Valente stays in the car. If I'm not out in forty minutes, he comes in and he doesn't knock.
My father's study is on the second floor, east-facing, French doors opening onto the terrace above the garden my mother planted and Cicero never touched. The one thing he kept. I stopped wondering why years ago.
He's at the chessboard when I enter. He's been expecting me. The chessboard is where he teaches his 'lessons'. Where he takes you apart piece by piece and calls it love.
The board is mid-game. The Immortal Game, Anderssen versus Kieseritzky, 1851. White sacrifices both rooks, a bishop, and his queen to deliver checkmate. Cicero's favorite. But the arrangement is off. He's deviated from the original, playing his own variation.
A bottle of Verduci sits open on the side table. Two glasses poured.
He doesn't look up when I walk in. Moves a bishop three squares.
"Elio."
Every muscle in my body tenses, a conditioned response I've spent twenty years trying to override. I don't bother trying today.
"Father."
He lifts his glass and holds the wine in his mouth before swallowing, savoring it the way he savors everything,performing refinement over rot. The wine is the color of old blood.
"Sit."
I don't. I stand three feet from the board with my hands in my pockets because if they're free I'll use them, and I need information first.
"You look terrible. The boys were only supposed to remind you. They may have been overzealous."
The smile on his face tells me he doesn't think hisboyswere overzealous.
"Where is she?"
He picks up a pawn, studies it, sets it back without moving it.
"Straight to it. No pleasantries. You used to have better manners."
"You used to have better men. I counted twelve at the warehouse. Valente got through them in under four minutes."
Something moves across his face, there and gone within seconds, but I've been reading this face since I learned what expressions meant. The mention of Valente bothers him. It always has. Loyalty he can't buy or beat into someone offends his understanding of how the world works.
"Where is she, Cicero."
Notfather.He catches it. His eyes lift from the board to my face, reading the damage the way I read a room.
"The American?" He leans back, crosses one leg over the other, suit impeccable, not a crease. Silver hair combed back. Handsome the way aging predators can be, distinguished and polished and rotten underneath. "I told you she was a distraction."
"And I told you she's none of your concern."
"Everything in this family is my concern. Especially when my son, my heir, is jeopardizing a political alliance worth two hundred million over a girl he's been fucking for a few weeks."
My jaw locks. The split lip cracks open.
"The Rossi arrangement is dead."
"The Rossi arrangement is whatever I say it is."
One step closer. Just one. "You pulled my security. Left my gates open. Whoever took her walked right in."
He sips without blinking.
"I know many things, Elio. The benefit of being the one who built everything you're so desperate to run." He sets the glass down and folds his hands in his lap. "What I know, specifically, is that the American is gone. And that her absence, while unfortunate for your bed, is a gift for this family."
