RUIN ME, MR. DE LUCA

Chapter Four —The Last Line

The speaker clicked off, and the silence rushed back in, thinner than before.

"Dante," Adrian said, in the careful voice of a man pressing on a bruise. "I should have known he'd come himself."

"You told me you knew who ordered it."

"I told you I'd say when I could prove it." Adrian's eyes didn't leave the monitors. "I suspected. I had no proof, and I didn't think he'd be foolish enough to walk into my house to get it."

"He doesn't look foolish." On the screens, men were gathering at the foot of the great staircase, rifles lowered, waiting with the patience of people who knew they would be obeyed. "He looks like he's enjoying himself."

Luca gave a rough laugh from the cot and winced. "That's Dante."

Adrian crossed to the back wall and ran his hand along a seam in the concrete, and a steel hatch the size of a coffin lid sighed open in the floor. Cold air rose out of it, smelling of salt. "The tunnel runs under the cliff to the boathouse. Ten minutes on foot, and there's a boat. If we leave now, we're on open water before they realize we aren't upstairs."

"They'll realize in about five," Elias said.

Adrian looked at him.

"He said we have until the east wing finishes burning. He's watching it burn. He won't wait politely." Elias heard himself talking faster, the way he did at the trattoria on a Saturday night when three tables sent back the same dish and he had to fix it in his head before it reached the kitchen. "He wants me alive. It's the one thing he's said twice. So if I talk to him, he'll keep talking."

"No."

"You haven't heard the idea."

"I don't need to." Adrian's voice dropped. "You're not going near that microphone."

"I'm not going near him. I'm buying us time." Elias walked to the console beneath the monitors, found a red button engraved with the word INTERCOM, and put his thumb over it. "I said safe doesn't mean ignorant, Fine. Then let me be useful."

A muscle jumped in Adrian's jaw. Behind him, Luca said quietly, "He's not wrong, boss."

Adrian shut his eyes for exactly one second. When he opened them, he nodded.

Elias pressed the button. His own voice came back at him through the house, thin and strange, echoing off marble somewhere above.

"Uncle Dante."

A pause. Then the soft, pleased voice: "There he is."

"I'll come up." Elias kept his tone flat and a little frightened, which wasn't hard. "But not while the house is burning. Call your men off the fire. Give me ten minutes to say goodbye to the people who've been looking after me."

"Looking after you." A chuckle. "Is that what they're calling it now?"

"Ten minutes."

"Nine," Dante said, with great courtesy. "I'm a patient man, Elias, but I'm not a stupid one. Don't make me come down there."

The speaker went dead.

Adrian was staring at him. It wasn't the recalculating look from the passage. It was something stranger, as though he'd found a coin in his pocket that he didn't remember putting there. "You just negotiated with the man who killed your parents."

"I bought us nine minutes." Elias's knees had begun to shake, and he locked them. "Can we go now, before I think about it?"

Luca was already pushing himself up off the cot. "I'll take the east service stairs and give them something to chase."

"You're shot," Elias said.

"In the shoulder. I've been shot in worse places by better men." Luca grinned, gray and crooked. "Go. Look after him." He didn't say which of them he meant.

• • •

The tunnel was barely tall enough to stand in. Adrian went first, a flashlight clamped in his teeth until Elias took it from him without a word and held it steady, and the beam danced over wet stone and rusted pipe. The air grew colder. The sound of the sea swelled below them, long and hollow, like something breathing.

For a while there was only that, and their footsteps, and the hard, clipped rhythm of Adrian's breath. Then Elias noticed the dark stain spreading down the back of his sleeve.

"You're hit."

"It's nothing."

"It's not nothing. It's dripping." Elias caught his arm and turned it into the light. A bullet had plowed a shallow furrow across the outside of his left shoulder, the shirt torn, the skin open and still bleeding. "When? In the study?"

"A graze."

"Sit."

"We don't have time."

"We have six minutes, and you'll faint in four if you keep bleeding." He pushed Adrian down onto an overturned crate, tore a fresh strip from his own ruined shirt, and worked quickly, pressing, folding, knotting. He had done this once already tonight. His hands knew the way now.

