Chapter Two
He had them assembled in the front hall by five. It was theatre and he knew it was theatre and he had learned from his father — who had been very bad at almost everything except this — that theatre performed early enough becomes law.
The omega stood at the foot of the stairs where Matteo had put him. Small, in a very good coat. Not frightened. That was the thing that kept snagging: the boy had come out of the car and looked at the ceiling roses.
"This is Aleksandr Vetrov," Matteo said. "He is in this house for ninety days as surety on a Vetrov debt. Some things are going to be true for those ninety days and I want them said once."
The hall was quiet. Gennaro stood at the front, arms folded over his stomach, wearing the expression of a man enjoying his nephew's competence.
"He does not leave the property. He does not use a phone. He does not go into the east wing." Matteo let that sit. "And nobody touches him."
Somebody shifted.
"I'll say it in the ugly way, so there's no misunderstanding, and then I won't say it again.
" He looked along the row of faces, unhurried.
"He is unbonded. He is an omega in a house of alphas.
Some of you have already had a thought about that.
Have it, and then put it down, because if a man in my employ so much as makes him uncomfortable in a corridor, that man is not going to be dismissed.
Do you understand the distinction I am making? "
They understood the distinction.
"He is worth four point two million to me and he is worth nothing at all to me damaged. Any of you who can't hold both halves of that sentence in your head at once can leave now with my blessing."
Nobody left. Matteo hadn't expected anyone to; that wasn't what the offer was for.
"Bianca will show him the house. Go to work."
They dispersed. Gennaro came up the stairs at Matteo's shoulder with his hand out to squeeze his arm — Gennaro was always touching people, it was his great gift — and said warmly, "Your father would have put him in the cellar."
"My father put a lot of people in the cellar."
"And look how loved he was." Gennaro laughed at his own joke, which he always did, and it was always funny, which was the problem with Gennaro. Then, mildly: "You said the number out loud."
"He asked me to."
"He asked you to."
"In front of Konstantin."
Gennaro's face did something for about a quarter of a second. Later — much later — Matteo would go back to this moment and take it apart frame by frame like a man going through security footage, and he would find it there, small and unmistakable: not surprise. Recalculation.
At the time he noticed it, filed it as nothing, and forgot it for six weeks.
"Cheeky," Gennaro said, delighted. "Well. Ninety days."
***
By eight the house had emptied out and Matteo, who had not slept, went to the kitchen for coffee and found the omega already there.
Sitting at the long table. Coat off. Bianca opposite him with her arms crossed and her whole body angled away, and between them a plate of the almond biscuits their aunt sent every fortnight, of which four were gone.
"—no," Vetrov was saying, "but the feeling of it. In Brunswick you can hear the trams from bed. Here I can hear the garden. It's disgusting. I'll get used to it in about a day and a half and that's what I object to."
"You're a hostage," Bianca said flatly.
"Yes, and I've been one for four hours, and already the biscuits are better.
That's what I'm telling you. The corruption is very fast." He caught sight of Matteo in the doorway and did not startle, did not stand, did not perform a single one of the small submissions Matteo had watched grown men perform in that doorway for eleven years.
He just picked up another biscuit. "Mr Ferrante. Your sister hates me."
"My sister hates everyone."
"She was quite specific."
"I was specific," Bianca agreed, standing, gathering her keys. "Matteo. A word. Later." She went, and the smell of her perfume went with her, and the kitchen was suddenly very large.
Matteo made coffee. He did it slowly, with his back turned, which was itself a decision.
The blocker patch, he thought. The boy was still wearing it. Twenty-eight hours in the car and the hall and now here and Matteo had not once caught anything off him — no fear-sharpness, no omega-sweetness, nothing but wool and the almond biscuits.
Which meant that whatever Matteo was currently experiencing in the region of his sternum was not chemical. It was not pheromones. It was not the reliable, manageable, entirely dismissable hydraulics of biology.
It was that the boy had said four point two million in a container yard at four in the morning with a man's hand on his neck.
Matteo had been on suppressants for eleven years.
He had started them eight weeks after his father was shot in the front seat of a car outside a restaurant on Lygon Street, and he had started them for a very simple, very unromantic reason: an alpha in rut is unreachable for three days.
Three days of not answering the phone. Three days of being predictable, and located, and slow.
His father had been killed on a Tuesday because his father had been findable on Tuesdays.
So Matteo did not rut. He had not felt the leading edge of one in over a decade. He had, in the way of a man who has amputated something, gradually come to believe that he had never had it.
He set the second cup down in front of Vetrov, who looked at it with open surprise and then, briefly, with something more complicated.
"Rules," Matteo said, sitting.
"I heard the rules. You said them very well. The bit about the corridor was excellent."
"You're going to be bored," Matteo said. "That's the part nobody warns people about. Not frightened. Bored, for ninety days, in a house where everyone has been told not to speak to you."
Vetrov's mouth twitched. "Is that concern?"
"It's maintenance." Matteo drank his coffee. "Bored people do stupid things and I don't want to have to punish you. What do you want? Within the property."
And Vetrov — hostage, surety, four point two million in a good coat — leaned forward on his elbows and said, with an eagerness so undisguised that it took Matteo a full second to recognise it as sincere:
"Something to read."
"Books are in the—"
"No. Not books." He was smiling now, and it changed his whole face, and Matteo felt the change land somewhere under his ribs like a dropped stone.
"I'm an accountant, Mr Ferrante. I'm a very good one.
You have a legitimate freight brokerage and eleven men on a payroll and an aunt who sends biscuits every fortnight, which means you have receipts. "
"You want my books."
"I want a book. Any book. Give me the fuel accounts for the trucks, I don't care, give me the thing you'd give a child.
" He spread his hands. "You've got ninety days of me sitting in your kitchen.
You could have ninety days of me being useful.
And before you say it — yes, obviously, I'd be seeing your business.
I've already seen your business; I've moved your money twice, through Vanuatu, in 2019 and again the year after, and I thought at the time that whoever you had doing it was competent but slow. "
The kitchen was very quiet.
Matteo set down his cup.
"That was me," he said.
"I know," said Sasha Vetrov. "That's why I said competent."