Chapter 20: The Four Words

VITTORIA'S POV

I read the message four times.

Each time, the four words stayed the same on the screen, unmoved by how many times I needed them to mean something different from what they meant.

"We have your brother."

No name attached. No number I recognised. No follow-up message giving me instructions or demands or any of the things that should logically come after four words like that, which was somehow worse than if there had been twenty more sentences underneath them. The silence after a threat is always louder than the threat itself.

My hands were not shaking. I noticed that distantly, the way you notice small details when your mind has gone somewhere very cold and very focused. My hands were completely still around the phone, and my breathing was even, and the room was quiet, and all of those things were true at the same time as Alberto was somewhere in this city in the possession of people who wanted to use him to move me.

I got out of bed.

I did not stop to think about whether it was three in the morning or whether Marcello was still in the study or whether walking down that corridor right now would communicate a vulnerability I had been careful to keep managed. I got out of bed, and I walked down the corridor, and I pushed the study door open without knocking.

Marcello looked up from the desk immediately. One look at my face and he was on his feet before I had taken a second step into the room.

"What happened?" he said. Not a question. A door opened for the answer to walk through.

I held the phone out to him.

He took it and read the screen, and the quality of the stillness that came over him was different from his usual stillness. This one had heat underneath it, controlled and directed inward, the kind that precedes something absolute.

He set the phone on the desk and looked at me. "When did this come in?"

"Three minutes ago. I came straight here."

He picked up his own phone and was already dialling before I had finished the sentence. The call was answered in two rings despite the hour, which told me everything about the kind of people he kept around him.

"Alberto Alfonso," he said into the phone. "Find him. Now. Use everyone available." He listened for two seconds. "I don't care. Everyone." He ended the call.

He looked at me across the desk, and his expression contained something I had not seen on him before, not in any of the days I had spent learning to read the landscape of his face. It was not anger, and it was not strategy, and it was not the controlled danger that lived permanently just below the surface of everything he did.

It was urgent.

Personal, undisguised urgency.

"Sit down," he said.

"I cannot sit down," I replied honestly.

He did not push it. He came around the desk and stopped in front of me and put both hands on my shoulders, not hard, just enough to create a point of steadiness in the room, and looked at me directly.

"I need you to think clearly for the next few minutes," he said. "Can you do that?"

"I am thinking clearly," I said.

"Good. Has Alberto contacted you at all in the last two hours? Any message, any missed call, anything."

I thought back. After the call, in which he had told me about Ric, I had told him to stay still and keep his phone on. Nothing since then.

"Nothing since around eleven," I said.

Marcello nodded. "Which means they moved on him sometime between eleven and now." He released my shoulders and went back behind the desk, pulling the map towards him that he had been working on when I walked in. "Where does Alberto stay. Exact address."

I gave it to him. He marked it on the map with a pen and made another call, firing the address into it before the other person had finished saying hello.

I stood on the other side of the desk and watched him work and told myself that Alberto was stubborn and loud and had survived every difficult thing our family had ever faced and that four words on a screen were not the end of a man like him.

I told myself that three times.

It helped less each time.

"Marcello." My voice came out smaller than I intended. "If this is Seymour"

"It is Seymour," he said without looking up from the map.

"Then Alberto is bait. They do not want him. They want a reaction from this building."

"Yes."

"Which means he is alive."

Marcello looked up at me then. "Yes," he said. "Which means he is alive." He held my gaze with a steadiness that was the closest thing to comfort available in a room like this at three in the morning. "I will get him back, Vittoria."

I looked at him across the map and the desk and the distance between what I had been four days ago and what I was standing in the middle of right now, and I believed him. Not because I was naive or desperate enough to believe anything a person offered me. Because I had watched this man operate in the days since I arrived, and I understood that when Marcello Giordano said he would do something, it was not a promise.

It was a forecast.

My phone buzzed on the desk between us.

We both looked at it simultaneously.

A second message from the same unknown number.

Marcello reached it first and read it, and something changed in his face. Something fast and controlled and deeply alarming in the way that only alarming things that are being very carefully managed look.

He turned the phone to face me.

"Tell your husband to stand down, or the Alfonso boy loses a finger for every hour he waits. The clock started when you read the first message. You have fifty-three minutes left on the first hour."

The room tilted slightly.

I pressed both hands flat on the desk and breathed through it and counted to four and breathed out and counted to four again, the way my mother had taught me when I was small, and the world felt too large to be inside.

Marcello was already on the phone again, his voice lower and faster than I had heard it, the map in front of him covered now in marks and annotations that had not been there twenty minutes ago.

I picked up my own phone with steady hands and opened Alberto's contact and called him.

It rang six times and went to voicemail.

His voicemail message was the same one he had recorded three years ago, gruff and impatient, telling the caller to leave a message and make it quick because he did not have all day. I had teased him about that recording so many times. I had told him it made him sound rude, and he had said he was not in the business of being charming to people who called without texting first.

The sound of his voice on that recording did something to my composure that the four words and the fifty-three minutes had not managed to do.

I ended the call before the beep, set the phone down, and pressed the back of my hand against my mouth for three seconds.

Then I straightened up.

Marcello ended his call and looked at me from across the desk with those blue eyes that were moving fast behind their steady surface.

"I have people four minutes from Alberto's building," he said. "If they took him from home, we will know within the next ten minutes. If they moved him somewhere else, it would take longer, but we will find him." He paused. "I need you to stay in this building and stay off the phone to any number you do not completely trust. Every call you make right now is a signal they can use to locate or manipulate."

I nodded.

"And Vittoria." His voice dropped. "Whatever message they send next, whatever they tell you to do or wherever they tell you to go, you do not move without telling me first. Not one step."

"I understand," I said.

He looked at me for a moment longer than the instruction required.

Then his phone rang, and he took the call, and I watched his face as he listened, and I had spent enough days learning to read it that I caught the exact moment the information coming through the line shifted the landscape of the situation.

His jaw tightened. His eyes moved to the map. His free hand pressed flat on the desk.

He ended the call.

He looked at me across the desk, and in that look was something I had not seen him direct at me before.

Apology.

"They did not take him from his building," he said quietly. "They took him from outside this one." He paused. "Alberto was here, Vittoria. He came here tonight to find you. He was outside this building when they picked him up."

The breath left my body completely.

My brother had not stayed still.

My stubborn, loud, impossibly loving brother had looked at my one-word reply and decided that yes was not enough and had come to find me himself and had walked into the open hands of the worst possible people while trying to reach his little sister.

I sat down in the chair behind me because my legs had made that decision independently.

Marcello came around the desk and crouched in front of the chair so that we were level, his forearms on his knees, his face close and direct.

"This is not your fault," he said.

I looked at him.

"It is not your fault," he said again, firmer this time. "And I am going to bring him home."

I held his gaze and nodded once because speaking was not available to me right at that moment.

He stood and went back to the desk and the map and the phones and the machinery of a man going to war over something that mattered to him.

My phone lit up one more time.

Not the unknown number.

Not Alberto.

It was Nissi.

And the message she had sent at three forty-seven in the morning contained eight words that rearranged everything I thought I understood about tonight.

"I'm sorry. I didn't know they would take him."