Bound To The Devil’s Throne

Chapter 10

She heard him at two in the morning.

Not through the walls this time — through the narrow gap at the bottom of the study door, the strip of light that she had come to think of as a kind of signal, a lighthouse beam she could navigate by in the dark apartment. He was on the phone. He had been on the phone, she realized, since he left the kitchen three hours ago, because when she had passed the study on her way to bed at ten she had heard his voice and when she had gotten up at midnight for water she had heard his voice and now at two in the morning the voice was still there — quieter now, lower, the particular quality of a conversation that had moved from information-gathering into something more considered.

She did not stop at the door.

She went to the kitchen, poured her water, stood at the counter and drank it in the dark. The city outside the kitchen window was doing its usual thing — never fully dark, never fully quiet, the low continuous hum of ten million people proceeding through their nights in all their various ways. She had grown up with that sound. It was the one constant in all of this that still felt entirely hers.

She was rinsing the glass when she heard the study door open.

Footsteps. Not toward the kitchen — toward the main sitting room. She dried her hands and followed, because the footsteps had a quality she had learned to distinguish from his usual movement. He was still, and she did not yet have language for all his textures of still, but she was building the vocabulary.

He was standing at the window. Not looking out — or rather looking out without seeing out, which was different. His hands were in his pockets. His jacket was off, left somewhere in the study hours ago. He had a phone in his right hand, screen dark, held with the looseness of something finished with.

She came and stood beside him. Not close. The appropriate distance for two people looking at the same window without necessarily looking at the same thing.

After a moment he said, "You should sleep."

"You should sleep," she said.

The corner of his mouth moved. She was cataloguing those small movements now — the vocabulary of his almost-expressions, the things his face did when it wasn't performing blankness. "I need less sleep than most people," he said.

"That's not a biological fact, it's a habit you've built to avoid something." She kept her voice mild, observational. "I'm not criticizing it. I do the same thing."

He looked at her sideways. The silver-grey eyes in the ambient light of the city. "What do you avoid?"

"Stopping," she said. "If I stop, I have to feel whatever is waiting." She looked at the window. "It's easier to keep moving."

Silence. Not uncomfortable — she was beginning to understand that silence with Dante Romano was not the absence of communication but its own form of it. He used silence the way some people used words, to fill space with something real rather than reflexive.

"Ferretti," he said. The name had a weight to it that was separate from its syllables — the weight of something that had been carried for a long time.

"You don't have to explain it," she said.

"I know." A pause. "Ferretti was my father's closest friend. From childhood — they grew up in the same town in Sicily, came to New York together. He was at my parents' wedding. He was at my christening." He stopped. "When my parents died, Ferretti was in the car behind them. He survived the initial attack. He was in the hospital for two days." His voice was level and precise and gave nothing away except by what it refused to give away, which was everything. "He didn't survive the hospital."

Elena was quiet.

"Or so I was told," Dante said.

She heard the eleven years in it. The architecture of a grief and an investigation built on a foundation that had just, in a kitchen conversation over a name spoken by a delirious young man, developed a c***k.

"The people who told you," she said carefully. "Were they people you trusted?"

"They were people I had no reason not to trust." A pause. "At twenty-one, in the first weeks after your parents are killed, the information you're given becomes the foundation of everything that follows. You don't have the perspective yet to interrogate its sources."

"But you've interrogated it since."

"I've interrogated everything since." He turned from the window and looked at her. The full look, not the peripheral assessment. "For twelve years I have built a case against the Calabrese family. I have evidence. I have testimony. I have a financial trail that points — clearly, I believed — in one direction."

"And now?"

"Now a dying man says a name that shouldn't exist, and everything built on that foundation requires reexamination."

Elena thought about what she'd seen in the study. The corkboard. The photographs that were not surveillance but memorial — the man who resembled Dante, the woman beside him. His parents. Twelve years of a case being built toward a conclusion that, if this was true, was the wrong conclusion.

"What did your calls tonight tell you," she said.

He looked at her for a moment — the brief assessment of whether to answer. She had learned to wait through that pause without filling it, because filling it produced deflection and waiting produced truth.

"Three separate contacts," he said. "People I use for information retrieval rather than operations. Independent of each other. I asked each of them the same question through different channels." He paused. "Two came back with nothing. The third —" He stopped.

She waited.

"The third came back with a sighting," he said. "Eight days ago. Lower East Side. A man matching Ferretti's description — accounting for eleven years — entering a building that my organization has no connection to and no prior intelligence on."

The city hummed beyond the window.

"He'd be in his fifties now," Dante said. "My father's age, if my father had lived." Another pause, and this one was different — she heard something in it that she had not heard from him before, something underneath the control that was older than control. "If Ferretti is alive, then everything I was told about the night my parents died is wrong. Not incomplete. Wrong."

"Which means whoever told you was either deceived or was lying."

"Yes."

"Or both," Elena said. "Deceived about some things and lying about others."

He looked at her. "Yes," he said, more quietly.

She thought about the corkboard. The twelve years. The direction of a life shaped by a version of events that might have been constructed. She thought about being twenty-one and losing your parents and being given a story that became the architecture of everything afterward — the grief, the anger, the organization of every year since toward a reckoning with the wrong person.

She thought about the weight of that, and she looked at Dante Romano standing at his window at two in the morning with his phone dark in his hand, and she felt something that she was careful about but couldn't entirely prevent.

"What will you do," she said.

"Find him." Simple. Absolute. No deliberation.

"And when you find him?"

He looked at the window. "That depends on what he tells me."

"So you'll listen first."

