16. Antonio

Cristiano draws a breath and blows it out with a weighty exhale. “A couple weeks ago when I got home from work, I suspected someone had been in my house. A drawer was partially open. Just a crack, but I didn’t remember leaving it that way.”

“Any chance it was one of your sisters?”

He shakes his head. “I’m very careful. For anyone watching from the outside, I vary my routine, but inside, everything stays the same. I don’t take chances with my family. I’ve been crystal-clear with them about never entering my house without me. Just to be sure they don’t get any ideas, I’ve never shared my alarm code with them. The alarm wasn’t set off.”

“Was anything else amiss?”

“No. I dusted for prints and examined footage from the security cameras. No prints besides mine, and there weren’t any discernable gaps in the footage.”

“And you never told us?”

“There was nothing to tell. I didn’t find a damn thing.”

This is such bullshit. Cristiano knows better than anyone that this isn’t something you keep to yourself. He’s warned guards countless times that this sort of thing needs to be reported and investigated. This is how organizations are infiltrated.

“Besides,” he adds, “I’d been spooked for a while.”

Spooked?“What the fuck does that mean?”

“All that stuff with your father and those two other fuckers—I couldn’t stop thinking about it. My mother and sisters were at your house all the time. We lived on the property.”

I know where this is headed, and my stomach burns as he continues, “I didn’t have it in me to ask my mother, so I talked to my sister, Bianca. She denied that any of them ever touched her—or my other sisters.” He pauses for a moment, looking at his feet. “Hugo cornered my mother a few times, but she got lucky. At least that’s the story Bianca was peddling.”

Alma works for me, but our relationship goes far deeper than that. For years, she was my mother’s personal maid. She’s still my mother’s closest friend. She was the one who I found sitting at my mother’s bedside, after Hugo beat her—for the last time.

If my father assaulted Alma, I can’t do a damn thing to help her now. But I might be able to help her son find answers.

“You don’t believe Bianca?”

“I don’t think she lied to me. I think she told me what she knows. But there’s no way my mother would have ever burdened us with that kind of truth.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know what to believe.”

“Do you think my mother knows anything?” I don’t even know why I ask, because if it happened, of course she knows. “I’ll talk to her.”

Even if Cristiano is compromised, I owe it to Alma.

He shakes his head. “According to Bianca, your mother and mine kept the girls and any woman with a pulse away from your father. Your mother took beatings over it. I don’t know what the repercussions were for mine—if any. And I’m not sure it’s worth dredging it all up. Hugo’s dead. We can’t kill him again.”

It’s a pity.There’s great satisfaction in ending a reign of terror. I’d like to do it again. You can’t undo the wrongs of the past, but you can ensure they’re not repeated by the same culprits.

“Why did you send your family away right before the regatta?”

His mouth twists with uncertainty. “I wanted them gone while we were waging war. I didn’t want to risk them ending up in the middle of something. I felt if they were safe, my head would be in a better place.”

I feel the rage radiating off Lucas, who’s an arm’s length away. Alma lavished more love on him than his own mother.

While I’m furious that Hugo tried to force himself on her, for me, it’s just one more assault my father levied against someone I care about. He terrorized my wife and my mother. Those are the deepest gashes. The ones that will haunt me for life. Everybody else is just one more painful slash.

Cristiano’s not wrong. We don’t have the right to demand answers from my mother and Alma, unearthing anguish that’s not technically ours. There’s not a fucking thing to be gained by it.

I need to stay focused on the task before me, as unpleasant as it is.

“What did Nikitin want from you?”

“Anything I could give him. He was desperate for something that would bring you down. So desperate that he was willing to believe that I’d actually help him. He was skating on thin ice with the Kremlin, and grasping at any lifeline. My initial reaction was to tell him to fuck off. It didn’t get me much.”

“Except for those bruises on your face.”

He shrugs. “After his soldiers knocked me around, Nikitin’s assistant, Mikhail, came to me, and advised me to play along. He said there might be a bomb on our boat, but that if I played my cards right, I would be able to get a message to you before anyone got hurt. I didn’t trust him, at first, but I couldn’t come up with a better option.”

