Chapter 4 Elio
ELIO
It's been seventy-two hours of dead ends, bought silence, and men who know nothing, because they were paid to know nothing.
Every lead dissolves on contact. The security footage shows three vehicles, a rehearsed extraction, faces obscured, plates that trace back to a rental company in Catania that burned to the ground the same night.
Too clean for anyone to have managed alone.
Logic keeps circling back to the same door.
I button my suit jacket in the car, my ribs punishing me for it.
The wrapping beneath my shirt keeps everything where it belongs but not enough to let me forget.
My split lip has scabbed over in a way that cracks every time I speak, which means every conversation for the past three days has tasted like copper.
The eye has gone from swollen shut to a deep purple-green. No amount of composure disguises it.
Good. Let him see his handiwork.
Cicero's estate sits on the hill above Palermo like a crown on a rotting head. Seventeenth-century villa, restored twice, once after the war, once after my mother died and he gutted the interior to remove all evidence of her existence. New marble. New fixtures. Every trace of her gone in six weeks.
The guards at the gate nod me through without searching me.
A mistake born of habit. They see the suit, the car, the face that looks like Cicero's but thirty years younger and currently rearranged by his fists.
They see the son who lived in this prison and never stood up to his father.
They don't see the four-inch folding knife in my inside breast pocket, the one I took off a Corsican in Marseille six years ago.
Titanium frame, carbon steel blade. Thin enough to disappear inside a lapel.
Valente stays in the car. If I'm not out in forty minutes, he comes in and he doesn't knock.
My father's study is on the second floor, east-facing, French doors opening onto the terrace above the garden my mother planted and Cicero never touched. The one thing he kept. I stopped wondering why years ago.
He's at the chessboard when I enter. He's been expecting me. The chessboard is where he teaches his 'lessons'. Where he takes you apart piece by piece and calls it love.
The board is mid-game. The Immortal Game, Anderssen versus Kieseritzky, 1851. White sacrifices both rooks, a bishop, and his queen to deliver checkmate. Cicero's favorite. But the arrangement is off. He's deviated from the original, playing his own variation.
A bottle of Verduci sits open on the side table. Two glasses poured.
He doesn't look up when I walk in. Moves a bishop three squares.
"Elio."
Every muscle in my body tenses, a conditioned response I've spent twenty years trying to override. I don't bother trying today.
"Father."
He lifts his glass and holds the wine in his mouth before swallowing, savoring it the way he savors everything, performing refinement over rot. The wine is the color of old blood.
"Sit."
I don't. I stand three feet from the board with my hands in my pockets because if they're free I'll use them, and I need information first.
"You look terrible. The boys were only supposed to remind you. They may have been overzealous."
The smile on his face tells me he doesn't think his boys were overzealous.
"Where is she?"
He picks up a pawn, studies it, sets it back without moving it.
"Straight to it. No pleasantries. You used to have better manners."
"You used to have better men. I counted twelve at the warehouse. Valente got through them in under four minutes."
Something moves across his face, there and gone within seconds, but I've been reading this face since I learned what expressions meant. The mention of Valente bothers him. It always has. Loyalty he can't buy or beat into someone offends his understanding of how the world works.
"Where is she, Cicero."
Not father. He catches it. His eyes lift from the board to my face, reading the damage the way I read a room.
"The American?" He leans back, crosses one leg over the other, suit impeccable, not a crease. Silver hair combed back. Handsome the way aging predators can be, distinguished and polished and rotten underneath. "I told you she was a distraction."
"And I told you she's none of your concern."
"Everything in this family is my concern. Especially when my son, my heir, is jeopardizing a political alliance worth two hundred million over a girl he's been fucking for a few weeks."
My jaw locks. The split lip cracks open.
"The Rossi arrangement is dead."
"The Rossi arrangement is whatever I say it is."
One step closer. Just one. "You pulled my security. Left my gates open. Whoever took her walked right in."
He sips without blinking.
"I know many things, Elio. The benefit of being the one who built everything you're so desperate to run.
" He sets the glass down and folds his hands in his lap.
"What I know, specifically, is that the American is gone.
And that her absence, while unfortunate for your bed, is a gift for this family. "
"Unfortunate for my bed."
"Don't be dramatic. She's a woman. There are others."
"No." I hear it come out before I can stop it.
He sets down his glass. Picks up the chess queen, white, and turns it between his fingers. He doesn't say anything for a long moment. Just looks at me.
"I wondered," he says finally, "how deep it had gone. Whether it was appetite or something worse." He tilts his head. "Now I know."
The knife is against his throat before the sentence ends.
I don't remember crossing the distance. The blade sits against the loose skin below his jaw, right where the carotid pulses, and a thin red line opens beneath the edge. His blood is darker than I expected. Almost black in the lamplight.
He doesn't flinch. Doesn't move. He holds the chess queen in his right hand and my eyes with his as a smile spreads across his face that has nothing to do with fear.
"There he is." Calm. Warm, even. The voice of a father watching his son take his first steps. "My son."
