“I want you to know that I support you,” he says, and the firm way he speaks almost raises my hackles, until he takes on the kind of fatherly tone my own never used in his life. “And I intend to support you in any way I can. Your claim, your leadership—all of it. There are others who think that your ties to your mother make things difficult, but I understand that allies are important. So—please, Sandro. For the good of the Family. You have a solution right under your nose.”
He wants me to kill Julian. Whether or not my brother is guilty seems not to matter to anyone but me, and I’m even beginning to question it myself.
Doesit matter who killed my father? Probably it was Julian. Either way, why not use this investigation as an excuse to rid myself of him for once and for all? It’s what my mother wants.
It’s what the senior administration wants.
It’s what I always assumed I would do, the moment I ascended.
Kill Julian. Kill Jacopo.
“Thank you for your advice,” I say after a long pause. “I’ll consider it.”
I hang up the phone and trail my fingers over the faint stain in the desk, wondering again: who would have had the balls to come in here and kill him? And so invisibly? Even if they managed to deal with the cameras outside, why didn’t the guards by the study door see or hear anything? It’s the secrecy along with the competency that concerns me. When I think of the assassins in LA who would have had the skills to pull it off, only Julian or Jacopo come to mind. And I know it wasn’t Jacopo.
I can put it off no longer.
When I check the cameras, Julian is prowling behind his bars. After sliding open the hidden doorway at the side of the study, I head down to the cells.
* * *
I’ve directed men repeatedly to bleach and sanitize this grotesque place, but the underlying reek of death has seeped into the very walls. It doesn’t seem to bother Julian at all; he either doesn’t notice it, or doesn’t mind it. I can see him watching me, fixedly, through the window set into the metal door at the entrance to the cells, but I try not to look back at him and concentrate on entering the code.
Once the door slides opens, only a few steps bring me to his cell, the one in which Julian has been kept since the day of my father’s murder.Ourfather’s murder, I suppose; Julian was certainly his son. He has Ciro’s flair and narcissism, unleashed from any moral qualms. That was why my father found him so useful.
I glance down the room to the last cell before speaking, and an unfamiliar sensation stabs at my heart. Guilt? Yes, guilt. I don’t feel it often—and usually only in the presence of my mother, who is an expert at wielding guilt as a weapon—but there it is, the idea that I threw Teddy into this hellhole, and left him there. That I used it as a method of control and fear.
Julian is standing in the middle of his cell with his hands behind his back and a broad smile cracking his face. His eye is still black from where I hit him, nose still a little larger than normal with swelling. “Brother!” he greets me, as I arrive in front of him. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” But then his face changes. “You look different,” he says, coming closer to the bars. He wraps his long-fingered hands around them, a delicate and purposeful display. “What’s happened?”
“Nothing has happened.”
He tips his head to one side, sniffing the air. “Where’s that delightful young twink you’re fucking?”
“Don’t talk about him. Talk about things that will help me, if you want to get out of here.”
I don’t know how I could ever have thought there was any resemblance between Julian and Teddy. Blond and blue-eyed they both might be, but Teddy is warm and innocent. Julian’s eyes are blank. Soulless. Nothing going on in his brain but computations—he’s clever, brilliant even, but he lacks a fundamental part. The part that makes himhuman.
“Are you offering me a deal?” he asks, curious. “Did Teddy MacCallum finally convince you of my innocence?”
“Whether or not you killed our father matters very little to me.”
He nods. “You plan to kill me anyway.”
I should. It would be the sensible thing to do. “My plans are mine to know. But if you help me, I’ll help you.”
“A quick and painless death instead of drawn-out and torturous?” He yawns, actually yawns, covering his mouth with one of those long-fingered, gifted hands. Gifted in music as well as in death. “Offer me something I actually care about, Sandro, and I might play your little game.”
“What do you want?”
He tips his head to one side, considering. “I want to keep this blanket, for one thing,” he says, nodding at the quilt on the bunk. “And a little heating down here wouldn’t go astray.”
The stink down here would infect the whole Manor if I let him have a heater. “I’ll send down warmer clothes,” I offer.
“What do you want in return?”
“Information, of course.”
He lowers his head, smiling up at me from beneath his brows, and I see the predator in him now. “Haven’t you been following up those little breadcrumbs I left for Teddy MacCallum?”
