Chapter Ten
HE HELD OUT until about four in the morning.
That was the honest figure and he made himself keep it, afterwards, the way you keep a receipt.
Not a week. Not a night of anguish in a garden.
Four hours: from no, not with this, said at a door with his back turned, to a man sitting on the edge of a bath at four a.m. with his hands hanging between his knees, working out the sequence.
There was no conversion. Nothing arrived to change his mind.
He simply discovered, in the way you discover the weather has turned, that the decision had already been taken somewhere below the level where he did his thinking, and that the part of him that had said no to Sasha at midnight had been sincere and had also been, in the technical sense, theatre.
That's what you are, he thought, and went down to the kitchen and made coffee for one, quietly, at four in the morning, in a house where a bonded omega was asleep two floors up and would feel it if he let himself be afraid.
***
The obstacle was the scent.
He worked it through on paper, which he had never once done in his life and now apparently did, and burned the paper, which was more like it.
Sasha had said a fortnight; less, bonded.
Whatever the literature said, Matteo had known at nine days without being told anything, and Rocco had been in the east wing on Thursday delivering boxes and had come down looking at the middle distance in a way Matteo had not liked.
So the news was not a thing he could hold.
It was a thing that was already leaving, on its own schedule, at a rate he could not adjust.
Which meant Sasha's plan -- give it to one man, watch where it comes out -- was already dead, and had been dead before it was proposed.
What he had instead was smaller and uglier and it was the only instrument left in the drawer.
He could not control whether they learned. He could control what each of them learned with it.
***
There were four.
He had refused to say them out loud in daylight with the door open, weeks ago, and had given Sasha an honest reason and a true one, and had not given him the other reason, because the other reason would have ended the conversation.
Emilio Sabbatini. Twenty-two years in the accounts office in Footscray, a man with a laminated photograph of a boat he did not own.
Rocco Trani. Who had driven the car from Genovese's with a napkin going black in the passenger seat and had not once, in eleven years, said a single unnecessary word.
Gennaro.
Bianca.
That was the other reason. That was the whole of it: that his sister ran the legitimate side and signed off supplier onboarding, and had done for nine years, and that if he had said four names in that office in October the cleverest person he had ever met would have gone at all four of them with a pencil and would have found something, because you find something in anybody, and Matteo would have had to sit in a room and decide whether he was looking at the truth or at Sasha Vetrov's very good work, about Bianca.
***
He gave them the news himself, one at a time, over two days, in the front room where the light was bad.
He told each of them that Sasha was pregnant.
He watched each of them receive it. Emilio wept, briefly and embarrassingly, and talked about his daughter.
Rocco said, "Congratulations, boss," and then, after a silence, "the east wing's got two doors," which was the longest strategic contribution he had made since 2019 and was, Matteo thought, the closest thing to love that man had in him.
Gennaro put both hands on Matteo's face and kissed him on the forehead and cried without any embarrassment at all, and said dio mio, caro, dio mio, and held on to him, and Matteo stood in his grandfather's front room being embraced by the man who had carried him at his father's funeral and felt absolutely nothing except the cold clean pressure of the work.
And to each of them, at the end, while they were still soft with it, he said the same sentence with one word different.
That he was moving Sasha out of the house on Sunday. That it was temporary. That it was because of the uncle. That he was not to be told yet, because he'd argue.
To Emilio he said Daylesford.
To Rocco he said the flat above the office in Docklands.
To Bianca he said Portsea, the house that had been their mother's.
To Gennaro he said the farm at Bacchus Marsh.
Then he waited.
***
He would have liked to say that the two days were bad.
They were not bad. That was the thing he came back to later with a kind of nausea: that he slept better than he had in a fortnight, that his hands were steady, and that some old, competent, entirely unbothered mechanism in him had come back online and was running the household like a Tuesday.
He ate. He answered correspondence. He had a long telephone conversation with a shipping agent about berth allocations and was, by all accounts, charming.
Twenty-five years old, in a car outside a restaurant, with his father's blood on the passenger door: he had promised himself he would never be the kind of man who could do this comfortably.
He was very comfortable.
***
Peter called at twenty past two on the Wednesday afternoon, forty-two days after a container yard.
There was a car on the road above the Bacchus Marsh property. Had been since the morning. Two men in it, neither of them local, and one of them had walked the fence line as far as the gate and come back.
Matteo said thank you and put the phone down and sat in his chair in the office and did not move for a considerable time.
The garden was doing its small noises.
And then, at last, six weeks late and in perfect focus, the front hall on the first morning came back to him entire -- Gennaro at his shoulder on the stairs with a hand out to squeeze his arm, and you said the number out loud, and in front of Konstantin, and the quarter of a second in the old man's face that Matteo had looked directly at, and catalogued, and filed as nothing.
