"Emilia." Her name scrapes out of him. "The Russians took her."
The world tilts.
Emilia. Dante's wife of three years, the woman who made my ice-edged eldest brother into something approaching a human being — Emilia, who has been trying to carry their first child for two years and who looked at Dante at Christmas dinner last year with the specific tenderness of someone who has chosen someone completely and found the choosing was enough. The world tilts and I push myself out of bed and my feet find the cold marble and I'm sitting on the ottoman across from him before I've decided to cross the room.
"When?" I ask.
"Yesterday." He looks at his hands. "They gave me twenty-four hours. A courtesy, they called it."
"We'll get her back."
"I already have."
The words land wrong. They're in the past tense. They're already done.
I look at my brother's face in the moonlight and I understand before he says anything else. The calculation shows — I've watched him make it my whole life, the shift in his expression when he's already decided something and is now delivering it. He didn't come here to tell me what happened. He came here to tell me what he did.
"What did you do, Dante?"
Silence. Long enough that it has weight.
"What did you do."
"I made a deal." His voice is very quiet. "With the Romanovs."
The name hits me physically. Aleksander Romanov — Pakhan of the Bratva, his organization running from Moscow to Miami, his family name spoken in a specific register by even hardened Commission men. Not fear exactly. Acknowledgment. The way you acknowledge weather or geography: this is the thing and it does not yield.
"What kind of deal," I say. Not a question. A door I'm opening because I have to, because not knowing is its own trap.
He finally looks at me. His eyes in the darkness are two holes in a face I've known since I was born. "His son. Aleksei. He needs a — " He stops. Chooses a word carefully. "A partner. For Obsidian functions. For the heir arrangement." His jaw tightens. "Someone from an old family. Educated. Someone they can present as?—"
"Me," I say.
Not a question.
He doesn't answer. That's also an answer.
The cold starts somewhere in my sternum and spreads. I stand because I can't sit still while he delivers this. I go to the window — the same one I've looked out of since I was seven — and press my palm against the glass. The Conti gardens in the moonlight: the hedgerows, the fountain, my mother's rose beds still maintained in the pattern she designed. I breathe.
"You sold me," I say, to the window. Each word is deliberate. "Like property."
"I saved my wife." His voice hardens over it, the way a wound hardens when it's been pressed too many times. "I did what had to be done."
"Without asking me."
"There wasn't time to?—"
"There was time." I turn. "There's always time for a conversation with the person being traded. You chose not to have it." I look at my brother across the room and I feel something shift between us, permanent, the hairline crack that will run through every conversation we have for the rest of our lives. "When is the contract signed?"
He reaches into his jacket. Produces an envelope. Heavy, sealed with wax in the Romanov colour.
"Already," he says. "The arrangement is binding. You'll be delivered to Aleksei Romanov upon enrollment at St. Gabriel University. The Romanov family holds a seat on the board."
Delivered.
The word sits in the room like something that fell and broke.
I take the envelope. I break the seal. I read.
