Page 21 of Give In to Me
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her voice was cool, lawyerly, the voice she used in depositions. “Katy is manipulative. She always has been. Her mother was the same way with our father.”
“Her mother was an addict who got clean and raised a daughter alone while your mother took the house and the car and the country club membership.”
“Don’t you dare—”
“You told me she was bragging. You told me she was building a narrative. You called me from your car, from your office, from your apartment, and you fed me lies about a nineteen-year-old girl who was so shy she couldn’t order her own coffee, and I believed you because you were her sister and I couldn’t imagine why a sister would do that.”
Dionne stood up. Her hands were flat on the glass desk and her composure was cracking, and underneath it was not guilt. He’dexpected guilt. He’d expected tears, apologies, the crumbling of a woman caught in her own machinery. What he got was fury.
“I loved you first.” Her voice shook, but not with shame. With rage. “Seven years, Julian. Seven years I was in your life. I introduced you to people. I came to your launches. I sat at your table at Haven every week for three years, and you never once turned to me the way you turned to her in the first five seconds.” Her chin lifted. “She is the mistress’s daughter. She is nobody. And you threw away seven years of friendship for a teenager in a polyester uniform who can’t even make eye contact.”
He regarded her across the glass desk. The woman who’d been in his life for seven years. The woman who’d fed him poison and called it protection and let him destroy the only person who’d ever seen him without his armor.
“We’re done,” he said.
Two words. Quiet. Final. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t explain or argue or give her the satisfaction of the fight she wanted. He said it like stating the time, or the weather, or any other fact that existed regardless of how anyone felt about it.
Then he turned and walked out of her office and closed the door behind him and stood in the hallway with the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead and his hands at his sides, and for thirty seconds he didn’t move. He just stood there. Feeling the weight of seven years of friendship collapse into rubble and not caring, not caring about a single piece of it, because the only thing he cared about was a girl with red hair who was somewhere in the world without him, and he had no idea how to find her.
HE CALLED LUCIANO ATeleven o’clock at night.
The phone rang four times. He sat on the edge of his bed in the dark with the Los Angeles skyline glowing through the window and the phone against his ear and his free hand gripping the mattress edge so hard his knuckles ached. Four rings. Each one a canyon. Each one the distance between two brothers who had never spoken, who had orbited each other for twenty-eight years like planets in separate solar systems, bound by gravity, divided by a silence that had been built to protect them both.
The line picked up.
Silence. Not empty silence. Full silence. The silence of a man who had spent twenty-four years guarding his brother from a distance and had just heard his phone ring with a number he didn’t recognize and had answered anyway, because Luciano Salvatore always answered.
“It’s Julian.”
More silence. Longer this time. He heard a sound on the other end that might have been an inhale, or might have been something else entirely, a sound that didn’t have a name in any language because it was what a man made when the brother he’d stolen from a monster twenty-eight years ago called him for the first time and said his own name.
“I know who you are.” Luciano’s voice was low, even, and underneath the evenness was a tremor so faint that anyone else would have missed it. Julian didn’t miss it. He’d spent his life listening for things people tried to hide. “I’ve always known.”
“I know.” Julian closed his eyes. “I know you have. I know what you did for me. I know why you did it. I’ve known since I was thirteen.”
The silence that followed wasn’t surprise. It was a man rearranging an entire life’s worth of assumptions in real time, and Julian could hear it happening, could hear Luciano’s understanding restructure itself around this single fact:He knew. He always knew. And he kept the silence too.
“Thirteen,” Luciano repeated softly.
“Tita’s closet. The documents. The birth certificate. Your letter.”
Another silence. Then: “Why now?”
The question was gentle. Not accusatory. The voice of a man who had waited twenty-eight years for this phone call and wasn’t going to rush it, wasn’t going to push, wasn’t going to do anything that might spook the brother who’d finally reached across the dark.
“I need to find someone.” Julian’s voice cracked. He let it. He was done with composure. Done with walls, done with armor, done with the fortified empire of a man who’d spent his life proving he couldn’t be discarded. He let his voice crack and he let the crack be audible and he said: “I can’t do it alone.”
“Tell me.”
Two words. Immediate. No hesitation, no qualifiers, no questions about who or why or what Julian had done to lose the person he was searching for. Just:Tell me.The response of a man whose entire life had been organized around the principle that when his brother needed him, he would be there.
Julian told him. Not all of it. Not the garden or the grove or the sound she’d made when his hand discovered her skin. But the shape of it. A girl. A lie. A destruction he’d authored with his own hands. And the fact that she was gone, sealed away by connections he couldn’t reach, and three investigators had come back empty, and he was sitting in the dark at eleven o’clock at night calling a brother he’d never spoken to because he had run out of walls to hide behind and the only thing left was the truth.
Luciano listened. When Julian finished, the line was quiet for five seconds.
“I’ll find her,” Luciano said. Not a promise. A fact. Stated with the calm certainty of a man who had spent two decades building a cybersecurity network that could find anyone, anywhere, and who was now going to point that network at the single task his brother had ever asked of him. “Give me forty-eight hours.”
“Luciano.”
