RUIN ME, MR. DE LUCA

Chapter Eight —What the Tape Said

"Don't move," Adrian said quietly.

He hadn't raised his voice. He had simply stepped half a pace in front of Elias, his right hand sliding inside his jacket, and the corridor had gone so still that Elias could hear the building's old pipes ticking.

Dante clucked his tongue. "Let's not, Adrian. I have four men in this corridor and nine in the street, and a bank is a poor place for gunfire." He turned to Elias, and the warmth in his face was devastating. "Look at you. You have Matteo's hands. Do you know that? Even in that ridiculous suit."

"Don't talk about him."

"I'll talk about him as often as I like. He was my brother." Dante sighed, a soft sound of old grief. "You'll never believe I loved him, and I understand why. But I haven't come to hurt you, my boy. I've come to bring you home."

"You burned a house down to say hello."

"A regrettable necessity." Not a flicker. "Give me the ledger. It's my family's book, after all, and a hundred and fifty years of history doesn't belong in a stranger's jacket. In exchange, you come home with me and you are a Ravenna again, with a name, a family, a future." A pause, beautifully timed. "And I will tell you who killed Marco."

Elias's pulse stuttered. "You killed Marco."

"I gave an order. I did not pull the trigger. I can give you the name of the man who did." Dante spread his hands, a reasonable man offering a reasonable trade. "A name is something. Isn't it?"

Beside him, Adrian's breath was very even, very controlled, and Elias understood he was counting. Four men. One gun. An arm that still wasn't right.

So Elias did the only thing he could think of. He kept Dante talking.

"Which of them?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Which one. You said you could give me the name." Elias let his gaze move slowly across the four men by the doors, and he saw the instant it landed on the man with the scar through his eyebrow. The scarred man didn't blink. But his eyes slid sideways, just for a heartbeat, away from Elias's face. It was the look of a man who had once stood in a restaurant kitchen and watched an old man fall.

"It was you," Elias said.

The scarred man's hand twitched toward his coat.

And the lights in the corridor went red.

Something iron screamed. Behind Elias, Signor Bellandi had thrown his whole stooped weight against a lever concealed by the stair rail, and across the corridor a steel shutter crashed down from the ceiling like a portcullis. It slammed into the floor between them and Dante with a sound like the end of the world. Through the slats, Elias saw Dante's smile finally slip.

"Bellandi!"

"Matteo Ravenna paid for my daughter's surgery," the old man said, his mustache shaking. "I have owed him twenty years." He pointed with a trembling finger. "The door marked ARCHIVIO. A stair behind it comes out in the alley. Go."

"Come with us," Elias said.

"I am an old man, signor. Go."

Gunfire hammered the shutter. They ran.

• • •

The archive was a long dim room of shelves and dust, the stair a narrow spiral of iron that rang under their feet. Behind them the shooting dulled to a flat, furious drumming. Elias took the steps two at a time with the ledger digging into his ribs, and Adrian's hand was around his wrist the whole way up, as though letting go might cost one of them something.

The door at the top gave onto a back alley, wet and narrow and smelling of old rain. Adrian shouldered it closed and dragged Elias into the recess of a shuttered doorway, pulled him in against the wall, and listened. Shouts, far off. A siren somewhere, going the wrong way.

Nobody came.

Elias's legs began to shake. He leaned his head against the cold brick and made himself breathe. The adrenaline was draining out of him all at once, and what it left behind was white, shaking fury.

"You did it again," he said.

"What?"

"You stepped in front of me." He turned on him. "In the boathouse. In the lobby. In that corridor. You put yourself between me and a gun every single time."

"That's my"

"Don't say it's your job." Elias shoved at his chest with the flat of his hand, and it was like shoving a wall. "It's not your job. It was never your job. You could have been killed in there."

"So could you."

"I'm nobody," Elias said, and his voice broke. "I'm a boy who works a counter. You're " He couldn't finish. His hand was still pressed against Adrian's chest, and he could feel the heart under it, hammering, fast and real. "If you die for me, I will never forgive you. Do you understand? Never."

