CHAPTER SIX

ELIAS

He was breathing.

I found that out because I finally forced my hand up through the dark, shaking so hard I could barely make my fingers work, and pressed it flat against his chest the way I’d pressed my palm to my father’s the night before, checking for a heartbeat instead of a wound. It was there. Fast, uneven, but there, thudding against my palm like something trying to escape a cage.

“Kai.” My voice cracked down the middle of his name. “Kai, look at me.”

He didn’t answer. His weight had gone slack and heavy across my back, dead weight in the worst possible sense of the phrase, and somewhere above us Renata was still screaming, no words now, just sound, raw and animal, nothing like the composed woman who’d stood in the doorway ten minutes ago holding a phone like a weapon of her own.

Light flooded the room, suddenly and blinding, someone had found the switch, and in it I saw the wreckage properly for the first time. The shattered window. Glass glittering across the floorboards like scattered ice. Marco Reyes gone, the door he’d come through and the one that had exploded inward both standing open onto empty hallway, and a man I didn’t recognize crumpled just inside the threshold, one of the dark-suited staff who’d led me through the house an hour ago, a spreading stain already black under the study lights.

He wasn’t moving either.

“Get him off me.” I was talking to no one, to everyone, my hands sliding under Kai’s shoulder and finding wet heat there that made my stomach drop through the floor. “Somebody help me, he’s bleeding, he’s bleeding, get him off.”

Renata was on her knees beside us before I finished the sentence, her composure gone so completely I almost didn’t recognize her as the same woman who’d smiled at us and called Marco a moment ago. Her hands moved over Kai’s shoulder with a speed and certainty that told me, with a small cold shock, that whatever else she was, she had done this before, had learned somewhere in her life exactly how to find a wound and press against it without hesitating.

“Through and through, high on the shoulder, missed anything that matters.” Her voice had gone flat and fast, the voice of someone talking herself down a ledge one fact at a time. “He’s going to be fine. He is going to be fine, do you hear me, Kai, you are going to be fine, you stubborn, reckless—” Her voice broke clean in half on the last word, and for one unguarded second I saw something on her face that had nothing to do with strategy or blackmail or nineteen years of careful lies. Just terror. Naked and total. The kind you only feel for someone you actually love.

I understood, in that moment, looking at her, that whatever Renata Cassano was guilty of, whatever she’d built and buried and protected with a phone call twenty minutes ago, she had not been lying about one thing. She loved him. Whatever this was, it wasn’t villainy performed for its own sake. It was fear, curdled into something monstrous by nineteen years of practice, and she had just watched the one person she’d spent her whole life protecting nearly die because of the exact silence she’d kept.

Kai’s eyes opened.

Not far, not steady, but open, and they found me first, before Renata, before the wrecked room, before anything else, and something in his face when he saw me eased for a half second even through the pain, before it tightened again with the effort of speaking.

“Elias.” His voice was wrecked, barely a breath. “Did he. Are you.”

“I’m fine. You threw yourself in front of a bullet, you absolute idiot, I’m fine—”

“Good.” His eyes were already sliding shut again, the word coming out slower, softer, like something dragged up from underwater. “Good. That's it. Good.”

“Stay awake.” Renata’s hand cracked, sharp, against his uninjured cheek, an old trick, a mother’s trick, and it worked, his eyes flew back open, furious and alive. “You do not get to close your eyes yet. Not until the ambulance is here. Do you understand me, Kai Cassano, I did not survive nineteen years of this family to bury you in your father’s study.”

Down the hall, feet were pounding, more staff, someone shouting for a doctor, someone else shouting a name I didn’t recognize into a phone, and underneath all of it I became aware, slowly, of the fact that Marco Reyes had simply walked out. No one had gone after him. No one seemed, in the chaos, to have even noticed which direction he’d fled.

I looked at the man crumpled by the door, and understood, with a sick lurch, what must have happened. He’d come running at the first gunshot, and Marco, cornered, unwilling to be identified as the man who’d fired on the heir to the Cassano empire in his own father’s study, had put him down and used the confusion to disappear into a house full of hallways he’d probably known since before Kai was born.

He had planned an exit before he ever drew the gun. That was the part that turned my blood cold all over again, once the immediate terror of Kai bleeding out under my hands had eased enough to let me think at all. Marco Reyes did not improvise. Everything about tonight, the phone call, the timing, the casual, unhurried way he’d raised the gun, had the shape of a man executing a plan he’d rehearsed more than once in his head.

Which meant he had known, before he ever stepped through that door, exactly how far he was willing to go tonight. And he had chosen, in the end, to leave two of us alive.

That thought didn’t comfort me. It terrified me more than anything else that had happened in that room, because it meant this wasn’t finished. It meant Marco Reyes had walked away from a botched job with a clear head and a longer game still running underneath it, and somewhere in that calculation, Renata Cassano’s usefulness to him had just become very, very small.

She seemed to understand that too. I watched it land on her face as the ambulance sirens finally rose faint and distant through the broken window, and watched some new and terrible arithmetic complete itself behind her eyes.

“Renata.” I said her name carefully, the way you’d approach something wounded and unpredictable. “He said your fingerprints have been on this for nineteen years. What did he mean?”

