Chapter 439: Then We Can Talk About What You Owe Me

POV: DANTE

Luca found the seam at two in the afternoon.

He came out onto the terrace with a laptop under one arm and the look of a man who had been waiting all day to say something. Dante was sitting in the shade with a cup of coffee he hadn’t touched. Through the glass door behind him, he could see the bedroom, the bed, the shape of Isabella asleep under the blanket. Her breathing was slow. The doctor had called twice that morning and said the same thing both times: holding.

"I’ve got something," Luca said.

"Sit."

Luca sat and opened the laptop on the table. "The trail I’ve been following. The Malta import firm, the Naples supplier, the courier. I thought it was a dead end, but I kept going." He turned the screen toward Dante. "Look at the closing date."

Dante looked. It was a corporate filing, a page of numbers and stamps. "What am I looking at?"

"The Malta company dissolved on the nineteenth of August. The registry in Naples says the nineteenth. But the freight authority has it closing on the eighteenth." Luca tapped the screen. "One day. Whoever built this was careless. Or in a hurry."

"Or tired."

"Maybe." Luca leaned back. He looked pleased with himself. "But it means the trail is real. Nobody fakes a date wrong by one day. Somebody ran this through a lot of hands, and one of them slipped."

"So where does it end?"

"It ends there. The firm closed two months ago. The supplier went out of business in the spring. The courier shut down in August." Luca spread his hands. "Whoever was behind it went dark long before we started looking."

Dante was quiet for a moment. He looked through the glass at the sleeping shape on the bed.

"Then we’ll never find the maker through the paper," he said.

"Not through this paper. No."

"But we have the pills."

"We have the pills," Luca agreed. "And a doctor who says they’ll hold her. That’s what matters now."

Dante nodded slowly. He looked at the screen again, at the small mismatched date, and something nagged at the back of his mind. He couldn’t name it. It was too small to hold.

He let it go.

"Good work," he said.

...

At six, Isabella woke and asked to sit outside.

He carried her to the terrace and settled her in the chair with a blanket over her knees. She was thin and pale and moved like someone relearning her own arms, but her eyes were clear. She looked out at the sea for a long time.

"I forgot it was so large," she said.

"The sea?"

"Everything. I’ve spent a week looking at ceilings." She turned her head. "Is it always this quiet here?"

"At night."

"I like it."

He sat on the step beside her chair. She put her hand on his shoulder. Her fingers weren’t steady yet, but they stayed.

"Luca’s been at his laptop all day," she said.

"He’s working."

"On what?"

"On finding out who made the pills."

She looked down at him. "Have you found anything?"

"A dead end. For now."

"Will you?"

"Yes."

She nodded slowly. After a moment she said, "I keep thinking about the deliveries. The box on the table, the little card with Dr. Armani’s name. I took it out of the envelope every month, and every month I never wondered." She shook her head. "How does someone not wonder for eight years?"

"By being told it was nothing to wonder about."

"That isn’t an excuse."

"It’s a reason," Dante said. "There’s a difference."

She was quiet. The light had begun to go, turning the water from blue to gray. A gull passed low over the cliff, then another.

"When you find out," she said, "I want to be the one who hears it first."

"You will."

"Promise."

"I promise."

She leaned her head against his shoulder. After a while she dozed, and he carried her back to bed and sat with her until her breathing evened out.

...

At eight that evening, the phone in his pocket began to buzz.

He didn’t recognize the number. He knew the pattern. He walked out onto the terrace, slid the door shut, and answered.

"Romano," Dimitri said.

"Valentino."

"How is she?"

It took Dante a moment to answer. He hadn’t expected that. "Sleeping. She woke up this morning and ate half a piece of bread. The doctor says she’s holding."

"Good."

"She had one more shaking spell around noon. Short. It passed."

"It will keep passing for a while," Dimitri said. "The doctor has a schedule. Follow it exactly."

"I am."

"Then we can talk about what you owe me."

Dante had known this was coming. He’d known it for two days, since the night he put his head against the glass and said the words Whatever you want to know about The Covenant. He had gone over them a hundred times. They hadn’t gotten easier.

"Ask," he said.

"First, I want to know that what you offered is real." Dimitri’s voice was flat. "So I’m going to ask you one question. Answer it, and we’ll proceed."

"Go on."

"Where is The Covenant’s research facility in Rome?"

Dante closed his eyes.

It was the one place he had been told to stay away from. He had seen it only once, from the back of a car, on a night he wasn’t meant to be out. A low gray building behind a fence, with the logo of a company he’d never heard of.

There was no taking it back once it was said.

"It’s called BioAdvance Research Solutions," he said. "In the EUR district. A low building behind a security gate. There’s a second floor underground. They don’t use the name on any of their paperwork. The people who work there don’t know who they’re working for."

The silence on the line was brief.

"Who handles their money?" Dimitri asked.

"James. He sits on their council. He moves it through legitimate companies. Brokers, freight, import houses."