The corner of his mouth again — not the almost-smile, something more complicated. "You expected otherwise."

"I expected—" She stopped. Reconsidered. "I expected the version of you that people describe. The one who acts first and accounts for it later."

"And?"

"And you've been on the phone for three hours doing careful, methodical intelligence work instead of sending people into the street." She held his gaze. "So I'm revising."

He studied her with an expression that she was beginning to think of as his most honest one — the look that appeared when she said something he hadn't anticipated and he hadn't yet had time to decide what to do with it. It was, she had noticed, the expression under which he was most himself.

"Revision is appropriate," he said. "I am not—" He stopped. Something moved through him, quick and internal. "The version of me that people describe is not entirely inaccurate. But it is not the complete version."

"I know," she said.

He looked at her.

"I've been paying attention," she said simply.

Another silence. The clock on the wall behind them moved in its quiet way. She thought about the young man she had treated earlier — Marco, twenty-two, who had said a name while his blood pressure was dropping and his body was making calculations about priority, said it the way people said things that had been living in them too long. She thought about the ripples she had watched move out from that name across the surface of the evening.

"Dante," she said. She used his name deliberately — she had learned to use it when she meant what she was about to say to be received as direct. "Who else knows about Ferretti? About the sighting, about what Marco said tonight."

"Nico," he said. "Now."

"No one else."

"No one else." He turned from the window to look at her fully. "Why."

She thought about how to say this. About the line between observation and accusation, between sharing what she saw and making claims she couldn't yet support. She had been in this apartment for less than two weeks. She had met perhaps a dozen people connected to this world. She did not have enough.

"Because," she said carefully, "I think someone wanted to know what Marco would say before he could say it in a controlled setting." She paused. "The ambush happened today. Marco was the one who ended up here instead of the hospital. That could be coincidence."

Dante was very still.

"And you don't believe in coincidence," he said.

"I believe in it less than I used to," she said. "The more time I spend here, the less things seem to happen by accident."

He was looking at her with the full weight of his attention, which was considerable, and she held it steadily because she had committed to this direction and flinching now would waste it.

"Say the rest of it," he said.

"I don't have a rest of it yet," she said honestly. "I have an observation and an instinct and not enough information to build anything from them." She met his eyes. "But I think you should be careful about who knows that Ferretti may be alive. I think the number of people with that information should stay very small. And I think you should be more careful about Marco — about who has access to him, and what he's told about what he said tonight."

Dante looked at her for a long moment. The city moved outside the window in its ceaseless way. Somewhere below them a siren began and faded.

"You've been here eleven days," he said.

"Yes."

"And you're suggesting that there is something wrong with the information channels inside my own organization."

"I'm suggesting it's possible," she said. "I could be wrong. I don't have enough to say I'm not wrong."

"What do you have."

She thought about the notebook under her mattress. She thought about Lorenzo Vitale's calibrated warmth and the questions he'd asked in the progression of a man who already had the answers. She thought about Nico's face closing down like a door when she'd asked who suggested her marriage. She thought about Marco not making it to a hospital with three colleagues who knew his location.

"Not enough," she said again. "But I'm working on it."

He looked at her with an expression that she would think about for a long time afterward — not the unnameable expression from earlier in the kitchen, but something more specific. Something that looked, though she was extremely cautious about this interpretation, like a man recognizing something he had needed without knowing he needed it.

"All right," he said.

Two words. But he said them like a decision.

"I'm going to sleep," she said. She straightened, shifted her weight, the small physical grammar of a conversation ending.

"Elena."

She stopped.

He was looking at the window again, or rather at the dark glass with its reflection of the room, which meant he was looking at her reflection without looking at her directly. It was, she thought, the most privacy he could give himself while still speaking to her.

"Earlier tonight," he said. "In the kitchen. What you did."

She waited.

"I have people whose function is to handle exactly that kind of situation," he said. "Medical contacts, protocols, chains of communication." He paused. "And you came off the elevator ten minutes after it started and handled it before any of those protocols reached the second step."

She said nothing.

"Marco is twenty-two," Dante said. Still looking at the window. At her reflection in the window. "His mother's name is Carmela. He's been with the organization since he was nineteen because it was the only stable employment offered to him and he took it without fully understanding what he was taking." A pause. "He would have bled out in the hallway waiting for the protocol to complete."

The city outside. The quiet apartment. The strip of light from the study still falling across the hallway floor.

"He's going to be all right," Elena said. "That's what matters."

"Yes," Dante said. "It is."

She went to bed. She lay in the dark and thought about Ferretti and the photographs on the corkboard and eleven years built on the wrong foundation and a man standing at a window at two in the morning watching the city he controlled and accounting for all the things he'd been told that might not be true.

She thought about what it would cost a person to discover that the shape of their grief was wrong. That the target of twelve years of anger was the wrong target. That somewhere inside the structure they had built, in the walls and the load-bearing columns of it, there was something that had been placed there by someone else.

She thought about the notebook under her mattress.

She thought about Lorenzo Vitale's fingers touching the edge of a table like a ceremony.

She thought: *you need more. Get more.*

Then she closed her eyes, and this time sleep came quickly, and she did not hear anything else from the study until morning.

But in the morning, when she passed the corkboard through the open study door — open for the first time, she noticed, propped with a book — she saw that the arrangement had changed.

At the center, where a Calabrese family photograph had been pinned for what she imagined was years, there was now a blank space.

And at the edges, newly pinned and carefully positioned, were four photographs she had not seen on the board before.

She was too far away to see them clearly. She did not stop to look. But she saw enough.

They were photographs of locations.

One of them, she was almost certain, was a building on the Lower East Side.