RUIN ME, MR. DE LUCA

Chapter Five —Seventy-Two Hours

Dawn came slowly, gray on gray, the sea and sky one color until the sun finally cut a seam between them.

By then Elias had lost the feeling in his hands. He had spent the last hour of the crossing at the rail with his back to the wind, watching the coast shrink, not trusting himself to sit down. Sitting meant thinking. Thinking meant a kitchen floor.

Adrian cut the engine as they slid into a harbor so small it looked painted on: a crescent of pastel houses, a handful of fishing boats rocking on their ropes, an old man in a wool cap mending a net on the quay. The man looked up, saw the boat, saw Adrian, and went back to his net without a word.

"He knows you," Elias said.

"He knows he's never seen me." Adrian tied off the line one-handed. "Islanders have a talent for it."

The house stood above the harbor at the top of a steep stone stair, whitewashed and shuttered, a bougainvillea gone wild over the door. Inside it smelled of dust and lemons. One room downstairs with a kitchen, a couch, and a table; one room above with a bed. Adrian checked the windows, the back door, and the roof hatch in a steady, practiced circuit, and only then took out his phone.

It buzzed in his hand before he could use it.

He read the message, and his face did something small and terrible. He passed the phone to Elias without a word.

LUCA:

Alive. Stitched. House is gone. Eleven of ours didn't make it. Don't call.

Elias read it twice. Eleven. He thought of the guards along the drive, standing with their backs to the house and their eyes on the dark. He thought of the woman in the black dress.

"Eleven people," he said.

"Yes."

"Because of me."

"No." Adrian took the phone back. "Because of the men who came through that gate. Don't take it from them by making it yours."

"That's easy to say."

"It's easy to say, and it's true. Those are two separate things, and I've never found a way to make them agree." He nodded toward the stairs. "Go wash. There's hot water. I'll find you something to wear."

• • •

The water ran pink, then clear.

Elias stood under it with both palms flat against the tile and watched Marco's blood leave him in slow, thin threads, and for the first time that night he let himself stop being brave. It came up from somewhere under his ribs, a sound he didn't recognize as his own. He pressed his forehead to the wall and let it come, quietly, with the water covering it. Eighteen years of Sunday dinners. A rolling pin worn smooth by forty years of dough. A skillet hurled across a kitchen with the last of a man's strength.

When he came out, there was a folded black shirt on the chair outside the door, and a mug of tea on the table downstairs, steaming, with far too much sugar in it.

Nobody had told Adrian how he took his tea. Marco must have. The thought nearly undid him again.

He put on the shirt. It hung to his thighs and smelled of cedar and smoke.

Adrian was standing at the kitchen window with his back to the room, and he turned when he heard the stairs. His eyes went over Elias once, from the damp hair to the bare feet, and then, very quickly, back to the glass.

"It's too big," Adrian said, to the window.

"It's fine."

"Sit. Drink that."

Elias sat, wrapped both hands around the mug, and drank. It was the sweetest tea he had ever tasted, and it was perfect. He set it down carefully.

"You owe me something," he said.

"I owe you a great deal."

"Then start with the truth. Not the proof. You said you'd tell me when you had proof, and I'm not asking for proof. I'm asking what you know."

Adrian was quiet so long that Elias thought he would refuse. Then he pulled out the opposite chair, sat, and laid his gun on the table between them, a gesture of trust or exhaustion, Elias couldn't tell which.

"Eighteen years ago, in July, my father took me to a villa on the coast road," Adrian said. "Vincenzo De Luca. He told me we were going to make peace. The De Lucas and the Ravennas had been at each other's throats for a generation, and your father had left the family, and my father said that was an opening. I was nineteen. I believed him."

He looked at the gun, not at Elias.

"We were twenty feet from the road when your father's car came down the hill. A truck pulled out and hit it from the side. It went through the guardrail." A breath. "I ran. I got to the car first. He was alive. Your mother was already gone. He took hold of my wrist and said, 'Keep him away from this. Whatever happens, keep him away.' Then he stopped."

Elias's throat had closed. "And your father?"

"Standing at the top of the hill. Watching." Adrian's voice stayed level, and the effort of keeping it level showed in his hands. "I saw his driver beside him, and I saw a ring on the hand that shut the truck's door. Vincenzo's ring. I told myself for a year I'd imagined it."

"You knew it was him."

"I knew. I didn't want to. Then I did, and I spent fifteen years collecting proof because I couldn't believe it, and then because I couldn't forgive it." He finally lifted his eyes. "Three years ago I gave the evidence to the police. My father is in prison. I took over what was left."

The room was very still.

"That's why you stayed away from me," Elias said slowly. "Not just the promise."

"Because you'd look at me the way you're looking at me now."

"I'm not looking at you like anything."

"Elias."

"I'm not," Elias said, and heard it come out steadier than he felt. "You put your own father in prison. You stood on a hill at nineteen and watched that happen, and you carried it for eighteen years rather than hand it to a child." He swallowed. "I don't know what that is. But it isn't what I thought a De Luca was."

Something in Adrian's face moved, a slow crack in something frozen, and it was so naked that Elias looked down at the mug.

In his pocket, folded small against his ribs, the letter was a stone. He loved me like a brother, and he will still choose his family over you. He wanted, suddenly and fiercely, to push it across the table.

He didn't.

"Sleep," Adrian said at last, his voice rough. "Upstairs. I'll take the couch."

"You were shot."

"Then neither of us takes the bed."

They looked at each other across the gun, and Elias felt one corner of his mouth tug against his will. "Fine. I'll take the couch. You take the chair by the door and pretend you're not going to fall asleep in it."

"I don't sleep."

"You're the only man I've ever met who says that like an accomplishment."

Adrian didn't smile. But he stayed in the chair.

• • •

Elias woke in the dark to a voice.

Low, in the kitchen. He lay perfectly still on the couch under the thin blanket someone had spread over him and breathed the way people breathe when they're asleep.

"...no," Adrian was saying. "Don't touch him."

A pause. A tinny voice on the speaker, too faint to make out the words. Elias knew its rhythm anyway: smooth, courteous, patient.

"You wouldn't dare."

The tinny voice answered.

"He's in a cell with forty men watching him. You can't reach him."

A longer pause. Then Dante's voice, clear now, perhaps because the phone had been lifted, perhaps because the night had gone so quiet. "Seventy-two hours, Adrian. Bring me the boy, and Vincenzo serves out his sentence in peace. Keep him, and I can't promise what happens to a man in a cell."

Elias's eyes were open in the dark. He did not move.

The silence stretched. One second, two, three. He counted them. He had counted them once before, in a concrete room, and the number had mattered then too.

"I'll think," Adrian said.

The call ended.

For a long time Elias lay with his eyes on the ceiling beams and listened to nothing: the sea moving against the stones below, the faint creak of a chair as a man who did not sleep sat down in the dark. In his pocket, the letter pressed against his ribs like a second heartbeat.

He had a secret. Now Adrian had one too.

Two men, two secrets, and seventy two hours to learn which of them would break first.