He pauses at the door. Turns. Looks at me standing in the bathroom in a towel with wet hair and swollen lips and his marks on my thighs.
"Emma," he says. Soft. The first time he's used it.
Everything in me shatters. But in a good way.
"Charlotte," I correct. But I'm smiling. I kinda like the way it sounds falling from his lips. "Emma's in the car, remember?"
"She's not in the car. She's standing right in front of me." He holds my gaze. "They're both here. They're both you. And I love both of them. I know I said I wouldn’t use your name until you asked, but I wanted to see how it tastes. It’s heaven and hell and every one of my sins being erased and forgiven."
He leaves. The door closes.
I sit on the bed in my towel and press my fingers to the back of my neck.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
Still here. Both of me.
And loved.
Chapter Seventeen: Claudio
Nowindows.Onedoor.A table bolted to the floor and two chairs, one bolted, one not. The lighting is a single overhead fluorescent strip that I've angled to hit the bolted chair directly, leaving the rest of the room in semi-shadow. The walls are bare concrete, unpainted, the kind that absorbs sound and body heat and hope.
I designed this room. Four years ago, when Aurelio authorized the sub-level renovation, I specified every dimension. The ceiling height. The temperature, which sits at sixty-two degrees because cold makes people tired and tired people talk. The chair, which is steel with no cushion, bolted at a height that forces the occupant to look up at whoever's standing.
The drain in the floor, which is there for practical reasons I don't need to explain.
Salvatore is in the bolted chair. His hands are zip-tied in front of him. His jacket is gone. His watch is gone. His gold pen is gone. Every artifact of the man he performed for fifteen years has been stripped, and what's left is a fifty-three-year-old man in a white shirt with sweat stains under the arms and a scar on his left hand and the expression of someone who has done the math and doesn't like the answer.
I sit in the unbolted chair. Cross my legs. Set Alexandra's folder on the table between us. Don't open it.
Leone stands by the door. Arms crossed. Face blank. He hasn't spoken since we brought Salvatore down. He's here to observe, not participate. The work is mine. Leone understands that interrogation is an instrument, not a blunt object, and he trusts me to play it.
Salvatore looks at me. His eyes are steady. Controlled. The eyes of a man who has survived in this organization for fifteen years by being smarter than the people around him and is now calculating whether that intelligence is enough to get him through the next few hours.
It isn't.
"Water?" I ask.
He blinks. "What?"
"Would you like water. Before we start."
He stares at me. The offer is genuine. It's also tactical. Kindness before cruelty creates a specific kind of dissonance that accelerates the interrogation cycle. Deny, negotiate, threaten, break. Most people get through the first three stages on adrenaline. The break happens when the adrenaline runs out and the body realizes it's alone.
"No," he says.
"Okay." I open the folder. Spread the pages on the table. Financial records. Call logs. Charlotte's written statement, signed an hour ago. The timeline I've been building since the night I found a keycard on a dead man's vest.
"Let me tell you what we know," I say. "And then you can tell me what we don't."
He says nothing. His jaw is set. The mask is back on, the loyal soldier, the fifteen-year veteran who would never betray the family that raised him. He's going to ride that mask until it's torn off his face.
I start.
"Six shell corporations, registered through three offshore banks, all traceable to an entity called Apex Meridian. We mapped the financial architecture. The corporations aren't random. They're sequential. Each one handles a specific category of transaction. Weapons. Intelligence. Personnel. Infrastructure."
I turn a page. Show him the diagram Alexandra built. The web of connections, blue lines for money, red lines for communication, black lines for operations. His face is at the center.
