“Boss,” the voice rasped. “It’s Matvet.”
He had my attention now. Dorothy had said he was awake, but I hadn’t spoken to him. “Yeah. I’m listening.”
“You need to listen to the recording I just sent you,” Matvet said, his voice strained. “It’s urgent.”
The video on the laptop screen played as I stared quietly. There was no audio; only visuals of grainy footage of a dock, with Dmitri at its center.
“Boss?” Matvet’s voice broke through the silence again.
“Let me call you back.” I hung up and dropped the phone on the table.
Dmitri was talking to a man I recognized from the same listLuigi had been tied to. I played the clip again, my jaw tightening in confusion. I faced Alessia’s father.
“What the hell is this?”
His voice was faint but clear. “That’s Luigi.”
“No.” The word growled out of my chest. I turned and ordered everyone out of the room.
They cleared the space, leaving me alone with him.
“That’s not Luigi.”
He shook his head slowly, pain etched deep across his brow. “Check the other photos,” he said. “He’s in every one of them. Every man on that list… he met them before they died. I tracked the dates and times. Everything matches.”
My throat locked. I clicked through the photos, each file slicing into my brain. Dmitri knew all the men I investigated. Some pictures at the dock, outside a house I personally marked as compromised, and everywhere Luigi had been.
All seven men always disappeared before I could reach them. Luigi had erased every witness. I backed away from the table like it had caught fire. The room spun.
It made no sense. I remembered the month Dmitri disappeared. He said he had business to handle. That month, someone burned our mother and sister alive.
Luigi didn’t rise from the ashes. He had always been there. Wearing my brother’s face. I reached for my phone to call Dmitri, but stopped when I saw Matvet’s unopened message.
He said it was urgent. I tapped it, and the audio started.
The voice that came through cracked with age and sickness. My father.
“A good leader works mysteriously,” he said. “He carries a false name, erases enemies without leaving a sound. That is your job. Take a new name and do some cleaning, then be the next Konstantinov Bratva. Am I clear, Dmitri?”
Silence.
Then Dmitri’s voice came. “Yes, Father.”
Father coughed painfully and spoke again. “Your brother… is weak. A curse. A disgrace to our name. He will never be a leader. Kill him if you must. Take him down. Take everyone around him down, and be the mob boss.”
The audio ended, and my sanity too. I stared at the wall. My father had spent his last three months in bed, and not once had he asked for me. Not once did he speak my name? I told myself I didn’t care.
But now I did, because Luigi wasn’t a myth. My greatest enemy was my brother. I turned to the door, sickness surging back up my chest. I pulled out the pills again and tossed two more into my mouth.
Luigi was close. And God help me, I left Alessia with him.
Chapter Thirty-four
Alessia
I sat cross-legged on thecouch, scraping the last swirls of ice cream from the bottom of the can. It was old, but still sweet enough to count as comfort. My phone lay on the coffee table, charging at a crawl, as if it had something against me. I kept watching, waiting for a bar to light up so I could call my parents or Carina and pretend that things were still normal.
Dmitri hadn’t stopped talking on the phone since we got here. One call bled into the next, his voice shifting between languages I couldn’t place and English too low for me to catch.