CHAPTER TEN: IF YOU WANTED ME DEAD

MATTEO

She asks it like the question costs her something, and I understand, watching her hand finally start to shake around the grip of a gun that’s been perfectly steady for the last two minutes, that it probably does — more than she’s willing to let me see.

“I don’t know,” I say, honest, because honesty is the only currency I have left in a room where she’s holding all the power that matters. “I’ve spent five years watching my own people die and finding no thread to follow back to whoever’s pulling it. If you’ve spent nine years being told it was me, then someone built that story on purpose, and building a story like that on purpose takes patience most people don’t have.”

“Someone I trust,” she says, and it isn’t a question, more like she’s saying it out loud to see if it survives being spoken.

“Probably.” I keep my hands visible, keep my voice level, the way you’d talk down anyone standing at the edge of something they haven’t decided yet whether to jump from. “Nobody builds a weapon that patient out of a stranger.”

Her eyes are brown — ordinary brown, nothing remarkable about the color itself, except for the way they refuse to look away from me even now, even shaking. It reminds me, strangely, of every Romano who ever sat across a negotiating table from an enemy and didn’t blink first. I didn’t expect that from her. I expected fear, the kind I’ve seen on a dozen faces in this exact room over the years — the pleading, the bargaining, the offers of things people don’t actually have to give. She’s offered me none of that. She’s offered me a question I don’t think she’s ever let herself ask out loud before tonight.

There’s mud drying at the hem of her coat, rain still dripping off dark hair she hasn’t bothered to push out of her face, and underneath all of it, something exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with tonight’s storm — the specific tiredness of someone who has been running toward the same finish line for so long they’ve forgotten what it feels like to stand still.

“If I lower this,” she says, “what happens.”

“That depends on what you do after you lower it.”

“I could still kill you.”

“You could,” I agree. “You had a clean shot for at least ninety seconds and you didn’t take it. I don’t think that’s about to change just because we started talking.”

Something almost like a laugh escapes her, short and disbelieving, gone as fast as it came. “You’re very sure of yourself for a man with a gun to his head.”

“I’m not sure of much tonight,” I say, and mean it more than anything I’ve said in this room in years. “But I’m sure of that.”

She studies me the way you’d study a locked door you’d been told for years was a wall — like the possibility of it opening hasn’t fully occurred to her yet, and she doesn’t quite trust the hinge even now that she can see it. I let her look. There’s nothing else I can do, standing here with nothing between us but a few feet of air and whatever she decides to believe.

“Why didn’t you call for your men,” she asks, abrupt, like the question’s been sitting behind her teeth since she walked in. “The moment I lowered this even an inch. Most men in your position would have shouted the house down.”

“Because the moment I do that, this conversation ends, and I still don’t have the one thing I actually want out of tonight.”

“Which is?”

“The truth,” I say. “I’ve been fighting a war for five years against an enemy I couldn’t see. You just became the first person who might actually be able to show me his face.”

Somewhere below us, faint through the storm, I hear what might be Rocco’s voice calling my name across the terrace — close enough that if she wanted an excuse to end this fast, before the room fills with men who wouldn’t hesitate the way I have, this would be it. She hears it too. I watch her register the sound, weigh it, and choose, deliberately, not to move toward the door.

“He’ll come up here in a few minutes,” I say. “If he finds you standing over me with that gun still raised, he won’t ask any of the questions I’ve been asking. He’ll just shoot.”

“Then tell him not to.”

“I intend to. I’d like it a great deal more if I didn’t have to also worry about you shooting me first while I’m doing it.”

Something flickers at the corner of her mouth — not quite a smile, gone before it can properly become one, but real, the first unguarded thing I’ve seen cross her face since she stepped out of my own reflection in that window. “You’re strange for a man who’s supposed to be a monster.”

“Maybe I am one,” I say. “Just not the one you were told about.”

The gun stays raised another long moment — long enough that I hear the storm again, properly, rain hammering the window at my back, thunder rolling low enough to feel through the floor. Then, slow, like it costs her every ounce of the training that put her in this room in the first place, she lets the barrel drop an inch. Not away. Not down all the way. Just enough that I understand, watching her, that something in her has shifted even if she hasn’t decided yet what to call it.

“Who are you,” I ask, quiet now. “Really. Not what they call you. What’s your name.”

Her jaw sets. For a second I think she’s not going to answer at all — that whatever door opened in the last two minutes is about to swing shut again, gun and all, and I’ll spend whatever’s left of tonight finding out the hard way whether I was wrong to believe she wouldn’t pull the trigger.

Instead she says, so quiet I almost lose it under the thunder, “Vienna.”

Just that. No surname. No history. A single word offered like it costs her something rare to hand over, and standing there with a gun still between us and fifteen dead men in the space where trust should be, I understand, with a certainty I can’t yet explain to myself, that everything about tonight just changed, and neither of us has any idea yet what it’s about to cost us to find out how.

Outside, the storm doesn’t care that anything in this room has shifted. It keeps coming, the same as it has all night, throwing itself against three-hundred-year-old glass like it’s trying to get in on whatever’s happening between us. I find myself, absurdly, grateful for the noise — it gives us both somewhere to look besides each other, for the one stretched-out second neither of us seems ready to fill with anything else.

“Vienna,” I say, testing the shape of it out loud, the way you’d test ice before deciding whether it holds your weight. “Whoever told you my name was the one on your list — I need to know everything you know about them. Tonight. Before Rocco gets up here and decides for both of us how this ends.”

She doesn’t answer right away. The gun is still between us, still lowered but not gone, and I watch her weigh the offer the same careful way she’s weighed everything since she walked through that door — like trust is a currency she spent the last of a long time ago and isn’t sure she has enough left to make the purchase. Footsteps sound on the stairs now, closer, unmistakably Rocco’s, and whatever answer she gives me next is going to have to survive whatever walks through that door behind it.