As soon as he saw Demis in the doorway, Ralph rose from the table and took a step toward him. He opened his mouth to say something — but Demis, ignoring all rules of subordination, spoke first.

  Today he finally had news for his boss. Good news.

  “Leo is alive.”

  Ralph froze. His hands finished the automatic motion they had begun — buttoning his jacket.

  “Details?”

  “He was wounded. Presumably quite seriously. He’s recovering after surgery.”

  “Where?”

  “Somewhere in the mountains. His location is being kept secret. Just like the fact that he’s alive.”

  “As well as the fact that he was wounded,” Ralph added.

  Demis nodded.

  Leo Stavrakis had disappeared on the same day Ralph himself was injured. But Ralph’s disappearance hadn’t drawn nearly as much attention as Leo’s — the senator’s son, heir to a business empire, a fixture of private parties and expensive clubs, adored by women, cameras, tabloids, gossip columnists, and anyone else drawn to bright lights.

  Ralph, however, had known Leo — or rather remembered him — in a completely different light.

  A brilliant liar, capable of weaving a story so elaborate that an entire campus would fall for it.

  They were always harmless lies, the lies of an artist — lies from which Leo gained nothing except admiration.

  The crowd didn’t believe him — at least Ralph didn’t.

  And he never understood why Leo staged these free performances. Because Ralph knew — sensed it like an animal recognizing its own kind — that beneath the bravado lived someone intelligent, cold, calculating.

  And extremely aggressive.

  Leo never entered a fight until he was sure he could win. But once he saw an opening, nothing and no one could stop him. In the heat of a fight, he sometimes lost control — and that was when Ralph won.

  Eventually, Leo decided it was more advantageous to have Ralph as an ally. Sometimes Ralph agreed to these situational alliances. Sometimes he didn’t. And he put considerable effort into ensuring that his agreement — or refusal — always came as a surprise to Leo.

  Useful to each other or not, they never became friends.

  They couldn’t.

  It was against both of their creeds.

  It would never have occurred to Ralph to seek Leo out. He wouldn’t even have remembered him — after returning to the country, to his family and his father’s business, Ralph had too many other issues to deal with.

  That day, he had lunch with his sister Vella in the restaurant of the Vesuvius Hotel, which belonged to her. Ralph had been living there for a month — he hadn’t had time to find suitable accommodation yet. In this matter, he could rely only on Demis. But Demis was as busy as he was.

  Ralph could have stayed at his father’s house — no one would have dared object. But no one had invited him either. None of them wanted to.

  After seeing Vella to the door and holding an umbrella for her until her car arrived, Ralph returned to the lobby, where the concierge called him out:

  “Mr. Dengof?”

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Stavrakis, sir. He’s in the lounge now having coffee. He asked me to tell you he would be grateful if you joined him.”

  Ralph glanced at his watch. A vague uneasiness had settled in his mind during lunch with Vella — and now it intensified. He couldn’t remember his sister mentioning Leo or the Stavrakis family at all.

  But conversations with Vella often left him with a creeping sense of anxiety. It was her special talent.

  He followed the lobby boy down a side corridor to the private area of the restaurant. The boy left him before a heavy curtain and disappeared. Ralph lifted it and stepped inside.

  Two armed men met him. A third approached from behind and, poking him in the back with something hard, advised him to keep quiet and follow orders.

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  He briefly regretted brushing off Demis’s concerns and refusing personal security. He didn’t trust the men his father wanted to assign to him. And the people he did trust were thousands of kilometres away with his mother.

  He had never imagined he would actually need protection.

  Ralph understood that it was pointless to resist armed men and followed them without protest. But they treated him roughly — taped his mouth, tied his hands. In the parking lot, they shoved him so hard he fell and hit his face on a car hood. Finally, they dumped him on the floor of the vehicle, and he rode the whole way with his forehead pressed into a dirty rubber mat.

  None of this matched the word invitation — or the Leo Stavrakis he remembered. Whatever else Leo was capable of, such crude, primitive brutality would have disgusted him.

  The kidnappers dragged Ralph out of the car in the backyard of what looked like a club or café. It was empty and quiet at that time of day. The back wall was covered with identical graffiti. There was a row of rubbish bins. A mesh fence with an iron gate. A metal door.

  The surrounding residential buildings loomed above him like cliffs. The cloudy sky seemed to lie directly on their roofs and peer into the windows of the upper floors. The low, cigar-shaped building they dragged him into resembled a submarine lying at the bottom of a deep underwater trench.

