Page 70

I don’t know if I can survive that.

But even if I don’t, even if some part of my mind snaps from it, there is one thing I will do, and it’s the cruelest and kindest thing I can imagine.

I will play along and fake a reconciliation about the matter. I will rebuild the trust between us. I will embezzle what I can. And then, some night when he’s away on business, I will make an excuse to take Sarah to the hospital, and there, we will make our escape from Lupo Sartorre.

Not because it’s cruel. Not to hurt him, though hurting him would be a happy bonus.

Sarah is not safe here. No child is safe with a man who kills children.

Down the hall, the study door is open, and Lupo is standing behind his desk. He looks up. He reads Nick’s face, then mine, then the tension in my whole body. And I watch him understand, in one second, that there is no after.

24

LUPO

The room chills when Nick brings her to my study, and I know before either of them speaks. Nick wears the flat apology of a soldier who caught the thing we’ve all been dreading. Veda wears nothing at all, which is worse, because I’ve spent two months learning her faces and this one is a door slammed shut.

She shrugs off Nick’s hand at her shoulder and crosses my rug to the desk. She doesn’t sit, and she doesn’t wait for me to speak. She puts her phone on the blotter between us, face up, and swipes it once, and there’s a manifest on the screen. Lane routing. A container number. Methotrexate.

“Before you say anything,” she says, and her voice is a scalpel, clean and cold and steady. “I already know. I stood in that office and read the whole thing myself.”

“Veda—”

“I want you to explain how a man whose daughter has cancer ships fake chemotherapy to other people’s children for money.”

“Sit down, Veda.”

“You don’t get to tell me what to do, Lupo.”

Fair. I stay where I am, and I don’t reach for a single word-lawyer’s trick, because I can feel them lining up in me out of habit and I refuse every one. She’s earned more than smooth talk.

“Then I’ll stand too.” I come around the desk, and she doesn’t retreat, which is either courage or contempt, and I suspect it’s both. “It’s real. All of it. The drawer, the manifests, the assays. Every terrible thing on that phone is true, and I’m not going to lie to you, because you’re too smart for it and because you deserve better than that from me, finally.”

“Finally.” She laughs, and there’s no humor anywhere in it. “That’s a hell of a word to reach for now.”

So I give it to her. All of it. The Brancatis. The old alliance, the crates under the olive oil, the line my grandfather never crossed and Matteo did. Counterfeits nested in my lanes, discovered the morning of the seizure, confirmed in a lab in Basel. A war she’s been living beside without seeing.

Why a respectable American wife made the whole thing look like a family visit, not a man coming to Italy to dismantle his own routes from the inside.

Then the dossier, the sit-down Thursday, and the plan to burn the Brancatis and myself together and clear her name in the same fire.

I tell her about Bergamo. About Giulio, and that I refused Allegra’s off-ramp because taking it meant running counterfeit chemo for the rest of my life, and I could not, would not, be responsible for dead children.

It doesn’t soften her. It brings into focus the picture of how much she was standing next to and never shown. “You kept all of this from me⁠—”

“To protect you.”

“After I protected you.”

I feel my brain wrinkle at that. “How so?”

“You picked me,” she says slowly, “because I’d make it look respectable. A doctor wife. Cover for a man taking apart a drug operation. That’s the reason you made Nick pack my suitcase while I slept. Why you chose me. I’m the one who gives you legitimacy in this.”

“That was one reason. It stopped being the reason weeks ago.”

“Don’t.” She holds up a hand. “Don’t do the part where you pretend it became real for you. I lived that part. I said I stopped pretending to a man with this in a drawer, a man who never, ever stops pretending. You kept a bomb and a plan to detonate your life without telling me I was standing in the blast radius?”

“It’s not as if⁠—”