"Elio." The voice shifts. Softer. The warmth he manufactures when brute force isn't working. "I don't know where they've taken her."
"Bullshit."
"If I did, I'd tell you." His left thumb taps his right knuckle, just once, the tell he's had since I was a boy, the one that separates what he's inventing from what he's reporting. "Not because I care about the girl. But this situation is becoming embarrassing. The Syndicate is watching."
I wait.
"Your fixation is a liability. The longer she's missing, the longer you're compromised." He holds my eyes. "I want her found. For very different reasons than yours."
He didn't take her. He created the opening and someone else walked through it. But he knows who. He always knows. That's the only thing he's never lied about, his information is always current, always complete, always exactly as useful as he wants it to be.
"Names."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Whoever moved her needed infrastructure. A location. Someone handled logistics. You know who operates those networks in Sicily. Give me a name."
"I'm not a directory service."
I twist the blade. Not enough to kill. Enough that the blood flow thickens. His hand closes around the chess queen, knuckles going white.
"A name, Cicero. Or I'll burn every operation connected to this family until I find her myself, and then you can explain to the Syndicate why your son dismantled half of Sicily looking for an American girl."
His jaw works. He calculates. I watch him decide what information costs him least.
"Tommaso Lombardi. He moves logistics for several operations that have been developing throughout the South. If someone needed to transport a woman quietly and quickly, he's the kind of man they'd call."
It's a thin thread. It might lead nowhere. He knows that and he's given it anyway because a thread going nowhere keeps me busy and away from him.
"Where is he?"
"Messina, last I heard. Owns a bar near the port." He swallows against the blade, his blood smearing on the steel. "He moves around."
"If this name is wrong?—"
"It's not wrong. Whether it gets you where you want to go is another matter entirely." He holds my eyes. "Lombardi is a cockroach. He'll know something, or he'll know someone who does. That's the best I can offer you."
I pull the knife back, fold it closed, return it to my breast pocket, and I'm a man visiting his father's study on an afternoon except for the blood on my fingers and the blood on his collar.
He reaches for his wine. His hand is steady. It always is.
"There was a time when you would have asked for my help rather than put a blade to my neck."
"There was a time when you didn't sell out my household to prove a point."
"Everything I do is for this family."
"Everything you do is for yourself. The family is just a vehicle."
He looks at me then, full attention, chess queen in his right hand and a monogrammed handkerchief pressed to his throat with the left, blood blooming through white linen. There's no anger in that look. No hurt. Instead I see recognition. The way you recognize your own face in a mirror, aged and distorted but undeniably yours.
"She's a commodity, Elio. That's all women ever are in this world. You can dress it up in whatever language you like. The math is the same. She has value. Value can be traded."
Something goes cold in me. Not rage. I know rage. This is the other side of it.
He priced her. Between sips of wine, in this room, he assigned a number to the woman who draws her hands alongside mine to show me we're the same size.
I turn for the door.
