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I'd do it again.

I press the heels of my hands against my eyes until the burning backs off, then flop into the pillows that smell like cedar and him.

Valentino

Twenty minutes of access, bought with favors Bruno will be repaying for a year, and it all comes down to a piece of warm brass in my palm while a guard at the end of the corridor keeps his eyes fixed on the wall.

The lock turns. The door swings in on a room the size of a confession booth, and there he is.

Elio Mancini sits on the edge of a bolted cot with his hands loose between his knees, looking up at me like I’m room service he ordered a week ago."Hello, Valentino." His voice has rust in it. "I've been waiting for someone to come. For days now."

I believe him completely.

In our world, when you bite the hand that's fed you for years, the hand doesn't write you off or wish you well in your future endeavors. The hand comes to a federal holding facility outside Rome with a key it shouldn't have and twenty minutes nobody will log.

He's known this since the cuffs went on.

The waiting was the punishment. The arrival was always coming.

I step inside and pull the door behind me until it kisses the frame. The room smells of industrial bleach and a man who’s stopped caring how he smells. A fluorescent tube buzzes overhead with the dedication of an insect that forgot how to die.

"Who from the inner circle was working with you against the Sartoris?"

No greeting back.

He doesn't deserve the courtesy, and I don't have the time.

Elio nods once, slow, like he's rehearsed this conversation with the ceiling every night.

"There was no one. Absolutely no one."

I walk toward him without hurry. My footsteps sound flat on the floor, and I watch him track them.

Men expect rage in rooms like this. They brace for it the way they’d brace for weather.

Calm frightens them more. Rage means a man is still negotiating with himself. Calm means the decision was made before he walked in.

"Enzo Basile knew the exact minute that car would reach the airport road," I say. "Not the day. Not the hour. The minute. His truck hit the door Amanda was sitting behind. Luca took a skull fracture to protect her."

I stop in front of him, close enough to count the gray coming in at his temples.

"So you'll tell me who fed him the route."

I don't raise my voice. There's no need. He's going to answer because there’s nothing left in his life except answers, and we both know it.

"I only ever talked to Aldo." He holds my eyes when he says it, which surprises me, and I hate that it does. "One man. One channel. Aldo wanted information about the family's Milan business. He paid. That's the whole of it, Valentino. I never met anyone above him or beside him. If Basile knew the airport route, it didn't come through me. I was already in a cell."

That leaves one problem.

Aldo died under my hands two weeks before that truck hit the car. A dead man doesn't pass routes to his father.

Which means either Mancini is lying with the composure of a saint, or the leak is still breathing somewhere in our house, walking past our women, drinking our wine.

I don't let myself follow that thought any further. Not with Mancini sitting in front of me. We can deal with it later.

Tonight has one purpose, and it isn't comfort.

"Why?" I ask him. "You had a place. You had Vittoria's trust. Why work with a man like Aldo?"