RUIN ME, MR. DE LUCA

Chapter Ten —The Confession

The call ended, and the blue light on the ceiling went out, and in the dark Elias heard Adrian put the phone down on the nightstand with great care, as though it might go off.

"What letter?" Adrian said again. Quietly. He wasn't angry yet. Elias almost wished he were.

Elias sat up. His legs had gone strange and distant beneath the blanket. He reached for the chair, found his jeans, and drew the folded sheet of cream paper from the pocket. It had gone soft at the creases from being carried, and he held it out across the bed without a word, the way you hold something out to a person you've wronged.

Adrian switched on the bedside lamp. He took the letter and read it.

Elias watched his face, because he owed him that. He watched the first lines, the ones he had read aloud in a concrete room. Then the paragraph he hadn't. His father's slanting handwriting. Do not trust the De Lucas. Not even Adrian. Especially not Adrian, once he learns what you carry. The last line, which he had read three times in the green dark of a boat.

Adrian read it to the end. He read it again.

Then he folded it along its creases, gently, and laid it on the blanket between them.

"When?" he asked.

"On the boat. After the boathouse." Elias's voice came out smaller than he wanted. "You asked what it said, and I said nothing important."

"Yes. I remember."

"I wanted to tell you in the tunnel. And at the bank. And in the van, after" He couldn't finish that sentence. "I stopped believing it a long time ago. I just couldn't find a way to take the lie back."

Adrian nodded once. He stood, picked up his shirt from the chair, and put it on without buttoning it. His movements were slow and entirely controlled, and Elias understood with a sick drop that this was what Adrian looked like when he was hurt. Not loud. Closed, like a door shutting very softly.

"I need some air," Adrian said, and went out.

• • •

The rain had come back. Elias found him on the terrace, standing at the parapet with his back to the door and his shirt plastered to his shoulders, looking out over the rooftops at the lights of a city that did not know what it owed him. The washing lines hung limp and dripping. Beyond them, the dark mass of Vesuvius had vanished into cloud.

He stood a few paces behind him and didn't speak. He had learned that much, at least, from the man in front of him.

"He was right about me," Adrian said, not turning.

"Adrian "

"Let me finish." The rain ran down the back of his neck. "For eighteen years, every decision I made was for the family. The name, the territory, the men who depended on us. I stood on a hill at nineteen and I watched my father do that, and I told myself it was loyalty, and I did nothing. I kept the promise to your father because it was convenient. It was safer for the name if you stayed a stranger. I never once came for you." His voice dropped. "Matteo knew what I was. He loved me, and he wrote that line because he knew exactly what I'd choose."

"That's not "

"It's not wrong, Elias." He finally turned. His face was wet, and he didn't wipe it. "It was true. When he wrote it, it was true. You had every reason to doubt me."

"I didn't, though." The words came out of Elias fast and ragged. "That's what I'm trying to tell you. I read it on the boat with the engine going and your hand on the wheel, and I thought, he's wrong. He didn't know you. He knew a nineteen year-old on a hill. He didn't know the man who cleaned Marco's blood off my hands, or who wouldn't trade me when it would have saved his father, or who stood in the rain and told me to look at him and breathe." He swallowed. "I'd already decided. The lie was cowardice. I was afraid that if I told you, you'd look at me the way you did in the study, like I was a problem you had to manage."

Adrian said nothing. His hand had closed on the wet stone of the parapet.

"I'm sorry," Elias said.

"Don't."

"I am. I hid it, and I let you walk into that vault, and I—"

"Elias." Gently. "I'm not hurt that you hid it."

"Then what?"

"That you carried it alone." Adrian's voice cracked, just slightly, on the last word. "Three days. Through all of that. You had a letter telling you I'd betray you, and you went into a bank holding my hand anyway." He shook his head slowly, as though it were something he couldn't quite look at directly. "I don't know what to do with that. Nobody has ever trusted me before it was safe."

The rain fell between them. Down in the Quarter, a window slammed, and a woman's voice called a child in for the night.

Elias crossed the terrace in four steps, and the rain was cold on his bare feet, and he did not stop until he was standing close enough to see water caught in Adrian's lashes.

"It was safe," he said. "I didn't have to be certain of the world. I was certain of you."

Adrian looked at him for a long moment, his eyes enormous and dark and utterly unguarded, and then he laughed, a short, helpless, broken sound.

"Three days," he said. "It's absurd."

"What is?"

"I'm going to say something, and I need you not to say anything back." He drew a breath. "I think I've been in love with you since you stood in my study with a torn collar and told me I'd have to take that envelope from you."

The world stopped.

"That was three days ago," Elias said faintly.

"I told you it was absurd."

"You told me not to say anything back."

"Yes."

"No," Elias said, and he took Adrian's face in both hands, felt the rain-cold jaw and the pulse beneath it, and said, "I'm not going to do that," and kissed him.

It was nothing like the alley. There was no fury in it, no fear. It was slow, nearly careful, a question asked and answered and asked again. Adrian made a low sound against his mouth and his arms came around him, one hand spread against his back, the other in his wet hair, as if he had been holding his breath since the day he turned nineteen and had finally been told he could stop. The rain ran down both of them. Elias felt the whole lean length of him shaking, just slightly, and understood that he was not the only one who had been afraid.

When they broke apart, Adrian rested his forehead against Elias's.

"I love you," Elias said. He had never said it to anyone who was alive to hear it. "I'm scared out of my mind and I don't care. I love you."

"Say it again."

"I love you."

"Again."

He was laughing now, and so was Adrian, quietly, foreheads pressed together, two soaked men on a rooftop in the middle of a war. It was the best moment of Elias's life. It was a terrible time to be happy.

"Come inside," Adrian murmured. "You'll catch your death."

"I like the rain."

"I know." He pressed a kiss to Elias's temple, brief, devastating. "I'd like you to live long enough to complain about it."

• • •

They were halfway across the terrace, Adrian's arm around his shoulders and Elias's fingers tangled in the front of his shirt, when the door banged open.

Luca stood in the stairwell. He was pale, soaked to the knees, and breathing as if he had run up seven flights, which, judging by the empty hallway behind him, he had. His good hand held his phone. The other, in its sling, was clenched.

Adrian let go of Elias in an instant. "What?"

"Ferrante's office was raided an hour ago." Luca's voice was ragged. "Not by us. By police. Dante's police. They've seized her files and put her on leave pending an inquiry. She's safe, but she can't touch anything, and she can't take the ledger."

The night went cold around them.

"That isn't all," Luca said. He wet his lips. "Boss, I got a call from a man inside the prison. A judge signed an emergency release at two this morning. Medical grounds. A hearing nobody was told about."

Elias felt it before Luca said it. A cold weight, settling.

"Vincenzo De Luca walked out of the prison an hour ago," Luca said. "And he didn't go home."

Downstairs, very far down, a doorbell rang.

It rang once, clear and patient, in the quiet of the building. Then again. Elias had never heard such an ordinary sound ring so much like a verdict.

Adrian's face had gone entirely blank. He crossed to the parapet and looked down into the street through the rain, and Elias, following, saw them: a black car idling at the curb with its lights off, and a single figure on the pavement under an umbrella, an old man in a dark overcoat, standing perfectly still and looking up at their window.

"Adrian," Luca said quietly. "Your father's at the door."