77

77

PERRY'S POV

The address Dante sent me was a small restaurant in a quiet part of Rome, the kind of place that had no sign outside and no presence online and existed entirely on the basis of people who already knew it was there telling other people who needed to know.

I arrived first.

The hostess led me to a private room at the back, separate from the main dining area, with a single table and two chairs and a window that looked out onto a narrow courtyard where nothing was happening. I sat down and ordered water and waited.

She walked in seven minutes later.

Ulla Adel was not what I had been expecting.

I did not know exactly what I had been expecting. I had been picturing someone who looked the part, someone visibly worn down, someone whose damage showed on the surface the way damage sometimes did on people who had been through something they could not fully recover from.

But she walked into that private room like a woman who had made a very deliberate decision about what she was going to allow the world to see and what she was going to keep entirely to herself.

She was tall, dark hair cut short and sharp around her jaw. Her eyes were a pale green that caught the light in a way that made them look almost silver and they moved around the room quickly when she entered, taking in every detail, the exits, the table, me, all of it in about two seconds before she settled.

She sat down across from me and crossed one leg over the other and looked at me with those pale eyes and said nothing.

"Ulla Adel," I said.

"You must be Perry Cullen," she said. Her accent was slight with the German accent underneath the international smoothness of someone who had lived in several places. "You look like your press photos."

"Is that good or bad," I said.

"Neutral," she said. "I do not read press." She reached for the water jug and poured herself a glass without being asked. "You want to talk about Silas."

"I do," I said.

She smiled. It was a small and very controlled thing that did not reach the pale eyes at all. "Of course you do." She set the jug down. "Everyone who finds me eventually wants to talk about Silas."

"How many people have found you," I said.

"You are the second," she said. "The first was a journalist. Three years ago. I did not talk to him." She looked at me steadily. "I am talking to you."

"Why."

She tilted her head slightly. "Because a journalist wants a story. You want a weapon." She picked up her water glass. "I prefer weapons to stories. They are more useful."

I leaned back in my chair and looked at her properly. She was interesting and I had not expected her to be interesting.

"Tell me about him," I said.

She was quiet for a moment. Her pale eyes went to the window and the courtyard beyond it and something moved through her expression that was there and gone before I could name it.

"He is the most controlled person I have ever known," she said. "That is the first thing you need to understand. Whatever you think you know about him, whatever picture you have in your head of the man you are going up against, add ten layers of control on top of it and you are getting closer."

"I have seen him operate," I corrected her.

"You have seen his surface," Ulla laughed. "That is different." She looked back at me. "Control is not an act. It is not a performance he puts on for the room. It goes all the way down. He makes decisions the way other people breathe and without emotion getting in the way." She paused. "Almost without emotion."

"Almost?" I asked.

She smiled again. "Almost."

"What gets through?"

She was quiet for long enough that I thought she was not going to answer. Then she said, "Two things. His family. His mother specifically and ownership." She said the last word carefully. "When Silas decides something belongs to him, really decides it, he does not let go. Not without a cost to whatever he is letting go of."

"Is that what happened to you," I said.

The pale eyes came back to me and something in them went very flat and very still.

"He decided I was his," she said. "And then he decided I was not. The transition between those two states was not pleasant."

"What did he do," I said.

"He did not do anything dramatic," she said. "That is what people do not understand about him. He does not need to as he could simply removed himself. Completely and permanently, the way you closed a door and walked away from it. One day I was the most important person in his world. The next day I was nobody." She picked up her water glass again. "The things he took from me were not things he could give back. They were not material things."

She said it without self pity and that was somehow worse than if she had said it with bitterness.

"What can you give me," I said. "Specifically, I need things that I can use."

"His underground operations run through three primary structures in Rome," she said. "I know the names of two of the three. I know the name of the man who runs his financial routing in Southern Europe. I know about an arrangement he made with a government official in this city four years ago that neither of them would want examined closely." She looked at me. "I know other things. Smaller things. But details add up."

"Why are you telling me this," I said.

She looked at me for a long moment. "Because he has a new woman," she said.

I went still as something had shifted in her voice.  The controlled surface had cracked slightly.

"How do you know that?" I asked carefully.

"I have kept loose tabs on his life from a distance," she said. "Just enough to know what he is doing." Her jaw moved slightly. "He has never brought anyone to his penthouse before except me and not in any consistent way, like the way you bring someone into your actual life." She paused. "Until now apparently."

I watched her face. "Does that bother you," I said.

Her eyes came to mine and for a second the pale green of them was very direct and very unguarded.

"Yes," she said simply. Then she picked up her water glass and straightened in her chair and the surface came back up smooth and controlled as if the crack had never happened. "Which is useful for you. Angry people are motivated people."

We talked for another hour and by the time she finished talking I had more on Silas Moretti than Dante had managed to find in two weeks of looking.

When the conversation reached a natural end she reached for her bag and I signaled for the bill.

"One more thing," I said.

She looked at me.

"The woman," I said. "She is my wife."

Something moved across her face. Quick and complicated.

"Your wife?"

"She has been spending considerable time at his penthouse," I said as her pale eyes held mine. "She seems to matter to him," I said. "More than the others apparently."

Ulla looked at me for a long time without speaking. The hostess brought the bill and I paid it without looking at it and when the hostess left the room was quiet again.

"Yes," Ulla said finally. Her voice was very even. "She seems to matter to him quite a lot."

She stood up and picked up her bag and adjusted the strap on her shoulder. Then she looked at me and the control was firmly back in place but something was sitting underneath it that was not going anywhere.

"You know," she said conversationally, "I have been in Rome for four days and I have not had a single interesting evening."

I looked at her.

She looked back at me with those pale silver green eyes and tilted her head slightly and the sassy controlled woman who had walked in an hour ago was still there but there was something else present now underneath it.

"I know a place nearby," she said. "Good wine and a private room." A pause. "No agenda."

I held her gaze.

She had just given me more ammunition than I had found in weeks. She was sharp and damaged in equal measure and she was jealous of the woman in Silas Moretti's penthouse in a way she was not entirely managing to conceal.

I stood up. "Lead the way,"