Her eyes came up to mine, and for a moment I thought she’d simply refuse to answer, retreat back into the composed, untouchable woman from the doorway. Instead something in her seemed to finally give way, some final wall worn through by watching her nephew bleed out on the floor in front of her.

“It means,” she said quietly, “that I have spent nineteen years believing I was the one holding the leash in this arrangement. And I only understood tonight, watching him raise that gun without asking my permission first, that I was never holding anything at all.” Her hand, still pressed hard against Kai’s shoulder, was shaking now, faint but visible. “He let me believe I was protecting this family. What I was actually doing was protecting him. I have been doing it for so long I forgot there was a difference.”

“Protecting him from what?”

Her mouth opened. Whatever she might have said next was lost under the sudden crash of paramedics through the doorway, a stretcher, hands prying mine gently but firmly off Kai’s shoulder, a voice telling me to step back, sir, please, step back and let us work, and I found myself shoved to the edge of the room watching strangers lift the man who’d thrown his own body over mine without a second’s hesitation, watching his blood soak dark into a white gurney sheet while his eyes searched the room and found me one more time before they wheeled him out.

“Elias.” Barely a whisper, almost lost under the noise. “The letter. Your father’s desk. Don’t wait for me.”

Then he was gone, out through the ruined door, down the hall, into an ambulance, and I was left standing in the wreckage of the Cassano family study with Renata Cassano kneeling in her nephew’s blood and a dead man’s aide by the door, and no earthly idea what letter he meant, or how he’d known about it at all.

They took her away for questioning an hour later, though “questioning” seemed a generous word for the hushed, deferential conversation two Cassano-employed detectives conducted with her in the hallway, more courtesy call than interrogation. Nobody asked me anything. Nobody, I noticed, asked where Marco Reyes had gone, or why the head of a syndicate with no official business at the Cassano estate had been standing in the study with a drawn weapon when the shooting started. The story that would leave this house tonight, I understood with a hollow, exhausted clarity, was already being written by people with far more practice at it than the truth would ever get.

I sat alone on the hall bench they’d left me on, my shirt stiff with drying blood that wasn’t mine, and thought about the letter.

My father’s desk. I’d been in that study a hundred times growing up, had dusted those shelves myself more than once in the years my father’s hands shook too badly to hold a rag steady, and I had never once seen a letter, never once found so much as a hint that there was anything left to find in that ruined little room beyond nineteen years of silence and one dead woman’s belongings scattered across the floor by whoever had torn the house apart looking for something Salvatore swore he no longer hadUnless whoever had searched that house had been looking in the wrong place entirely.

I was on my feet and moving before I’d fully decided to, past the detectives, past Renata’s cool, unreadable stare following me down the hall, out into the cold harbor air, and it wasn’t until I was three streets from Dockside Row that I let myself feel the full shaking terror of everything that had happened in that study, everything that was still happening, somewhere out there, to a man bleeding in the back of an ambulance because he’d chosen, without a second’s hesitation, to put his body between me and a bullet meant for both of us.

I didn’t understand yet what that meant. I only knew, walking fast through the dark toward my father’s ruined house with Kai’s voice still echoing in my head, that whatever this was between us, it had stopped being a threat, or a debt, or a rich man’s cruelty a long time before either of us had been willing to say so out loud.

My father’s house was dark when I reached it, the police tape from last night still fluttering loose across the shattered front door, and I let myself in through the back the way I had a thousand times as a boy sneaking in past curfew, my heart hammering for reasons that had nothing to do with nostalgia.

The study was exactly as we’d left it. Drawers dumped, the old sea chest overturned, my mother’s few remaining things scattered across the floorboards like something washed ashore. I knelt among them, running my hands along the underside of the desk, the back panel of the ruined drawers, everywhere a man might hide something he never intended anyone to find, and it was nearly twenty minutes before my fingers caught the edge of it, a thin seam in the desk’s false bottom that wouldn’t have been visible at all if the drawer above it hadn’t already been torn half off its rails.

I pried it open with shaking hands, and there, tucked flat against old varnished wood, was a single envelope, yellowed soft with age, my name written across the front in my father’s hand, the ink faded but the letters unmistakably his, careful and slow, the handwriting of a man who’d sat a long time deciding what to say before he ever put pen to paper.

I broke the seal with hands that had finally, finally stopped shaking, and unfolded a single page, and read the first line before the sound of footsteps on the porch outside stopped my heart cold in my chest.

My dearest Elias, if you are reading this, then I have failed to protect you the way I swore I would the night you were born, and I am sorrier than any words on this page can hold. Your mother did not die the year they told you she did.

The porch door opened.

I looked up, the letter still open in my trembling hands, and found Teo Falcone standing in the frame, out of breath, his old fisherman’s coat soaked through with rain that hadn’t started yet, his face gone pale and stricken in a way I had never seen on him in all the years I’d known him behind that bar.

“Elias.” His voice cracked on my name. “Thank God. I’ve been looking for you all night. There’s something you need to hear before anyone else gets to you first, and God forgive me, boy, I should have told you years ago.”