“He’s both,” I say. “He wants her. Your brother wants me. Together they think that makes a plan, and one of them was smart enough to execute it.”
He puts his hand over his mouth and pulls it away, steady. “But why?”
“Because of Blackvine Ridge,” I say, and the word changes the air in the room like a window just opened in winter. “Because I learned too much there and walked out with it. Because I can tie your brother to it now after the wedding. Because he used it to put other men on their knees by taking their sons and daughters and tormenting them.” I shake my head once, sharp. “Not you. You didn’t know. But you should hear me say this: if they think taking her silences me, they miscounted.”
Color leaves his face in a way that makes me want to punch walls and find a chair for him at the same time. “My brother,” he says, but it’s not a question, it’s a confession someone else should be making. “I thought he…no. I didn’t think. I didn’t look. That’s worse.”
“She knew you didn’t know,” I tell him, and that breaks something in him I don’t want to watch. “She gave me her rosary to use as a weapon, not because she stopped believing, but because she knows he uses God as a prop. We were going to make him swear and then prove the lie in a room full of people powerful enough to bring him to his knees.”
He huffs a laugh that isn’t a laugh. “That is my girl.”
“She’s mine now,” I say, quiet but packed with emotion.
He nods once, like a man who has decided to buy a house after living in it for twenty years. “We bring her home,” he says. “Then we burn down his fucking world.”
“Plan,” I say, because if I don’t make a list I’ll break the next thing I touch.
Tiernan arrives at the door without knocking because we are long past knocking, and I messaged on my way, told him to meet me here. He looks me up and down—salt, shirt half-buttoned wrong, a cut I don’t remember getting on my hand—and then nods at Don Marco. “Sir.”
“Come in,” Don Marco says.
Pru is behind Tiernan because of course she is. She’s in a hoodie and boots and a face that looks like it could file for a restraining order against patience. She should look ridiculous in this room. She looks like a problem being solved.
“Don’t start without me,” she says. “She’s my best friend.”
“You’re not invited,” Tiernan says on reflex.
“Invitation extended,” Don Marco says, sharp enough to cut. “Caterina has made Prudence a part of this family.”
Pru shoots Tiernan a look that saysI winand moves to the end of the desk like she owns the acre of carpet her boots just conquered. “What do we have?”
“Resort footage,” I say, sliding the phone across. “Nico and two we don’t recognize. Security post was clear; either a payoff or a timing trick. Boat at the south dock. No running lights. We’ve put Customs on alert without names. They were out ten minutes after the cut.”
Pru watches the grainy clip once and goes very, very still. “I’m going to kill him,” she says in a tone that belongs in a much quieter room.
“You’re going to sit where I tell you and do what I say,” Tiernan answers, equally quiet.
“You’ll need me,” she says, not looking at him. “You don’t know his face like I do. You don’t know how he plays the game.”
“She does,” Don Marco murmurs, eyes still on the paused frame where Nico is smiling like a boy stealing fruit. He looks at me. “He won’t hurt her,” he says, and I can hear the faith he wants to have tearing itself into rags. “Not…that way. He thinks he loves her.”
“He’ll hurt her because he thinks he loves her and she won’t feed into it,” I say. “We don’t bet on his restraint. We bet on our speed to get to her.”
Tiernan begins to lay out pieces on the desk like a patient dealer: a chart of the island chain, a list of private slips attached to Moretti properties, two potential spots where a man who wants to hide a boat would park it and still make a phone call.
He checks his watch. “We get eyes on the air first. Then docks. Then safe houses on the east side. They won’t come north. We still own too much of it.”
“He’s vain,” Pru says. “He’ll want her to see a view and think that he can give it to her forever.”
Don Marco points at the chart. “Here,” he says, tapping a cove with a rental property that hasn’t been rented in a year. “It’s got a terrace he thinks is romantic. The code hasn’t changed.”
Tiernan’s phone lights. He reads, nods. “Rafferty has the marina cam,” he reports. “Black hull, two outboards, no lights. Matches. They cut south-southeast right away. We have a ghost wake. Weather’s flat—easy run.”
“Boats on station,” I say. “And a plane.”
“Already in the air,” Tiernan says. He looks at me and then at Don Marco. “We do it clean.”
“Clean,” Don Marco agrees. He looks older than he did ten minutes ago and more dangerous for it. He lifts his eyes to me. “You’re going to want to kill my nephew yourself.”
