Chapter 29
Dante’s men went first.
Matteo took four, and they cleared the approach and the parking lot and the two empty lots on either side, and by the time the car pulled up there were two of them on the roofline and one behind the loading dock and no one at all on the river.
The water was black and slow. The lights of the bridges laid long gold roads across it and broke them and laid them again.
Allesia sat in the back seat with the ledger in a leather satchel at her feet and her father’s medallion around her neck, and she watched the building and did not say anything.
“You don’t have to come in,” Dante said.
“I know.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
She looked at him.
“He’s been deciding things about me my whole life,” she said. “He decided my father had to be afraid. He decided my mother had to never contact a Moretti. He decided I had to be hidden and forgotten. Tonight I get to decide something about him.”
Dante looked at her for a moment.
“Then stay behind me,” he said.
“I’ll try.”
“That’s not—”
“I’ll try,” she said, and got out of the car.
The boathouse door was open.
Inside, the ceiling was high and ribbed with old beams, and the floor was concrete, and the river light came up through the windows on the far side in long pale slabs. There were no lights on. There was one chair, in the middle of the room, and one man standing beside it with his hands behind his back.
Vittorio Moretti had aged the way a building ages — gracefully, on the surface, with the structure underneath gone soft.
He was sixty-one. He was tall. He had Dante’s jaw and Dante’s eyes, and his hair was silver at the temples, and he wore a dark suit with no tie and a watch that cost as much as a car. He looked like a man who had spent fourteen years being comfortable.
He looked at Dante and smiled.
“Nephew.”
Dante stopped ten feet away.
“Uncle.”
“Still the manners.” Vittorio looked past him, at Allesia. His smile did not change. “And the maid.”
May you like
“Her name,” Dante said, “is Allesia Romano.”
“I know her name.” Vittorio’s eyes moved over her the way a man reads a contract. “I’ve known it for eleven years. Giovani was very good at hiding her. Better than I expected. He was a careful man. It’s a shame what happened to him.”
