Luca Moretti's Arc

Chapter 9 of 9

The ring sat on Luca's desk through the morning — a worn brass band with a cracked inscription circling it, the loyalty he had given and now taken back. But a ring was not a confession. Luca needed the man's voice, on tape, naming DeMarco. Without that, the note in the leather envelope was just paper, and DeMarco was still a gate Luca could not open. He drove out to the empty parking garage where the traitor was kept. Broken elevators. Dark lower floors no one walked. In the bottom level, behind concrete pillars, his men had built a heavy iron cage on a poured slab, padlocked tight. The traitor sat inside, wrists raw, eyes flat. Luca pulled up a chair. He set the cracked ring on the floor between them and asked for one name and one story. The man spit on the concrete and said nothing. Luca tried for hours. He offered the man his life. He offered his family safe passage. He laid out what he already knew — the mailbox, the booth, the number — and waited for the crack. The traitor only smiled, the kind of smile a man wears when he is more afraid of someone else than of you. Luca understood then. DeMarco had reached him first, long before tonight. Whatever threat sat behind that fortified gate was bigger than anything Luca could put inside a cage. Luca stood. He picked up the broken ring and slid it into his pocket. The lock clicked shut behind him. The confession would not come — not from this man, not in time. If he could not make the traitor speak, he would have to make DeMarco speak instead. The investigator's two weeks had just become his only road in.