Demetrio's POV
The drive to my father's villa took twenty-two minutes from the city, which was twenty-two minutes of a conversation I had been constructing and deconstructing since I left Grigori's briefing, trying to find the sequence of questions that produced the most complete picture with the least amount of my father understanding how much I already knew going in.
Manuel DeLeon was a man who had spent four decades in a world where information was leverage and had never forgotten that, not even in retirement, not even in his own study with his own son. The way to get the full truth out of him was not to arrive with the full truth already in hand. It was to arrive with enough to make the conversation necessary and let him fill in the rest with the particular pride of a man who had kept a secret a long time and needed, at some point, for someone to understand the weight of it.
