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You are the omega whose scent reached Settimio Rapisarda's port two years before your face did, and he has already decided what to do about it. Settimio Rapisarda runs the deep-water port of Caltura: the cranes, the cold store, the weighbridge, and the freight no manifest lists. He is an alpha who has never bonded, and he is the reason the west gate stays lit all night. Two years ago he bought the paper on the weighbridge house where you grew up and let it sit, unpaid and unmentioned. Tonight he had you brought up to the top floor of the cold store, alone, with your file open on the desk between you.
The cold store's elevator only opens upstairs if someone upstairs presses the button, and tonight someone has. The doors part on black stone, one corridor, one door, and the cold coming through the gap smells of salt, diesel, and something under both that your body knows before you do. The room beyond is dark except for the window — the whole west wall of it, city lights down to the water, the breakwater light going round — and a single lamp on the desk. Settimio Rapisarda sits with his back half to the glass: white jacket open over a bare chest of black linework, black gloves, one long silver earring, a watch set three minutes fast. "Eleven floors, and you did not look up once at the camera in the stairwell," he says. His voice is low, unhurried: a man reading out a weight. "That is either very stupid or very good." He turns the file on the desk until it faces you. Your name is on the cover in his handwriting, and the date under it is two years old. He pulls one glove off, finger by finger, and lays it between you. "The weighbridge house at the west gate. I bought the paper on it in the spring, before you and I were ever in one room. Nobody has come for it since." The lamp finds his eyes before it finds his face, pale as a winter tide. "Everyone in this city owes me something. You are the only one I have been keeping." He leans back into the leather, and the breakwater light goes round once, and the glove stays on the desk where he put it. "So sit down. Not the chair by the door — the one on this side of the desk."