"I'd prefer it. To prison. To being traded to the federals. Death is faster."
"That's not your choice to make anymore."
I leave the room. The heavy door closes behind me. The lock engages. The sound echoes in the sub-level corridor like a period at the end of a very long sentence.
Emilio is waiting in the corridor. He's been there for three hours. His back is against the wall, and his legs are stretched out and there's an empty coffee cup beside him and a look on his face that I haven't seen since we were teenagers and our mother was dying and neither of us knew how to carry the weight of watching.
"Well?" he says.
"He talked. Everything. Apex Meridian, The Silent, the financier. A man named Werner Kreiss, based in Geneva. Phase three is a takeover. Both families, absorbed into a third entity. Six weeks out."
Emilio processes this. His jaw works. "The bartender?"
"Alive. Delaware. I have the address."
"I'll go."
"Not alone."
"Claudio."
"Not alone, Emilio. Kreiss has men on her. Two guards. You take Carmelo."
He looks at me. Something in his face softens. Shifts. "You think she matters."
"She's a witness."
"That's not why you want me to go."
He's right. Savannah isn't just a witness. She's a thread. A connection to the civilian world that Kreiss's operation has been contaminating, and a woman who overheard something she shouldn't have and is sitting in a Delaware apartment not knowing if she'll ever leave. She matters the way Charlotte mattered on day one. Before I knew her. Before she bit me and counted ceiling tiles and said my name in the dark.
"Go get her," I say. "Bring her to the compound. Leone will figure out the rest."
Emilio stands. Stretches. Picks up his empty cup and tosses it in the trash with the casual accuracy of a man who's been throwing things with precision his whole life.
"How's Charlotte?" he asks.
"She said she loves me."
Emilio stops walking. Turns. Looks at me with an expression that moves through about six emotions in two seconds and lands on something I don't have a name for. Not surprise. He's not surprised. He saw this coming before I did.
"And you said it back."
"Yes."
"And you meant it."
"Yes."
He nods. Once. Then he steps forward and wraps his arms around me and holds me against his chest with the grip of a man who shares my blood and my face and every wound I've ever carried, and I hug him back.
I put my forehead against his shoulder and close my eyes and breathe, and his heartbeat is the same rhythm as mine, the way it's always been, from the womb to the war to this corridor in the sub-level of a building where I just spent three hours extracting a confession from a man I used to trust.
"I'm proud of you," Emilio says. Quiet. Against my hair. "Not for the interrogation. For the other thing. For letting someone in."
He lets go. Steps back. Grins.
"Now go wash the blood off your hands before you see her. You smell like a butcher."
