CHAPTER FIFTEEN: TERMS OF AN UNEASY TRUCE

VIENNA

I don’t tell him everything. Not that first night — some doors don’t open all the way just because one lock finally gave, and nine years of training isn’t undone by a single ledger and a man’s tired, honest face across a small table.

But I tell him enough. The fire. The man who knelt beside me on cobblestones I can still feel under my knees if I let myself remember too hard. The Nest, the folder, the sixteen names, the years of drills that turned a grieving girl into something Voss could point at a target and trust to fire true.

Matteo listens without interrupting, which surprises me more than it should. Every man I’ve ever reported to has needed to fill silence with his own voice, correcting, directing, shaping the story into something more useful to him. Matteo just listens, elbows on his knees, dark eyes steady on my face like the story itself is the only thing in the room worth his attention. Somewhere outside, a bird starts up its ordinary morning noise against the vineyard, oblivious, and the sound of it feels almost obscene against the weight of what I’m finally saying out loud.

It occurs to me, halfway through, that I’ve never told this story from beginning to end to anyone — not Kestrel, not any of the handlers who passed through the Nest over the years, certainly not Voss, who already knew every piece of it before I did. Saying it whole, in order, to a stranger who has every reason to want me dead, does something strange to the shape of it. It stops sounding like an unquestionable fact and starts sounding, for the first time, like a story somebody built.

“He trained you from seventeen,” he says, when I finally stop talking. Not a question. A fact he’s turning over, testing its weight the way I tested the ledger’s.

“He rebuilt me from seventeen,” I say. “There’s a difference, though I’m only just starting to understand what it is.”

He’s quiet a moment, and outside the window the last of the storm finally gives way to something grey and unremarkable, ordinary morning light creeping over a vineyard that has no idea what almost happened inside these walls hours earlier. “I want to propose something,” he says. “And I want you to actually consider it before you tell me no.”

“That depends entirely on what it is.”

“We find him. Together. You know how he thinks, how he moves, what he taught you to look for in a target — which means you know exactly what he’d look for hunting you, if it comes to that. I have resources you don’t. Men, money, a family name that opens doors neither of us could open alone. Separately, we’re both just people he’s already outmaneuvered once. Together, we might actually stand a chance of getting ahead of him instead of always finding out what he’s done after it’s already too late to stop it.”

“And what do you get out of it,” I ask. “Really. Not the version that sounds noble in front of your men.”

He doesn’t flinch from the question, which I notice, filing it away next to everything else about him I’m still deciding whether to trust. “I get to stop losing people I can’t explain,” he says. “I get to stop wondering, every time I walk into a room, whether tonight’s the night somebody I’ve never met decides my name is next. That’s not noble. That’s just tired.”

“That I believe,” I say, and mean it more than I expect to.

I study him for a long moment, the same weighing look I gave the gun before I lowered it, the same one I gave the ledger before I opened it. Trust doesn’t come easy to me. It never has, not since a rain barrel and a burning house taught me exactly how fast the people you love can be taken from you by someone who never once has to answer for it.

“If I say yes,” I say slowly, “I’m not doing it as your prisoner.”

“I wasn’t going to ask you to.”

“I mean it. I’ve spent nine years being someone else’s weapon. I won’t spend whatever comes next being yours instead, however politely you ask.”

“What would you need,” he asks, “to believe that’s actually true, and not just something I’m telling you to get you to agree.”

The question catches me off guard — not the words themselves, but the fact that he asked it at all, instead of simply promising and expecting the promise to be enough. “I need to be able to leave,” I say slowly, testing each word before I commit to it. “Not tonight. I understand tonight. But once we’re past whatever crisis just walked through that door, I need a door that isn’t locked from the outside.”

“Done.”

“That easily?”

“I didn’t say it wouldn’t cost me an argument with Rocco,” he says, something almost like humor in it, the first I’ve heard from him all night. “But yes. That easily. I’m not interested in keeping anyone here who doesn’t want to be kept. I’ve had enough of that kind of loyalty to last a lifetime — the kind people give you because they’re afraid of what happens if they stop.”

Something moves behind his eyes when he says it, some old weight he’s carrying that has nothing to do with tonight, and I find myself wondering, not for the first time, how much of what makes this man different from every other name I’ve collected has to do with exactly that — a man who’s spent his whole life surrounded by people who serve him out of fear, and hates it more than he’s ever said out loud to anyone.

I almost smile, hearing it, the first almost-smile I’ve let myself have since I climbed a wall in the rain to kill him. It doesn’t fully arrive. Some part of me isn’t ready yet to let it, not with a locked door still between me and the rest of the world, not with a name I’ve trusted my whole adult life sitting freshly cracked open on the table between us.

A knock sounds at the door before I can answer any of it, sharp, urgent, nothing like the careful two-beat rhythm Rocco’s men have used every other time tonight. Matteo is on his feet before it finishes, some old instinct in him reading the wrongness of it faster than I can name what’s different.

“What,” he calls out, voice gone flat and cold in a way I haven’t heard from him since the study.

The door opens. Rocco, breathless, a phone gripped tight enough in one hand that his knuckles have gone pale. “You need to see this,” he says. “Both of you. Now.”