POV: Aria
Matteo didn't respond to what I told him. Not right away.
He stood at the window for a long time and I sat at the table and didn't push because I had already said what I had and pushing would have turned the information into something else, an accusation, a demand, and that wasn't what I wanted from him. I wanted him to think. He thought best in silence. I had learned that.
When he turned around his face had settled into the version that was fully controlled, which told me he had felt something and put it away and was operating from the assessment layer now.
"I'll look into it," he said.
"Quietly," I said.
"Yes."
"If he's clean and he finds out I raised it—"
"He won't find out from me," he said.
I nodded once. That was the end of the conversation. I picked up my things and left and the building was emptier than it had been two hours ago and the corridor outside the debrief room was quiet and I walked through it and told myself I had done the right thing and mostly believed it.
The part that didn't believe it was the part that had known Luca long enough to have a picture of him that didn't fit the thing I was describing. Luca who had driven six hours in bad weather to cover a job when Dez was sick, who had once stood between Matteo and a knife in a meeting that went wrong, who had recovered from two broken ribs and come back to the debrief the next morning. That Luca did not match the version I had reported tonight.
But the hand position at the wall. The separate phone. The conversation he had hidden.
I held both versions in my head and didn't resolve them and went to my car.
I sat in the car park for ten minutes. Not because I was avoiding anything. Because I was tired in the specific way that comes after sustained focus and I needed ten minutes of doing nothing before I could drive.
My phone showed a message from Sofia. Clean. Rest. Talk tomorrow. I sent back two words and set the phone down on the seat.
I thought about the unknown number. Victor isn't finished. The message had arrived twenty-four hours before a run that went completely clean from start to finish. Either the warning was wrong, or it was right about a threat that had not yet materialised, or it was about something other than tonight's operation entirely.
That third option was the one I couldn't stop returning to.
Victor isn't finished could mean tonight. It could mean next week. It could mean something that was already in motion before the convoy left the staging lot, something that the clean run didn't touch because it was aimed at a different target.
I was still sitting with that when the passenger door opened.
I moved. My hand went to the door handle, ready to push it open, and I turned in the seat before I consciously processed who was getting in, and it was Luca, and he closed the door and sat with his hands visible on his knees, which I registered as the deliberate signal it was.
He was telling me he wasn't a threat. He knew I had been watching him.
"How long," he said.
I didn't answer.
"You were at the corner of the relay building," he said. "I saw you in the glass reflection thirty seconds after you moved away. I've been waiting for you to say something all through the debrief and you didn't so I know you either told Matteo already or you're still deciding."
I looked at him. "Which are you hoping for."
His jaw moved. "I'm hoping you let me explain before you decide."
That was not the sentence of someone who was guilty of the obvious thing. It was also not the sentence of someone who was innocent. It was the sentence of someone in a position that required explanation and who knew the explanation was complicated.
"Talk," I said.
"The call tonight," he said. "Was to someone inside Victor's remaining network. Not to Victor. To someone who has been feeding Matteo information for eight months without Matteo knowing the source."
I was very still.
"The unknown number," I said.
He looked at me. "Yes."
"You've been running a contact inside Victor's operation for eight months," I said. "Without telling Matteo."
"Without telling Matteo," he said. "Because the contact specifically requested that. They said if Matteo knew the identity of the source, Victor would find out within seventy-two hours through the same leak that got Enzo identified."
I thought about the messages. The trunk. The bridge. The warning about Reyes. Eight months of accurate information arriving from a number nobody could identify.
Luca.
Not Victor's person inside Matteo's operation. Matteo's person inside what remained of Victor's.
"Why didn't you tell me," I said.
"I didn't know if I could trust you until recently," he said. "And then I didn't know if telling you was safer than not telling you."
"And tonight."
"Tonight my contact told me the operation was clean and the routes were clean and Victor's remaining network has fractured enough that there's no coordinated threat in the next thirty days." He paused. "That's what the call was."
I looked at the steering wheel.
The version I had reported to Matteo was technically accurate and factually incomplete and had just become a problem.
"Matteo knows," I said. "I told him an hour ago. About the call. The separate phone. The position at the wall."
Something moved across Luca's face that was not surprise because he had already known it was possible and had come here anyway.
"What did he say," Luca asked.
"He said he'd look into it quietly," I said.
Luca was silent.
"Which means," I said, "you have a window before he starts pulling at it, and the window is probably closing right now, and if it closes before you tell him what you just told me, the version he finds is the one I gave him."
Luca looked at his hands on his knees.
"He'll think I'm the leak," he said.
"Yes," I said.
His phone buzzed. He looked at the screen and his face went to something I had only seen once before, the night his ribs were broken and the medical person was working on him and he was trying not to show how bad it was.
"That's Matteo," he said. "He wants to see me now."