Chapter 5: Keys.

Ruby POV

“Move it, signorina! You’re blocking the gate.”

A horn blasted right behind me, and I dropped the chain in the slush. The padlock on the Ferrante gate had rusted shut, and only the third key on the port authority’s ring had turned it.

A grey truck sat a few meters from my back bumper with its engine running. The driver was leaning out of his window and waving his arm at my car.

“It’s my gate.” I held up the key ring so he could see it.

He laughed and leaned on the horn again.

I pushed the gate open with my shoulder. Behind it, six more trucks stood close to tail along the loading bay, with MORETTI painted in white letters across their doors. Two men were hosing road salt off a trailer, and a third sat on the gatehouse step with half a sandwich in his hand.

The gatehouse door opened, and a man came out with a clipboard under his arm.

His brown work jacket was too big for him, with the shoulders sitting wide and the cuffs hanging down over his knuckles. When he lifted a hand to shade his eyes, the sleeve slid back, and I saw the crooked knuckle on his right hand.

My fingers went cold inside my pockets. The last time I had seen that hand, it had been turning a heater dial all the way to the right.

He crossed the yard toward me without hurrying. Up close, he looked younger than the man who had carried me out of the snow. There were no shadows under his eyes, and his dark hair had grown a little longer at the front. He looked at my face, then at the keys in my hand, and his expression did not change at all.

He shifted the clipboard to his other arm. “Can I help you?”

“You’re on my property.” I took the memorandum of sale out of my coat and held it out to him. “I bought this building this morning.”

He took the paper and read it all the way down. His thumb stopped on the signature at the bottom.

“Lovato,” he said.

It was the same low, flat voice saying the same word. My throat closed, and I had to swallow before I could answer him.

“Ruby Lovato.”

“Lucio Moretti.” He handed the paper back without offering his hand. “The port has taken rent from me for this yard every month for three years. I paid January back in December.”

“Then the port owes you a month’s rent.” I folded the memorandum and put it back in my coat. “I need the yard empty.”

By the trailer, one of the men turned off the hose, and the yard went quiet. The one on the step set his sandwich down on his knee.

“Does your father know you’re throwing Morettis off the docks?” Lucio asked. His voice stayed calm, but his jaw had gone tight.

“My father doesn’t own this building. I do.”

“I have twenty-two trucks and nowhere else to put them.” He tapped the clipboard against his leg. “I’ll need a month.”

“You have a week.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he glanced over at his drivers, who had all drifted closer.

“Say that again,” he said quietly. “Louder, so they can hear it from you.”

Heat climbed up my neck into my face. I lifted my chin and said it again, loud enough to carry to the end of the loading bay.

“You have one week to get your trucks out of my yard.”

The driver of the grey truck whistled through his teeth. Lucio nodded once, slowly, and for the first time the corner of his mouth lifted.

“One week, then.”

The man on the step stood up and brushed the crumbs off his trousers. “Boss, that’s Lovato’s daughter. The old man will have our trucks towed off the docks by Monday.”

“I know who she is,” Lucio said, without taking his eyes off me.

His gaze dropped to my hands. I had been holding the keys so hard that my knuckles had gone white, and the ring was rattling against my palm.

He pulled off his gloves and held them out to me.

I stared at them. They were brown leather, worn pale across the palms, with a split along the seam of the left thumb. I knew that split. I had watched him pull those gloves off in the cab of his truck and wrap them around my hands.

“There’s no heating in there,” he said, tipping his head toward the gatehouse. “Give them back when I clear out.”

My fingers barely bent around the leather when I took them. The inside was still warm from his hands.

He turned and walked back to his drivers without another word, and I went into the gatehouse and shut the door behind me.

The office was smaller than I remembered, with a metal desk and two chairs. The outer window looked onto the gate and the road. The inner window looked back into the dark hall, where the long tables and the yellow queue lines did not exist yet.

I pulled his gloves on while I looked around. They were far too big for me, and the empty fingertips hung loose past the ends of my own fingers.

I stood in front of the outer window, on the spot where Cesare had stood drinking from his mug. My knees started to shake, and I gripped the edge of the desk until they stopped.

A pale window opened in the air in front of me.

[Storage unlocked.]

[Size: 2 m x 2 m x 2 m]

[Time does not pass inside.]

[Grows when filled.]

I read it twice. Then I pulled the right glove off with my teeth, took out my phone, opened the stopwatch, and started it running. I held the phone out in my flat palm and thought about the empty space the window described.

The phone vanished. Nothing was left in my palm but the cold.

I counted to sixty in my head, slowly, and then I thought about the phone again. It dropped back onto my palm with the screen still lit.

The stopwatch read 00:03.

I did it again and counted all the way to a hundred. When I brought the phone back out, the stopwatch had only reached 00:05, while the second hand of my wristwatch had gone nearly twice around the dial.

I sat down on the edge of the desk with the phone in my lap and thought about how small that space was.

Three or four of the generators in LF-2271 would fill it. All forty would need a container truck, and a driver who would not ring my father before he reached the coast road. Cesare had pulled that claims drawer open behind me yesterday morning. If he had looked inside the file, he already knew the routing slip was gone, and he could have his own truck at Porto Sanna by tomorrow.

Every haulage firm in Castelmare took work from Papà, except one.

Through the outer window I could see Lucio Moretti standing by the trailer with his drivers, writing something on his clipboard. My left hand was still curled inside his glove.

I stood up and opened the gatehouse door.

I was halfway across the yard toward him when my phone rang in my hand. Papà’s name filled the screen.

“Papà?”

“Where are you, Ruby?” His voice was very quiet and very flat, the voice he used on dockers he was about to fire. “Cesare tells me you bought the Ferrante building out from under me this morning. He also tells me something is missing from my claims cabinet.”