the way Marco used to count the covers on a busy Saturday night.

Then the speakers crackled to life.

It was the house intercom, the kind used to call the staff to dinner, and someone had taken it over. The voice that came through was smooth and unhurried and faintly amused, an older man's voice, polished like good furniture.

"Adrian. Let's not be children about this." A pause. "Send the boy up, along with what he carries, and I'll take my men and leave your house standing. You have until the east wing finishes burning."

The speaker clicked off.

Nobody in the room breathed. On the monitors, the fire in the east wing grew by an inch.

Elias turned to look at Adrian, and Adrian wasn't looking at him. He was looking at the floor. His jaw worked once. The silence stretched, one second, two, and Elias felt every one of them land.

"Are you going to trade me?"

"No."

"That took you too long."

"I was thinking." Adrian lifted his eyes. They were steady, and they didn't flinch. "About how many of my people die if I say yes, and how many if I say no."

It should have frightened him. It did, a little. But it was the first thing Adrian had said all night that Elias believed without effort, because no liar would have admitted it.

"Then stop keeping me in the dark," Elias said. His voice shook and he forced it flat. "Whatever's in this is mine. Marco died for it. My parents died for something. I'm done being the last person in the room who doesn't know what it is."

He pulled the envelope out and held it between them.

"Open it with me."

"Elias—"

"You promised my father you'd keep me safe. Safe doesn't mean ignorant. Not anymore."

For a long moment Adrian said nothing. Then he nodded once, short and grave, the nod of a man conceding a point to an equal, and he sat down at the table and pulled out the second chair.

Elias sat. His hands were steady now, and he didn't know why. He slid a finger under the flap, and the paper tore with a small dry sound.

Three things slid onto the table.

A small brass key, stamped with the crown and the snake.

A folded sheet of heavy cream paper, written closely in an elegant, slanting hand.

And a birth certificate, yellow with age, its corners soft as cloth.

Elias picked up the certificate first. It was a copy from an old Neapolitan registry, and the date on it was his own birthday. There was his mother's maiden name, Anna Ricci, which Marco had told him once and never again. And above it, in careful black ink:

Child: Elias Matteo Ravenna.

Father: Matteo Ravenna.

He read it twice, and then a third time, and the name did not become his. It felt like reading someone else's mail.

"Ravenna," he said.

Across the table, all the color had left Adrian's face. "Say it again."

"Ravenna. Elias Ravenna." He looked up. "That's my name?"

"It's your father's name." Adrian's voice was very quiet. "The Ravenna family is the oldest in the south. Older than mine. Older than anyone's. Matteo was the eldest son and the heir, and he walked away from all of it for your mother." He swallowed. "They never forgave him. They never forgave her. And you are..."

He stopped.

"What am I?" Elias asked.

"The last of the direct line."

The words settled over the room like dust. Luca had lifted his head from the cot. On the monitors, the fire kept spreading.

Elias unfolded the letter with fingers that had finally begun to shake. The handwriting was his father's, he understood, with a strange, hollow certainty. A man he remembered only as a laugh, the smell of cigarettes, and a pair of large hands lifting him onto a counter to watch the stove.

He read the first line aloud.

"My son, if you are reading this, then I am dead and you have been found. Do not trust—"

The speakers cracked again.

"Elias."

It was the same smooth voice. Closer, somehow. Warm now, almost fond, the way a man speaks to a child he has been waiting a long time to meet.

"Elias Ravenna. How wonderful to finally say it aloud." A soft, satisfied exhale. "I'm your uncle Dante. Come upstairs, nephew. Let's talk about your father."

Elias lowered the letter. He had one uncle. That uncle had died on a kitchen floor, bleeding, with a skillet in his fist.

And the one on the speaker had just set a house on fire to say hello.