Mikhail must be Fedorov’s man inside.

“Nikitin was so anxious about his future, he bought my change of heart without much of a problem. It was nuts.” He shakes his head.

Desperate people take desperate measures. It might be cliché, but it’s true.

“Mikhail confirmed what we always suspected,” Cristiano explains, looking from me to Lucas. “Those fuckers record everything.”

“Why didn’t you use the established SOS code?”

“I couldn’t risk it. At that point, I was almost certain Alvarez was the leak. He was the only one who knew I’d left work early to go to the docks. I told him I was leaving my car at the lodge and walking over.”

“I can’t believe Nikitin fell for it so easily.” It’s the first thing Lucas has said the entire time. “Do you think it might have all been a setup?” He shakes his head. “Forget it. It doesn’t make sense.”

“It had me worried,” Cristiano agrees. “But Nikitin knew he was a dead man if he couldn’t get to you,” he adds, cocking his chin at me.

“Chernov believed he could get a stronghold in the region by using Tomas’s relationship to Valentina. He wanted Daniela dead. But with Tomas gone, Nikitin was going straight at you. If you’re gone, the region is rudderless, at least for a while. That would give the Russians time to move in and stake a claim. It would also put Nikitin back in his boss’s good graces.”

“How do you know this?”

“Mikhail.”

Fedorov’s mole. Somehow everything swings back to him—although it seems like he’s been neutered.

“I told a bunch of lies for the tape. But I worried that the message was too obtuse for you to quickly put together, so I leaned on our old code. We used that signal so often when we were kids, I knew you’d remember it.”

Your back’s against the well. It’s code for: there’s danger from the water.

It seemed so dumb at the time that Cristiano shoved Lucas for being the idiot who had come up with it. But somehow it stuck. If your back was against the well, it was also against the river. In our games, the greatest danger always came from the river.

“Who set the bomb on the boat?”

“Alvarez,” he spits out with venom.

“He was working for Nikitin?” It’s hard to believe. Alvarez was one of my best guards. I wouldn’t have assigned him to Daniela’s protection otherwise. But his ideas about honor were old school. I understand why he had issues with me, but it’s hard to fathom why he’d turn on the region by working with the Russians. I don’t get that part.

“Here’s the thing,” Cristiano says. “Mikhail denied it. But who else would Alvarez have been working for?”

No fucking clue.“How did you get out?”

“When Nikitin fled, he gave Mikhail the order to have me killed. But he didn’t stick around to see it carried out. Once he was gone, everything fell into chaos. It gave Mikhail an opportunity to get me out and to Fedorov’s place.

“What I want to know,” Cristiano continues, “is why did Fedorov stick out his neck to save me?”

“We had a deal.”

He cocks his head, waiting for me to say more, but I don’t.

“What did it cost you?”

I ignore the question, for now. “To answer the question you asked earlier. Did I ever believe you were a traitor...”

We peer at each other. He expects the truth, and that’s exactly what I intend on giving him. He can take it. As can our friendship. What it might not withstand is a lie.

“The evidence was staggering. In your own voice. I was torn between my responsibilities, and my loyalty to you—and the man I know you are. I promised myself that I wouldn’t allow sentimentality to cloud my judgment, and I haven’t, but it’s cost me plenty.” It’s the truth. I would have done whatever was necessary, but it would have eaten at me until my final breath.

“He, on the other hand,” I say, jerking my head toward Lucas, “was a staunch defender. As was Daniela,” I add, almost under my breath.

“I would never betray you. Or you,” he says to Lucas. “Never. Not because of the oath we took as soldiers, but because of the original pact.”

The one we made when we were seven.We sat in a circle on the grass, between the river and my family’s vineyards. With a pocketknife—the one I still carry—we drew blood from each of our wrists. We promised each other undying loyalty and brotherhood, as we held our oozing wrists in a triad, skin against skin, commingling our blood.

When the corner of Lucas’s mouth twitches, I know he’s remembering it, too.

Life isn’t so simple anymore, and reminiscing is a luxury we don’t have time for right now.

I rub my palms together. “Now that our periods are all synced, we have a problem.”