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Which leaves one last “she” in this house to hide something from.

The dryness in my throat feels minor compared to everything else happening. I stand still, listening to the soft murmur behind the door—two men are discussing something at midnight that involves my pronoun and seems to have my ignorance woven into their plan.

Going in is out of the question. Knocking would mean a conversation, and I’m not ready for a conversation I’d walk into already losing.

My mind wanders in a thousand different directions, but they all end up in the same place. I’m an idiot for trusting Lupo. For being open with him. For thinking what happened in the bedroom meant something to him.

I go back down the hall to a warm bed I left thirty seconds ago as a woman who’d just handed a man her whole truth, and I lie down in it as a woman who’s learned the truth was only ever running one direction.

Me. Idiot.

Sleep doesn’t come. I lie in the dark beside his empty space and wait for him. When he slips back in an hour later, careful not to wake me, I want to scream at him. Tell me what the hell that was! Why am I the only person around here who doesn’t know what’s going on?

Why did you let me fall in love with you?

But I don’t say any of it. I keep my breathing long and even and let him believe I slept through it. His midnight secret has already made a liar of me before dawn.

There’s a duality to Lupo. I’ve learned that about him—two things at once, always, the tenderness and the strategy running on the same current, and I stopped being able to tell them apart weeks ago. Everything he does has more than one reason. The truth is the best way to tell a lie. The man is as duplicitous as they come, and I’m the idiot who thought she understood him anyway.

But I think I do, in spite of the rest of it.

The truth of Lupo Sartorre is that his lies and his honesty look so much alike that even he doesn’t know where one begins and the other ends. In the bed we share, he lied with his body. That open, vulnerable look on his handsome face. All of it, lies.

He said nothing, and I heard everything I wanted to hear.

22

LUPO

The sit-down notice goes to Matteo by courier at dawn, sealed with the wax my grandfather used. A spot of theater still moves a certain type of man, and Matteo is nothing if not a man who loves a performance. Neutral ground, the Contini private room again. One last table before the world changes forever.

I revised it three times before being satisfied. If it’s too warm, he senses the trap. If it’s too cold, he shows up with guns instead of lawyers. The final version sounds overly apologetic, which is exactly how I want every watching family to see me when this is over.

Nick places the dossier on my desk as the house sleeps above us. After months of quiet effort, he has finally assembled it into a single tool—the very dossier I asked him to expand the morning of the Genoa seizure. He’s been working on it in secret, gathering a courier’s route here, a bribed inspector’s bank records there, and a photograph of a pill press snapped through a Naples skylight by a man I’ll never meet, whom I will pay for life.

It sits on my grandfather’s desk in a plain document case, and it holds the deaths of two families. Matteo’s and mine.

“Walk me through it one more time,” I say. “As if I’m the prosecutor.”

He reviews it thoroughly, page by page, creating a striking and damning record. The Brancati counterfeit operation is exposed from start to finish—the lab outside Naples equipped with pill presses and die marks, the brokers in Genoa and Rotterdam distributing the product, and the buyers and wholesalers involved. Two customs officials and a regional health inspector take bribes from Brancati to overlook the illicit activities, even as chalk is shipped under the guise of chemotherapy.

Names. Account numbers. Dates. Photographs. Enough to end the Brancatis three times over.

And enough to end me too.

That’s the unavoidable truth of this plan. I’ve examined it every night since Bergamo, searching for a way to preserve my house and dismantle their network, but none exists. The counterfeits shipped thanks to my company. Even if I told authorities I didn’t know until recently, why would they believe me?

My family has been in olive oil for generations. Olive oil in Italy has become a global market for counterfeiters and smugglers worldwide. Not to mention the fact that my family is known for our connections to the mafia. If I suddenly turn in a known mafia member for his operation within my own network, it’ll turn the spotlight on me just as much as on him.

“You’re sure about the Sartorre sections,” Nick says, the way he’s said it four times this week, giving me a door each time.

“Leave them in. Every page. Telling the whole story is the only way to guarantee that Matteo goes down.”

That is the price. When it goes wide, I lose shipping lanes I’ve held for thirty years, licenses my grandfather bled for, cash I can’t count without getting angry, and likely, my freedom.

That last part is debatable. I have fantastic lawyers, and enough money in foreign accounts to be able to reach a non-extradition country in hours. But Ma wouldn’t go. Sarah has never had a stable life. And Veda likes it here.

If I go to prison, at least my baby girl will have Veda and Ma and Italy.