My hand is steady. My breathing is controlled. The ribs are locked out, sent somewhere I don't have to hear them. The knife presses deeper. Another thread of blood runs down the blade, wets my fingers.
"You will tell me where she is."
"Or what?" He hasn't moved. "You'll cut my throat? In my own study? With twenty men downstairs? Think, Elio. Be smart."
He's right that I need to be smart. He's wrong that I am.
"Tell me where she is."
"I don't have her."
"Bullshit."
"Language," he says reflexively, like I'm twelve and he's correcting table manners, his throat bleeding onto his Brioni collar while he worries about my vocabulary.
"You opened the gates." I press the blade a fraction deeper. "Pulled my security."
He says nothing.
"You left her unprotected and someone walked in and took her."
"I pulled your security to teach you a lesson about priorities." He pauses. "What happened after that was none of my doing."
"You let it happen."
"I created the conditions for reason to find you." He lifts his chin. The blade bites deeper. He doesn't care. "She was making you weak. Sentimental. A man in your position cannot afford sentiment. I did what any father would do."
"The man you raised was chained to a beam in a warehouse and beaten for two days because he wouldn't obey." My voice drops to something quieter and more dangerous than shouting ever could be. "That's not raising a man. That's breaking a dog."
For the first time, his expression changes, the corners of his mouth tightening. We've maintained the fiction, discipline, correction, lessons, because the truth is uglier than either of us wanted to hold. But the fiction died the moment I got back, and she was gone.
"You want her back."
"I want her back."
"Then let me help you."
I press the blade hard enough that he has to tilt his head back, his Adam's apple riding against the steel.
"The way you helped by leaving my gates open?"
"Elio." The voice shifts. Softer. The warmth he manufactures when brute force isn't working. "I don't know where they've taken her."
"Bullshit."
"If I did, I'd tell you." His left thumb taps his right knuckle, just once, the tell he's had since I was a boy, the one that separates what he's inventing from what he's reporting. "Not because I care about the girl. But this situation is becoming embarrassing. The Syndicate is watching."
I wait.
"Your fixation is a liability. The longer she's missing, the longer you're compromised." He holds my eyes. "I want her found. For very different reasons than yours."
He didn't take her. He created the opening and someone else walked through it. But he knows who. He always knows. That's the only thing he's never lied about, his information is always current, always complete, always exactly as useful as he wants it to be.
"Names."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Whoever moved her needed infrastructure. A location. Someone handled logistics. You know who operates those networks in Sicily. Give me a name."
"I'm not a directory service."
I twist the blade. Not enough to kill. Enough that the blood flow thickens. His hand closes around the chess queen, knuckles going white.
"A name, Cicero. Or I'll burn every operation connected to this family until I find her myself, and then you can explain to the Syndicate why your son dismantled half of Sicily looking for an American girl."
His jaw works. He calculates. I watch him decide what information costs him least.
"Tommaso Lombardi. He moves logistics for several operations that have been developing throughout the South. If someone needed to transport a woman quietly and quickly, he's the kind of man they'd call."
It's a thin thread. It might lead nowhere. He knows that and he's given it anyway because a thread going nowhere keeps me busy and away from him.
"Where is he?"
"Messina, last I heard. Owns a bar near the port." He swallows against the blade, his blood smearing on the steel. "He moves around."
"If this name is wrong—"
"It's not wrong. Whether it gets you where you want to go is another matter entirely." He holds my eyes. "Lombardi is a cockroach. He'll know something, or he'll know someone who does. That's the best I can offer you."
I pull the knife back, fold it closed, return it to my breast pocket, and I'm a man visiting his father's study on an afternoon except for the blood on my fingers and the blood on his collar.
He reaches for his wine. His hand is steady. It always is.
"There was a time when you would have asked for my help rather than put a blade to my neck."
"There was a time when you didn't sell out my household to prove a point."
"Everything I do is for this family."
"Everything you do is for yourself. The family is just a vehicle."
He looks at me then, full attention, chess queen in his right hand and a monogrammed handkerchief pressed to his throat with the left, blood blooming through white linen.
There's no anger in that look. No hurt. Instead I see recognition.
The way you recognize your own face in a mirror, aged and distorted but undeniably yours.
"She's a commodity, Elio. That's all women ever are in this world. You can dress it up in whatever language you like. The math is the same. She has value. Value can be traded."
Something goes cold in me. Not rage. I know rage. This is the other side of it.
He priced her. Between sips of wine, in this room, he assigned a number to the woman who draws her hands alongside mine to show me we're the same size.
I turn for the door.
"Elio."
I don't stop.
"The Rossi marriage will happen. With or without the girl."
I walk out. Down the stairs. Past the twenty men who answer to him. Through the front door into Sicilian sunlight that has no business being this bright when everything in me has gone this dark.
Valente has the engine running. He reads my face through the windshield and doesn't ask, just puts the car in gear the moment my door closes.
I unfold the knife and wipe my father's blood on my trousers. Black fabric. Won't show.
"Tommaso Lombardi in Messina. Bar near the port."
Valente's eyes go to the rearview, to the blood on my hands.
"When?"
"Now."