"Why?" he asks.
"Because I need to know."
"You've never needed to know before."
"I need to know now."
Another silence. Longer. His hands stay folded. His expression doesn't change. The warmth is still there. The concern. The face of a priest looking at his niece with the particular tenderness of a man who raised a child from the wreckage of a murder.
"The candles spoke," he says. "You answered. That is the system. That has always been the system. The specifics don't change the outcome, cucciola. They never have."
"They might."
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he stands. Walks around the desk. Puts his hand on my shoulder. Squeezes.
"You're tired," he says. "The work is heavy. It has always been heavy. But you carry it because God chose you to carry it. The specifics are His burden, not yours."
He changes the subject. Asks about the restaurant. About my week. His hand stays on my shoulder for another moment, then drops. He turns to the espresso machine. Makes me a cup. Sets it in front of me.
He wouldn't look me in the eye when I asked.
I noticed. He looked at my forehead. My chin. The space over my left shoulder. Every place a person looks when they're constructing an answer rather than delivering one. The geography of evasion, which I know because I was trained to read it, because the man who trained me to read it just used it on me.
I finish the espresso. Set the cup down. Leave.
The walk home takes eleven minutes. The vicoli of the Sanità close around me. My thigh burns with every step. The butterfly strips pull against the wound.
I killed a good man. I felt it in my bones.
My uncle wouldn't look me in the eye when I asked why. And now I have to question everything.
Chapter 27
The Discovery
Niccolo
Enzo calls at 4 AM.
"We have one," he says.
I don't ask one what. There is only one thing Enzo's team has been hunting for months. The leak. The source. The reason the Ferrantes know things they shouldn't know, move when they shouldn't move, strike where the intelligence says we're weakest with an accuracy that stopped looking like luck somewhere around the second ambush.
"Where?" I say.
"The warehouse on Via Foria.Third floor."
"I'm coming."
The drive through empty Naples takes nine minutes. The warehouse is a decommissioned textile factory Enzo converted into a secure meeting site two years ago. No neighbors. No foot traffic after midnight. Thick walls that contain sound the way a confession booth contains words.
I park in the alley. The side entrance is unlocked. Two of Enzo's men in the stairwell, both armed, both nodding when I pass. I take the stairs to the third floor.
The room is bare concrete. One chair. One table. One overhead lamp, the industrial kind, a metal cone directing a circle of white light onto the chair. Enzo stands by the far wall with his arms crossed, his spiral notebook closed in his hand. Two more men flank the door behind me.
In the chair sits a man I don't recognize. Late twenties. Thin. A runner's build under a blood-stained shirt that was white before Enzo's people collected him. His left eye is swollen shut. His lower lip is split and leaking a steady line of blood down his chin. His hands are zip-tied behind the chair. He's breathing through his mouth because his nose is broken.
"Who is he?" I ask Enzo.