"He's dying," I say.
"Yes."
"How long have you known?"
"I didn't. Not for certain. I suspected. The cane is new. Six months. He started losing weight around the same time. Aurelio was never a small man. Watching him shrink was like watching a building settle."
"Leone knew."
"Leone always knows. He carries Aurelio's secrets the way he carries everything. Silently. Without complaint." Claudio turns from the window. His face is tight. Not the mask. Something rawer underneath. "Aurelio took me in when I was just a kid. Much like he did Leone. He put a gun in my hand and a purpose in my head and gave me a reason to exist that wasn't just surviving another day in a world that didn't give a shit about two orphaned twins from a broken home." His teeth grind down, clenching and unclenching the muscle. "He made me. And now he's dying, and there's nothing I can do about it. There's no threat to neutralize. No problem to solve. Just time, running out, and a man I owe everything to sitting in a chair with blood on his handkerchief."
I stand. Cross the room. Put my hands on his chest.
"You can't fix it," I say. "You can honor it. By doing what he asked. Finishing the war. Protecting the family. Being the man he built."
"He didn't build me for this. He built me for the quiet work. The precise stuff. He didn't build me for loss."
"Nobody's built for loss, Claudio. We just survive it."
He looks at me. Those wrong-colored eyes. The eyes of a man who observes everything and loves nothing, who runs the world through a system designed to eliminate variables, and has just been confronted with the one variable no system can solve.
"You survived it," he says. "The loss. The before. You rebuilt."
"So will you. So will Leone. So will Emilio. You'll rebuild because that's what this family does. Aurelio said it himself. The family isn't blood. It's the people in the room."
He puts his forehead against mine. Closes his eyes. I hold him there, my hands on his chest, his breath on my face, and the compound hums around us and the war council is over and the old lion is dying and the world is shifting, and we stand in the center of it and hold still.
"Charlotte," he says.
"What."
"When this is over. When Kreiss is handled and The Silent is dismantled and the war is finished. I want to take you somewhere."
"Where?"
"Anywhere. Somewhere without concrete walls and locked doors and GPS trackers. Somewhere with a kitchen where I can make you coffee and you can pretend you made it yourself."
I laugh. Wet. My eyes are leaking. "I never pretended."
"You accepted the credit."
"Credit adjacent. There's a difference."
He smiles. Small. Real. The smile he saves for me, the one that drops the mask just enough to let the warmth through.
"I'll take you anywhere, principessa. Just say where."
I press my face into his chest. Breathe him in. Cedar and gun oil and the compound's soap and underneath it, just him. Just Claudio.
"Anywhere," I say. "Anywhere with you."
Chapter Nineteen: Claudio
TheMarylandsiteisa warehouse on the outskirts of Frederick. Industrial zone, low traffic, surrounded by chain-link fence and the kind of businesses that close at five and don't leave cameras running. Kreiss chose well.
The building is nondescript, single-story, steel-sided, indistinguishable from the auto body shops and plumbing supply companies on either side. You'd drive past it a thousand times without looking twice.
I've looked twice. I've looked from four different angles over the past six hours, mapping entry points and sightlines and guard rotations from the back of a van parked three blocks east.
