CHAPTER THREE

ELIAS

I didn't sleep. I sat up with my father through the worst of it, through the shaking and the muttering, through the moment near two in the morning when he gripped my hand hard enough to bruise and said, clear as anything, "I should have sent you both away when I had the chance," before slipping back into the fog he retreated to whenever the truth got too close to the surface.

Both. Not you. Both.

I turned that word over for the rest of the night like a stone in my pocket, worn smooth from handling, and by the time grey light came up over the water I had a list of questions long enough to fill a notebook and not one single answer.

I went to the Cassano house anyway. Not because Kai had ordered it, though he had, in that voice that expected obedience the way other men expected air, but because for the first time in nineteen years someone with actual power in this city seemed to believe, even a little, that my father wasn't simply a murderer drowning in guilt. And God help me, after nineteen years of being told exactly what to believe about my own blood, I wanted, badly, to know if it was true.

The house on the hill was everything Dockside Row wasn't. Glass and pale stone. A view of the harbor that made the water look clean instead of grey and tired. A silence so total it felt manufactured. A man in a dark suit led me through it without a word and left me in a study lined floor to ceiling with old maritime charts, where Kai stood at the window with his back to the door, the same way he'd been standing at the boathouse window the first time I saw him.

"You came," he said, without turning.

"You didn't give me much of a choice."

"I never do." He turned then, and something in his face had changed since the wreckage of my father's study, sharper at the edges, more focused, like a man who'd stopped sleeping and started thinking instead. "Sit down. I want to show you something."

He crossed to the desk and laid out a folder, old, the edges soft with handling, and inside it, photographs and shipping manifests yellowed at the corners. My chest tightened before I even understood what I was looking at.

"This is the harbor log from the week my brother died," he said. "I found it in my father's old files this morning, after Renata told me, very firmly, that there was nothing left to find." His finger tapped one line, a shipment entry, a signature scrawled beside it in handwriting I didn't recognize but a name I did. "Adrian's name is on a shipment manifest three nights before he died. A shipment that officially never happened, on a boat that officially wasn't in port that week, at a dock that was supposedly under my family's exclusive control." He looked up. "Your father worked that dock, Elias. Every night that month. I checked the crew rosters this morning too."

My mouth had gone dry. "You think my father saw something."

"I think your father saw everything." His voice dropped, low and urgent, the careful control cracking around something that looked almost like desperation. "I think the story I've been told my entire life, that Salvatore Marchetti murdered my brother over a gambling debt, was never the whole truth, and I think my own family has known that for nineteen years and let me hate the wrong thing anyway."

My hands had started shaking again, the way they had in the boathouse, except this time it wasn't fear. It was something far more dangerous, hope, thin and unfamiliar, an emotion I'd trained myself out of feeling about my father's case a long time ago because hope, in my experience, only ever made the eventual disappointment worse.

"If that's true," I said carefully, "if my father saw something he wasn't supposed to see, then whoever actually killed your brother is still out there. Still protected. Still powerful enough, nineteen years later, to send someone to tear my father's house apart looking for whatever he might still have."

"Yes."

"And they're close to your family. Close enough to know things move the moment you start asking questions." I looked up, meeting his eyes fully for the first time since I'd walked into the room, and watched understanding land on both our faces in the same instant, cold and simultaneous. "Kai. Who else knew you were going to my father's house last night? Who else knew about this folder?"

He went very still.

"I told exactly one person I was looking into your father's case," he said slowly, and I watched something in him, nineteen years of unquestioned loyalty, begin, for the first time, to crack. "My aunt."

Neither of us moved for a long moment. Outside, gulls called over the water, and somewhere in the house a door closed, soft and deliberate, and I felt every hair on my arms rise at once.

"Kai." My voice came out barely above a whisper. "Who's in the house with us right now?"

The study door opened before he could answer, and Renata Cassano stood in the frame, immaculate, unhurried, her eyes moving from the open folder on the desk to the two of us and back again with an expression that told me, in one terrible instant, that she already knew exactly what we'd found, and that she'd come prepared for it.

"Kai, darling," she said softly, closing the door behind her with a click that sounded, in the sudden silence, very much like a lock. "You really should have listened to me. I told you to leave it alone."