Adrian looked down at him. The red light of the alley sign threw his face into hard planes and deep shadow.

"It's the only thing I've ever been sure of," he said, low and rough. "Out of everything. You."

Elias stopped breathing.

He wasn't sure which of them moved first. Maybe it was both. One moment there was an inch of wet air between them and the next there was none, and Adrian's mouth was on his, hard and unsteady, nothing like the careful hands that had bandaged a shoulder. Elias made a sound into it that he'd never made in his life. His fingers closed in the front of Adrian's jacket and dragged him closer, and Adrian's hand slid into his hair, and the wall at his back was cold and the man in front of him was burning. There was rain in it. There was the taste of smoke and fear and something he'd been trying not to name since a tunnel, and every careful thing he'd been holding together came apart at once.

Adrian broke off first, forehead pressed to his, both of them breathing like they'd run the whole city.

"Tell me to stop," he said, barely a sound.

Elias should have. Every lie in his pocket said he should.

"No," he whispered.

A horn blared at the mouth of the alley.

They sprang apart. A battered white delivery van had skidded to a halt in the wet, and Luca leaned out the driver's window with the carefully blank face of a man performing heroic acts of self-control.

"I can come back," he said.

"Drive," Adrian said.

• • •

Nobody spoke for six blocks.

Elias sat on a folded tarp in the back of the van, knees drawn up, with the ledger in his lap and his heart still going like a trapped bird. He could feel his mouth. He could feel exactly where Adrian's hand had been in his hair. Adrian sat across from him in the dim, staring at the van's ribbed steel wall with the rigid concentration of a man defusing a bomb. Up front, Luca drove with a disciplined, saintly silence.

And under his ribs, the letter pressed like a hand. He will still choose his family over you.

"I shouldn't have," Elias said finally, to the floor.

"Don't apologize."

"I wasn't going to."

"Good." Adrian's voice was rough. "Because I'm not sorry."

Elias looked up. Adrian was looking at him now, and there was nothing cold left in his face at all.

He had to look away first.

His fingers found the cassette in his pocket, still in its plain plastic case, with the one name written on it. Matteo. He turned it over. Then he leaned forward and tapped the back of Luca's seat.

"Does this van have a tape deck?"

"It's a 1998 Fiat Ducato," Luca said. "It has nothing but a tape deck."

The cassette went in with a click. For a moment there was only hiss. Then, faintly, a voice.

He knew it. God help him, he knew it, though he'd have sworn he'd forgotten. Warm, a little amused, a little tired.

"This is Matteo Ravenna. It is the third of July. I'm in my study at the villa. In the next room, my brother Dante and Vincenzo De Luca are talking, and they don't know the window is open. If you are hearing this, I'm dead, and this is why."

A rustle. A door. Two men, muffled but clear.

"Both of them go in the car," Dante said. "Matteo and the wife. It has to look like the road."

"And the boy?" That was a different voice, older, heavier. Elias felt Adrian go rigid across from him.

"The boy too. He's a Ravenna. He's a risk."

"No." Vincenzo De Luca's voice was flat, absolute. "We agreed. Not the child."

"Then who raises him? Someone has to take the little—"

"Marco Moretti will."

The tape hissed.

"He's mine. He'll do what he's told, and he'll never say a word."

The van went on rolling through the rain. Nobody moved.

Elias's mouth had gone dry. "Marco," he said, and it didn't sound like his own voice. "My uncle. Marco knew. He—he worked for your father?"

Adrian's face had drained of color. "Marco never " He stopped. His hand had curled slowly into a fist on his knee, and Elias saw, with a lurch, that it was shaking. "My father sent him to raise you," Adrian said, very slowly, as if every word cost something. "And he never told me."

On the tape, the door closed. Hiss. Silence.

Eighteen years of Sunday dinners. A man teaching a grieving six year old how to hold a knife. I lied about everything.

Marco Moretti had been a De Luca man all along.