Carmelo stops at the mouth of the alley. He turns to me and his hands are on my shoulders, and his face is close to mine, and his gray eyes are flat in a way I've never seen.
"The people who placed you," he says. "The network. They sent men to find you. Two men. They came to the restaurant looking for information while you two were on break."
"Okay."
"They got Javi on his walk home."
That hits me in the center of my chest.
"Where is he?"
Carmelo's hands tighten on my shoulders. "I found his phone behind the restaurant. Blood on the ground. Not a lot. Enough."
"Where IS he, Carmelo?"
"I don't know yet. My brother Claudio is tracking them. They took him. They took him to get to you."
My legs give. Not dramatically, not a collapse. My knees just stop working and I go down. Carmelo catches me before I hit the concrete and I'm on my knees on the sidewalk outside my restaurant. The cold is on my face and my hands are on the ground. My chest burns and I can’t breathe.
"We'll find him," Carmelo says. He's on his knees next to me, his arms around me, his voice in my ear. "Claudio is tracking their vehicle. Leone and Matteo are here. We'll find him."
I have no idea who those people are, but I don’t ask because I don’t care. All I care about is getting Javi back. "They took him because of me."
"They took him because of the people who put you here. Not because of you."
"He doesn't know anything. He doesn't know about the pills or the Marinos or any of it. He's just a bartender. He's just my friend. He walks me home and makes jokes about The Rhino andhe doesn't know anything and they took him because he's the closest person to me and he has no fucking idea why."
My voice breaks on the last word. Not a clean break. A fracture that runs through my whole body, from my throat to my chest to my stomach, and the sound that comes out of me is a fucking wail.
Carmelo holds me on the sidewalk. His arms around me, his face in my hair, his body blocking the wind and the cold and the street. People walk past. I don't care. I'm on my knees on a Philadelphia sidewalk being held by a man with blood on his hands and a knife on his belt and the only friend I've ever had is gone because of a life I didn't know I lived.
My phone rings.
No… it’s Carmelo's phone, not mine. He answers with one arm still around me.
"Claudio." One word. He listens. I can hear a voice on the other end but not the words. Carmelo's arm tightens around me. His jaw flexes against the top of my head.
He hangs up.
"Grazi... I need you to be strong right now."
I know from his voice. I know the way I know the tapping and the triggers and the room with no windows. I know because my bodyhas been learning loss my entire life, and this is what loss sounds like coming out of the mouth of a man who doesn't use words he doesn't need.
"No," I say.
"They found his body. Under the overpass on Columbus Boulevard. Claudio's team found the vehicle and tracked it."
"No."
"I'm sorry."
"No. No. No."
Three times. The word comes out three times and each time it means less because the word can't change what happened.
Javi is dead. Javi who walked me home. Javi who called Carmelo The Rhino. Javi who counted the times I checked the door. Javi who asked about the Italian thing and suggested a therapist and offered me his family's Easter and never pushed past the wall and never asked for more than I could give and was the one real, unchosen, unmanufactured, unpaid person in my manufactured life.
Javi is dead because ofme. Because someone took me when I was eight, drugged me when I was thirteen and then someone fell in love with me and killed the people who were drugging meand now the machine is awake, and it reached for me but found him instead.