Not surprise.
Recalculation.
He had watched it happen. He had seen it, at five in the morning, on the first day, before Sasha Vetrov had eaten a single almond biscuit in his kitchen.
And he had put it down, because Gennaro had carried him at the funeral, and because it is easier, always and for everyone, to believe the thing that only costs you the newcomer.
Matteo put his head in his hands, in an empty room, for about ninety seconds.
Then he sat up and started work.
***
He told Bianca that evening, because he needed her and because she had earned it, and because he had put her on a list and she deserved to hear it from him.
She took the first part without moving. At the second part -- Portsea, mother's house, one of four -- her chin came up.
"You had me on a list."
"For six weeks."
"With Gennaro."
"With Gennaro, Emilio and Rocco. Yes."
Bianca crossed to the window and stood with her back to him for long enough that Matteo began composing something.
"Good," she said.
"Bianca--"
"I said good." She turned round and her eyes were bright and furious and entirely dry.
"You've never once suspected me of anything in your life and it has made you sloppy about everybody else.
I have signed off every supplier onboarding in this company since 2017 and if you hadn't had me on that list you'd have been an idiot, and I've spent six weeks watching you be an idiot about a Vetrov, so I'll take it.
" She sat down. "Now. Tell me what you're going to do, and don't be clever with me, I've had a very long day. "
"I'm going to give him everything he wants," Matteo said, "and let him take it."
"You're going to let him run."
"I'm going to let him run all the way to Konstantin, and I'm going to know the hour and the road and the price, and then I'm going to put it in front of the family with the ledgers underneath it so that nobody in this city ever gets to say I killed my uncle over a boy."
Bianca considered him.
"And Aleksandr?"
Matteo said nothing.
"Matteo."
"He isn't going to be told."
***
Here is the part he would not be able to explain afterwards, to her, or to Sasha, or -- in the small hours, for years -- to himself.
He had a reason. He had a good one. Sasha had spent eleven years being the cleverest person in the room and he could not stop being it: he would improve the plan.
He would find the flaw in it, because there was one, and he would fix it, and the fix would put him in a room with Gennaro Ferrante at some point in the next fortnight and Matteo would sooner have burned the house.
And under that reason, where the reasons run out:
He had spent six weeks discovering that he could be reached.
Pushed down on a footpath, thanked for a cup of coffee, told to say a name out loud.
He had liked it. He was going to go on liking it for the rest of his life.
And some old cold thing in him, the thing that had put him on suppressants eight weeks after his father died, had looked at all that and concluded that a man was permitted to be reachable in exactly one room of one house, and that everywhere else he had better remain the other thing.
So he did it the way he had done everything before Sasha Vetrov ate four biscuits in his kitchen.
Alone.
***
The difficulty was that he could no longer lie.
Not the words. The words were easy; he had never had any trouble with words.
The difficulty was that there was a man in his house who could feel the weather in him from two floors away, and by Thursday morning Sasha was watching him over the top of the phone accounts with an expression Matteo recognised from a desk in an office, and it was the expression of somebody looking at a column of figures that added up correctly and was wrong.
"You're carrying something."
"Yes."
Sasha waited.
And Matteo, who had built an entire life out of not saying things, discovered that there was one more floor beneath the floor he thought he was standing on -- because he did not lie, exactly.
He did something worse and more economical.
He put his hand flat on the desk beside Sasha's notebook and let his face do what it had been doing all week, and said:
"I'm frightened about the baby."
Which was true.
Which was, in fact, the truest sentence available to him.
And which he deployed, deliberately, at nine in the morning, as cover -- and watched it work: watched the suspicion go out of Sasha's face and something enormous and undefended come into it instead, and watched him reach out and take Matteo's wrist over the pulse, the way he had in a bathroom with antiseptic on his hands.
"Yes," Sasha said. "God. Me too. Constantly."
Matteo let him hold it.
Somewhere below them the front door went, and the house made its ordinary morning noises, and Matteo Ferrante stood with his wrist in the hand of the person he had bonded himself to for the rest of his life, and understood with complete clarity that he had just spent the child as currency, in the first week he had known about it, in order to avoid a conversation.
He did not stop.
He went downstairs at ten and made two phone calls, and the second one could not be recalled.
It was a Thursday.
His father had always said the trick was never to do anything important on the same day twice, and Matteo, who had spent eleven years on suppressants so that no one could ever find him on a Tuesday, stood in his grandfather's hallway with the receiver in his hand and thought:
He was wrong. It was never the day. It was that he loved somebody and everybody knew who.