Adrian sat very still under them.

It was strange, Elias thought, to be this close. Close enough to see the salt of sweat at his temple, the line of his throat, the pulse beating hard under the skin. The flashlight made a small, warm room out of the dark around them, and in it Adrian De Luca did not look like the most feared man in Italy. He looked tired. He looked like someone who hadn't been touched gently in a very long time and wasn't sure what to do about it.

"Why are you doing this?" Adrian asked, low.

"Because you're bleeding."

"That's not what I meant." His eyes lifted to Elias's. "Three hours ago I was a stranger who'd kept a secret from you for eighteen years. Why help me?"

Elias pulled the knot tight. His hands, he noticed, were not quite steady anymore. "Because the first thing you did when you saw me was wipe Marco's blood off my hands. A man like you didn't have to do that."

Adrian said nothing. His gaze dropped, just once, to Elias's mouth and came back, and Elias felt it like a missed step in the dark.

Neither of them moved.

Somewhere above, very faintly, the stone shuddered with the distant crack of gunfire.

Adrian stood first. "Come on."

• • •

The boathouse was a cave cut into the base of the cliff, a stone mouth opening onto black water. A sleek dark speedboat rocked at the dock, and a rusted door stood at the far end. The rain had thinned to a drizzle. The sea breathed against the pilings, patient as an animal.

"Get in," Adrian said, already on the dock, hand on the mooring line.

Elias stepped across onto the deck. The boat tilted under him.

The rusted door slammed open.

Light flooded the boathouse, and three men in black came through with their weapons already raised. Adrian spun, drawing, and a shot cracked across the water. Elias saw the muzzle flash. He saw Adrian's gun coming up too slowly, his hurt arm betraying him, and he didn't think. He threw himself across the gap and hit Adrian at the waist with his whole weight, and the second shot went over their heads and whined off the stone.

They went down in a heap on the dock. Adrian fired once from his back, and one of the men dropped. Elias scrambled up, grabbed the knife clipped beside the helm, and sawed at the mooring line until it parted. Adrian was on his feet again, hauling himself behind the wheel, and the engine caught with a roar that shook the whole cave.

Bullets stitched the water behind them. Then the boathouse mouth was gone and they were out on the open sea under a low black sky, the engine drowning everything else, the mansion burning on the cliff above like a second, smaller sun.

• • •

It was a long time before either of them spoke.

Adrian drove with his jaw set and his bandaged shoulder rigid, spray soaking his shirt, the wind tearing his hair back from his face. Elias wedged himself into the seat beside him and held the rail with both hands until his fingers hurt. Behind them, the fire dwindled to an orange smudge and then to nothing.

"You saved my life," Adrian said at last. He said it to the water.

"You'd have done it for me."

"I'd have tried." A pause. "I'd have been slower."

Elias laughed. It came out shaky and unexpected, and it surprised them both. Then the laugh dried up, because his hand had gone into his pocket and found the letter.

He had not meant to read it here. But the sea was dark, and the engine was loud, and Adrian was watching the horizon, and the cream-colored paper was already unfolding in his fingers. He tilted it toward the dim glow of the dashboard.

His father's handwriting. Slanting, elegant, patient.

My son, if you are reading this, then I am dead and you have been found. Do not trust Dante. He will smile at you and tell you he is family. He is the reason I ran.

But Dante is not the only danger, and he is not the worst one. Do not trust anyone who offers you shelter. Do not trust the De Lucas. Not even Adrian. Especially not Adrian, once he learns what you carry.

The paper trembled in the wind.

Elias read the last line three times.

He loved me like a brother, and he will still choose his family over you.

Beside him, Adrian glanced across, his face lit by the pale green glow of the instruments, his eyes on Elias for a single, searching second.

"What does it say?"

Elias folded the letter. He folded it again, small, and pushed it deep into his pocket against his ribs, where the envelope and the brass key already lay.

"Nothing important," he said.

It was the first lie he had ever told that mattered.