POV: Aria
Luca was not dead.
That was the first thing the driver told us after the car stopped. Not dead. Alive. Unconscious in the back seat of the second car with two broken ribs and a head injury that needed immediate attention but was not, according to whoever called, immediately fatal.
I was sitting very still.
The kiss was still there. Not as something I was thinking about directly but as something present in the space between me and Matteo that neither of us was acknowledging while the driver talked, a thing that happened and couldn't unhappen and that I had no architecture for yet because I was not done being angry and then the word Luca arrived and anger stopped being the primary thing.
Matteo was on the phone before the driver finished speaking.
I watched him. His voice was controlled and his questions were specific and the Matteo running a crisis and the Matteo who closed the space between us thirty seconds ago were identical on the surface and I couldn't see the seam between them and I didn't know if that meant there wasn't one or if it meant he was very good at putting things away.
I put mine away too. I had to.
"I want to see him," I said when Matteo ended the call.
"He's being moved to a secure location."
"I want to see him," I said again.
He looked at me. There was a beat where I could see him deciding between operational and something else, and then he said: "You'll see him when he's stable."
"He may know something."
"He does know something," Matteo said. "That's why someone tried to make sure he couldn't tell us."
We drove. The city moved past the windows and I looked at it and did not think about the fifteen seconds before the driver's phone rang. I had been practising that kind of not-thinking for years.
The secure location was a building I hadn't been to, smaller than the logistics office, higher up. It didn't matter right then.
Luca was on a couch with a medical person working on his ribs and his eyes were open and when I walked in and he saw my face something in him settled, which was not the reaction I expected.
"You're alive," he said.
"You're alive," I said.
"I wasn't sure which of us would be," he said.
Matteo came in behind me. Luca's eyes moved to him and the settling became something more careful.
"I didn't know the second car was Victor's," Luca said. "I want you to know that."
"Tell me what you did know," Matteo said.
Luca shifted and made a sound that told me the ribs were significant. "The check-in protocol. When Aria's engine died on the highway. I called it in like I was told to. I didn't know it was being monitored or that the position I gave would be used."
"You said that before," I said.
"I know," he said. "I'm saying it again because of what happened tonight."
He looked at Matteo directly. "The second car in the approach road. The one that wasn't Victor's. I saw it leave the convoy after the explosion. I followed it. That's why I was in the car when they found me." He paused. "They caught up to me before I could get a plate."
"Who are they," Matteo said.
Luca looked at him. "That's the part I need you to hear before you react to it."
"Say it," Matteo said.
"I recognised one of them," Luca said. "The driver of the second car. I've seen him three times in the last two years. Once outside the mansion. Once at the north warehouse. Once at a briefing I ran for your inner circle."
The room was quiet.
"He works for Victor," Luca said. "He has been working for Victor for at least two years. Inside your operation. Not Rael's level. Higher."
I watched Matteo's face. He didn't move. He didn't change. But something happened behind the level surface that I had learned to read and what I read was not surprise. It was confirmation.
He already knew. Or suspected. He just didn't have it named.
"You're not surprised," I said.
He looked at me.
"You had a shortlist," I said. "The twelve-year man or Luca. Now Luca is in this room with broken ribs telling you it's someone else. Which moves the shortlist."
"Aria," Matteo said. A warning.
"The twelve-year man," I said. "That's where this lands."
"Stop," he said.
"How long have you been carrying that," I said. "How long have you known it was probably him."
"Aria." His voice had something in it that wasn't warning anymore. Something that sounded like the seam I couldn't find in the car, the place where the crisis and the thirty seconds before it were not as separate as he made them look.
"Don't," I said. Quietly. "Don't use my name like that right now."
He stopped.
Luca watched both of us and had the sense to look at the ceiling.
I turned and went to the window. The city was doing what it did at three in the morning and I breathed and arranged everything I knew in the order it happened and tried to find the version of the next decision that didn't require me to trust something I wasn't ready to trust.
I couldn't find it. Every version required Matteo.
The twelve-year man. Victor's person inside the inner circle. Two years of access. The personal channel. The route documentation. My photograph on the wall eight months ago, because Matteo was building a case against Victor and Victor was building one back.
And somewhere in the city, a man whose name I still didn't have, who had known what I was to Matteo since before I knew it myself.
I turned from the window.
"I need the name," I said. "The twelve-year man. I need it before morning."
Matteo looked at me for a long moment.
"If I give you the name," he said, "what do you do with it."
"I go to Victor," I said. "Directly. Tonight. And I tell him his person is blown."
The room went still.
"That makes you Victor's asset," Matteo said.
"That makes me dangerous to both of you," I said. "Which is the only position where nobody kills me."
Matteo's jaw was tight. His eyes were on my face and his hands were still and the thing between us from the car was in that room then, present and unresolved, and it was making every word cost more than it should.
"The name," I said.
He said it.