Chương 12
“Maybe.”
“And if police arrest him, he talks.”
“Yes.”
“About all of us.”
“Yes.”
The word left Luca with surprising ease.
Nico breathed once into the phone.
“Boss.”
“Do it.”
“What are you giving them?”
“I haven’t decided.”
“That means everything.”
Luca looked at Matteo through the glass.
“Stand down, Nico.”
The line remained connected for several seconds.
Then Nico said, “You promised your father you’d protect what he built.”
“My father is dead.”
“So is Sofia.”
The cruelty was unintentional. Luca heard Nico regret it immediately.
Neither man repaired the sentence.
Luca ended the call.
Mercer watched him.
“That was not cooperation,” Luca said. “That was restraint.”
“It’s a start.”
“I did not ask for encouragement.”
“No,” Mercer said. “You’re used to obedience.”
The detective left to speak with hospital security.
Miriam sat beside Elena.
Luca remained standing.
After a while, Elena opened the envelope Sofia had addressed to her.
She read silently.
Halfway through, she covered her mouth.
Luca looked away.
When she finished, she folded the paper and held it against her lap.
“What did she say?” he asked.
Elena’s eyes remained on the letter.
“That she was sorry.”
“For what?”
“For leaving me with you.”
Despite everything, Luca almost took offense.
Elena looked up.
“She said you would frighten me because fear was the only language you trusted when you didn’t understand something.”
“That sounds like her.”
“She also said you might surprise me.”
Luca sat across from her.
“Did she say how?”
“No.”
The hospital clock moved past midnight.
Dr. Shah returned with preliminary results at twelve forty-seven.
Matteo had been exposed to a compound not included in his prescribed treatment. The amount detected was not immediately fatal, but repeated exposure could worsen cardiac and respiratory symptoms, weaken appetite, and complicate his underlying condition.
Luca listened without moving.
“Repeated?” he asked.
“The pattern suggests more than one recent dose, but we need confirmatory testing.”
“Can you reverse it?”
“We can stop further exposure and treat the effects. His underlying illness remains serious.”
“Will he recover?”
“We expect some improvement if the exposure ends. I cannot promise how much.”
“Who gave it to him?”
“That is not a medical question.”
“It is the only question.”
“For you,” Dr. Shah said. “For us, the question is what his body needs now.”
Luca looked through the window at his sleeping son.
Fear moved through him without anger to disguise it.
There was no target in the room. No throat to grip. No order that could repair damaged cells.
He sat down.
Dr. Shah softened, though only slightly.
“We found the substance because you provided relevant information. That helped him.”
The sentence should have offered relief.
Instead, Luca saw every earlier moment when he had dismissed Sofia’s fear, every medication bottle he had never examined, every time he allowed Rafe to decide who entered Matteo’s room because delegation felt like authority.
“Can I stay?” he asked.
“You can stay.”
Elena left before dawn to give a formal statement.
Miriam went with her.
Luca remained beside Matteo’s bed.
He removed his jacket and draped it across the chair. Without it, the tattoos on his chest rose above the open collar. Nurses entered and left without staring. One adjusted the blanket. Another replaced a bag of fluid and told Luca he could sleep.
He did not.
At three in the morning, he remembered Sofia sitting on the kitchen counter in their first apartment, eating red velvet cake from the bakery box with a plastic fork. They had been married four days. The apartment smelled of fresh paint and someone else’s cooking from the floor below.
She had put frosting on his nose.
He had caught her wrist.
Not hard.
Playful.
Still, her smile had changed.
He released her immediately.
She asked why his first instinct was always to hold something still.
He told her movement created uncertainty.
She said, “Maybe uncertainty is how you know it’s alive.”
He had kissed her instead of answering.
At four, Matteo woke and asked for water.
At five, he vomited.
At six, he slept again.
At seven thirty, Nico appeared at the hospital carrying two coffees and looking ten years older.
“No guards?” Luca asked.
“Police took statements from most of them. Half left. Three were arrested. Two are pretending they never heard of us.”
He handed Luca a cup.
Luca tasted it and made a face.
“Hospital coffee,” Nico said. “It builds character.”
“I have enough.”
Nico sat by the window.
For several minutes, neither spoke.
Then Nico said, “Rafe contacted Carlo Vescari.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Vescari called me.”
“What did he want?”
“To offer peace.”
Luca looked at him.
“He says Rafe acted alone,” Nico continued. “Says he’ll deliver him in exchange for guarantees.”
“What guarantees?”
“That we don’t retaliate against his people. That certain accounts stay untouched. That police never hear his name.”
“And you told him?”
“I told him I no longer know who speaks for us.”
The words were honest.
They hurt more than challenge would have.
“Do you want my position?” Luca asked.
Nico laughed once. “Today? No.”
“Before today.”
“I wanted your trust.”
“You had it.”
“I had assignments.”
Luca looked toward Matteo.
“What did Rafe give you?”
“A job when my brother went to prison. Money when my mother’s furnace died. Advice I didn’t ask for.”
“And loyalty?”
Nico rubbed his thumb along the coffee lid.
“He gave me reasons to confuse gratitude with loyalty.”
Sofia’s sentence echoed in another form.
Years. Debts. Habits.
Luca said, “Vescari wants us to kill Rafe for him.”
“Probably.”
“Then he can tell Mercer.”
“You really doing this?”
“I don’t know what this is yet.”
“Looks like surrender.”
“To you?”
“To everyone.”
May you like
Luca drank the bitter coffee.
“When my father died,” he said, “Rafe told me there would be men who tested whether grief made me weak. He gave me three names. By the end of the week, one man disappeared, one left the state, and one came to the funeral home to kiss my hand.”
