"Unfortunate for my bed."
"Don't be dramatic. She's a woman. There are others."
"No." I hear it come out before I can stop it.
He sets down his glass. Picks up the chess queen, white, and turns it between his fingers. He doesn't say anything for a long moment. Just looks at me.
"I wondered," he says finally, "how deep it had gone. Whether it was appetite or something worse." He tilts his head. "Now I know."
The knife is against his throat before the sentence ends.
I don't remember crossing the distance. The blade sits against the loose skin below his jaw, right where the carotid pulses, and a thin red line opens beneath the edge. His blood is darker than I expected. Almost black in the lamplight.
He doesn't flinch. Doesn't move. He holds the chess queen in his right hand and my eyes with his as a smile spreads across his face that has nothing to do with fear.
"There he is." Calm. Warm, even. The voice of a father watching his son take his first steps. "My son."
My hand is steady. My breathing is controlled. The ribs are locked out, sent somewhere I don't have to hear them. The knifepresses deeper. Another thread of blood runs down the blade, wets my fingers.
"You will tell me where she is."
"Or what?" He hasn't moved. "You'll cut my throat? In my own study? With twenty men downstairs? Think, Elio. Be smart."
He's right that I need to be smart. He's wrong that I am.
"Tell me where she is."
"I don't have her."
"Bullshit."
"Language," he says reflexively, like I'm twelve and he's correcting table manners, his throat bleeding onto his Brioni collar while he worries about my vocabulary.
"You opened the gates." I press the blade a fraction deeper. "Pulled my security."
He says nothing.
"You left her unprotected and someone walked in and took her."
"I pulled your security to teach you a lesson about priorities." He pauses. "What happened after that was none of my doing."
"You let it happen."
"I created the conditions for reason to find you." He lifts his chin. The blade bites deeper. He doesn't care. "She was making you weak. Sentimental. A man in your position cannot afford sentiment. I did what any father would do."
"The man you raised was chained to a beam in a warehouse and beaten for two days because he wouldn't obey." My voice drops to something quieter and more dangerous than shouting ever could be. "That's not raising a man. That's breaking a dog."
For the first time, his expression changes, the corners of his mouth tightening. We've maintained the fiction, discipline, correction, lessons, because the truth is uglier than either of uswanted to hold. But the fiction died the moment I got back, andshewas gone.
"You want her back."
"I want her back."
"Then let me help you."
I press the blade hard enough that he has to tilt his head back, his Adam's apple riding against the steel.
"The way you helped by leaving my gates open?"
