CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER TWO

KAI

I had the gun drawn before the sound finished. Moved Elias behind me without deciding to, pure reflex, and the fact that it unsettled me more than the intruder did was its own kind of warning.

"Stay down," I told them both, and went toward the study.

Empty. A framed photograph lay face down on the floorboards, glass starred with a crack, that was the sound. The back door stood open onto the alley, swinging on its hinge, and I've spent enough years reading rooms to know the difference between a house that's been searched and a house someone just walked out of. This was the second kind. Whoever it was had heard me coming and left rather than fought, which told me they weren't here to kill anyone tonight. Only to look. Or to make sure something stayed lost.

I came back to find Elias on his knees beside his father, one hand pressed flat to the old man's chest like he could hold the terror in by touch. The gentleness of it, the way he gave tenderness to a man the whole city called a murderer's excuse, hit something in my chest I hadn't braced for.

"Nobody there now," I said. "Back door's open. Whoever it was is gone."

"Gone." Salvatore laughed, broken and awful. "They're never gone, son. That's the joke. That's always been the joke."

"What were they looking for?" I crouched to his level, let nineteen years of rehearsed hatred bend, for one second, into something closer to real curiosity. "Salvatore. What do you have that someone still wants badly enough to tear your house apart nineteen years later?"

His eyes cut to Elias, fast, involuntary. I caught it. A man deciding, in real time, what his son could and couldn't afford to hear.

"Nothing," he said. "I got rid of it years ago."

"Got rid of what."

"Get out of my house." His voice cracked upward. "You've done enough. Get out."

Every trained instinct told me to push. This was the crack. Exploit it. But Elias looked up at me, and there was nothing in his face but a raw, exhausted plea I didn't have defenses built for. Not now. Not while he's like this.

I have spent my whole adult life being unmoved. I was not unmoved. That frightened me more than the gun in my hand.

"I'll go," I said. "Tomorrow. My study. Alone."

"I already told you I don't know anything."

"I don't think you do," I said, and meant it more than I expected to. "I think your father's been protecting you from something for nineteen years. I'd like to know what it is before whoever came tonight decides you're worth searching too."

I left before I did something I couldn't undo.

Three streets away I had to stop the car. Renata's voice came through sharp before I'd even said hello.

"Tell me you didn't go to the Marchetti house yourself."

"How do you already know that?"

"I have people watching that house, Kai. Same as I've had for nineteen years. One of them called me in a panic to say the place was ransacked and you were standing in it." A pause, blade sharp. "Tell me you had nothing to do with it."

"I had nothing to do with it. Someone got there before me. Tore the study apart. Salvatore's terrified, actually terrified, not performing it. Something was taken, or hidden, or destroyed years ago, and someone thinks it still exists."

The silence went on a half second too long.

"Renata."

"There's nothing there." Too fast. Too smooth. "Salvatore's been drowning himself in guilt for nineteen years because he's too much of a coward to end it properly. Leave it. Leave the boy. You have a family to run, and this is not the legacy your brother would want."

"You didn't answer my question."

Longer silence.

"Come home," she said, and hung up.

I sat there while the light went grey over the water and felt, for the first time in nineteen years, the specific vertigo of a story I'd never once questioned starting to move under my feet. My aunt's voice, half a beat too fast. A half beat too smooth. And under it, unmistakable now that I was listening: fear.

Renata Cassano does not get afraid. Not of Salvatore Marchetti. Not of ghosts.

She was afraid tonight. And I had no idea anymore which side of this my own family was standing on, or whether I was already standing on the wrong one.