  Inside, the room — once a hall or a studio — now looked like a warehouse: mismatched tables and chairs pushed to the walls. One of the men selected a chair and sat Ralph on it, tying his hands behind the backrest, so that he could barely move.

  They had never been friends — him and Leo. Nor had they ever had the chance to become enemies. By this point, Ralph was almost certain that Leo had nothing to do with his abduction — the kidnappers had simply named the first person Ralph might know in the city. So Ralph was genuinely surprised when Leo Stavrakis appeared.

  He walked like a film director onto a set, escorted by a cluster of glamorous starlets.

  “Well, what’s going on here?” Leo asked cheerfully.

  Then his gaze landed on Ralph — and Leo froze.

  Ralph couldn’t tell what Leo was trying to convey in that silent moment. Maybe he just didn’t recognize him. They hadn’t seen each other since graduation. Also, Ralph wasn’t in good shape — the right side of his face seemed frozen, his lip was bleeding.

  Leo stepped closer, studying him sharply. Ralph thought he saw a flicker of confusion — or something like it — cross Leo’s polished face.

  “What the fuck…” Leo whispered. “Ralph?”

  Then he straightened and snapped at the three armed men:

  “Are you fucking crazy? What did you do?”

  The men exchanged uneasy glances.

  “He resisted,” one muttered.

  Leo nodded to one of his girls — and she suddenly delivered a precise, crushing blow to the speaker’s stomach. He doubled over, wheezing.

  “Resisted?” Leo repeated, sounding genuinely astonished.

  “Oh dear. You approached Mr. Dengof, wished him good morning — and... he resisted?”

  His performance had improved, Ralph noted. The indignation looked almost convincing.

  “Release him,” Leo ordered.

  One of the girls stepped toward Ralph — but didn’t have time to act.

  A shot rang out. The girl collapsed at Ralph’s feet.

  For a moment everything fell into ringing silence.

  Leo stared at something behind Ralph. The women with him moved like a pack of cats — shielding him, dragging him back. Another shot. Another girl fell, covering Leo and pulling him down with her.

  Then gunfire erupted chaotically — apparently from someone Ralph couldn’t see. Someone who had come in through the interior door behind him.

  The next moment, someone knocked Ralph over to the floor, flipping the chair and shoving him hard against the wall. His cheek scraped across rough concrete.

  He could see almost nothing but a fragment of the wall. His shoulder throbbed. Someone crouched beside him and sliced the tape at his wrists, leaving a deep cut in his skin. His hands were too numb to feel pain.

  Ralph stared at his hands in amazement. He did not look at his wound. He stared at the pistol suddenly lying in his numb grip. Ralph’s first instinct was to throw the weapon aside immediately. The pistol couldn’t protect him — he wasn’t trained to use it.

  But holding it made him a participant in the ongoing fight, in which he couldn’t decide which side he stood. He seriously doubted that there was a side for him.

  What he needed was to get out. Fast.

  He tried to spot Leo, but now he couldn’t even tell where to look — everything was swallowed by smoke, shouting, and dust.

  Groping along the wall, still clutching the useless gun, he crawled toward where he vaguely remembered the exit to be.

  He was stopped by someone’s strong hand grabbing him by the collar.

  “Mr. Dengof, here you are.” The woman’s voice was strangely clear and calm amid the chaos unfolding around her.

  “This way.” She shoved him, as he thought, straight toward the flashes of gunfire. “Move! I’ll cover you.”

  He obeyed, and after taking a few steps, he found himself near the door.

  He reached the threshold when a flicker of movement flashed to his right. He recoiled instinctively — and that probably saved him. He barely felt the impact; he felt no pain — but as he crossed the threshold, everything went black.

  The last thing he heard was a woman shouting something after him.

  Ralph’s next more or less coherent memory was of the forest.

  The gun was no longer in his hand. Where had he left it? Had he fired it even once?

  He couldn’t remember pulling the trigger. But he did remember the recoil — a jolt so sharp it sent pain ripping through his entire body.

  Could he trust these memories? Ralph doubted it.

  What he did remember clearly was Leo’s pale face. His gaze, fixed somewhere over Ralph’s shoulder — at first confident and demanding, then frozen after the first shot.

  If Leo had been the director up to that moment, then an armed mutiny had erupted right in the middle of his set.

  The first thing Ralph learned from Demis, when he finally appeared in Ralph’s hospital room, was that Leo had vanished. Possibly dead. Ralph didn’t yet know what to do with this information — but he was grateful, once again, for Demis’s uncanny ability to answer questions Ralph hadn’t yet managed to ask.

  Which was particularly fortunate, considering Ralph’s speech only returned on the third day after surgery.