Page 80
“This is Allegra. Every word. She had the pieces because she’s been digging since she heard your name. Every accusation in print, for everyone to see.” I exhale, and that hurts too. Every breath, every sigh. All of it is pain. But it’s nothing compared to seeing Veda’s face right now. “So I un-print it a different way.”
She takes the phone back off my chest. “It doesn’t un-print, Lupo. There is no fixing this.”
“No, actually, there is.”
“Right. Tell me what you’re going to do about it, because I have run out of my own options somewhere between the drawer and the ditch. Tell me what the man with a hole in his gut is going to do to help me.”
“The dossier goes out. Tonight. Now, whatever the hell time it is.” My voice steadies as the plan does, the one clean thing left in the wreckage. “Nick has it staged—the whole Brancati network, labs to buyers to bought officials.”
“And that helps me how? I’m the doctor in the photographs, Lupo. Duress is a nice word. It’s not a defense that survives a front page.”
“Because it has sections that clear you. Proof you were recruited under duress, that your role was medical for my daughter and only medical, that the payments were fees and a settlement. That the network you’re accused of serving was one I was destroying, and you never knew it existed.”
“On whose word?”
“On the documents’ word. Not mine, not yours—Brancati’s own paper, the routing, the lab records, the timeline. It doesn’t ask anyone to believe a trafficker’s wife. It proves it, in the same package that proves the crime. The same documents that burn her, exonerate you.”
“And burn you.” It isn’t a question. She knows. “All the way. Not a controlled burn. Everything.”
“Completely.” I hold her eyes. “The Sartorre sections are in it—my lanes, my licenses, my name in the mud beside hers. I built it that way, because it was the only version that was true.”
“You can’t do that.”
“It ends the Brancatis, it ends me, and it clears you, all in the same hour. And it cannot be walked back once it’s out.”
Nick is not pretending to be asleep anymore. “Lupo, say the word, and I send it. But say it awake. Not bleeding, not for her, not when you’re panicking.”
“Nick.”
“This is the whole empire. Everything your grandfather built, everything your father held. You don’t get a second—”
“Send it.”
“Lupo, this isn’t—”
“I said send it, Nick.” I don’t look away from Veda while I say it. “All of it, the way we built it. Timed so nobody buries it. Clear her name in the same fire that takes mine.”
“You’re sure?”
“Do it now, before another paper picks up Allegra’s version and it becomes the only story anyone remembers.” I don’t hear him pull his phone out, so I look at him. “I wanted this before we were attacked, remember? This was always the plan. I’m not saying it because I’m on drugs or out of sentiment or anything else. Do it.”
Nick looks at me for a long moment, then takes out his phone and stands and walks toward the far end of the warehouse, already dialing his guy. I hear the beginning of the end of everything my grandfather built, spoken low into a phone, in a language of account numbers and release times.
Veda watches him go, then she looks back at me, and for the first time since the study, her face isn’t a door slammed shut. It’s confused and exhausted. “You could have cut the sections that implicate you. You could have burned her and kept your empire, and nobody would ever have known the dossier was anything but complete.”
“Not really. Yeah, I probably could have forged some things, but eventually, there would have been blowback. Maybe it would have been after Sarah took over. I’m not letting that happen. No one else pays for my sins.”
“But… you said you didn’t know.”
“I didn’t.” There goes another painful breath. Shit. Fuck. “I didn’t know because I was too busy looking the other way. I had fucked off to the US for a long time, and I stayed there because I liked it there. I wasn’t minding the store, so to speak. I should’ve been. Wasn’t. And because of that, I have no idea how long it’s been going on. I don’t know how many people this has hurt, and I never will. That’s my crime, Veda.”
“You have a massive business. You can’t know what’s in every crate you ship.”
“And you can’t control what your patients do, but if they take a bad turn, you feel responsible, right?”
She forces a calming breath. “That’s not the same thing.”
“Near enough for me.” I shrug, and that’s a mistake. Pulls at my stitches. Feels like everything does. “I’m not crazy. I know I can’t have eyes on every crate. But I should have been watching. It’s my responsibility to see that my shit runs right, and I didn’t do that, and people may pay for that oversight with their lives.”
