Chapter 12
RAFFAELE
The afternoon light is distracting me.
That’s what I keep telling myself—it’s the light.
The blinds are angled wrong. Marcy should have them adjusted before the next meeting.
The sun is cutting across my office in long gold bands, and whenever Bea crosses through one, her hair catches, her throat catches, and the curve of her shoulder in that cream blouse catches, and I lose another thirty seconds of whatever Antonio Martinez is telling me.
“—three weeks, Raffaele. Three fucking weeks my guys have been sitting in County. You know what County does to people?”
“I have a general idea.”
“A general idea.” He laughs without any warmth in it. “You know, when I hired you, they told me you were the best. Best lawyer. Best cleaner. Guy who could fix anything. And now I’m sitting across from you, and you’re half somewhere else.”
I bring my attention back to his face. Antonio is a compact, nervous man with a gambler’s hands and the kind of cologne you only wear if you’re trying to cover the smell of grease.
Two of his men are in the chairs behind him, silent as always, one picking at the arm of the chair, one watching the door.
“Your guys get processed through the courts the way the courts process them. I’ve filed the motions. The filings are in.”
“Filings don’t mean shit if the judge doesn’t move. You promised me a schedule.”
“I promised you a result.”
Bea moves past my peripheral vision with the whiskey bottle.
She stops at Antonio’s elbow, tips it carefully over his glass.
The amber rises to the right line and stops.
She doesn’t look at him. He doesn’t look at her.
He takes the glass with the same hand he’s been gesturing with and keeps gesturing.
That bothers me.
Not that she’s being ignored, because that’s the job, because that’s the whole point of a woman in the room carrying a whiskey bottle in this particular world. What bothers me is that I noticed.
“—and the witnesses,” Antonio is saying. “The bartender’s girlfriend. The waitress. They need a visit. A real visit. Not a phone call. Not a fucking letter from some kid in a suit.”
“The witnesses are handled.”
“Are they?”
“They’re handled.”
He drinks. He leans back. He’s waiting for me to say more, to give him the choreography he paid for, the usual reassurance, the specific names, the timeline. I give him nothing.
Bea crosses back behind his chair toward the sideboard. I catch the shape of her hip under the navy skirt, the set of her spine. She carries herself differently in clothes she didn’t pick. I noticed that in the car this morning too.
I’ve been noticing a lot.
Focus.
“D’Amico.”
“I’m listening.”
“You don’t look like you’re listening.”
“I’m listening, Antonio.”
I’m not. I’m back in the bedroom this morning, cutting my own face out of the mirror on the way out the door.
She sat up when I opened the closet and the sheet slid halfway off before she caught it, and she had that look on her face.
The one that said, Good morning. She was going to say something tender, probably.
She might have said my name the way she did last night, but without the wreckage around it.
I didn’t give her the chance.
It was necessary. She needs to understand what last night was and what it wasn’t. She needs to understand that the man who pays her salary is the man she saw in that room, not the man from the bed, and that the two aren’t going to shake hands across her in the middle of a workday.
That’s the theory, anyway. The theory also insisted she’d be relieved. Walk out with her shoulders set, with that cool professional line she does with her mouth, and we’d both go back to something workable.
Instead, she stood in my kitchen this morning holding a coffee I’d poured her and not drinking it, and the ride to the office was the longest eleven minutes of my life.
“—and the Sorrento thing. That’s still open, right? The money from Sorrento?”
“It’s being moved.”
“Moved where?”
“Somewhere you don’t need to know.”
“I paid for that money, D’Amico. That’s mine.”
“It’ll be yours again when the accounts are clean.”
Bea wipes down the sideboard. She finished the job twenty seconds ago, but the cloth is still going. At her wrist, just above the cuff of her blouse, there’s a thin mark where my thumb was last night. She hasn’t pulled the sleeve down over it. I don’t know if that’s oversight or something else.
I clear my throat. Antonio thinks the sound is directed at him.
“About fucking time. So, let’s talk about the schedule. I want dates. Real dates. Not this ‘when it’s ready’ shit you’ve been—”
“The lawyers will be ready when I decide they’re ready. Not before.”
“That’s not a fucking answer.”
“Move on, Antonio.”
He stares at me. He’s looking for the tell—the moment I’ll walk something back, soften the edges, hand him a scrap. He’s done this dance with me enough times to know the steps.
He mistakes my silence for an opening.
The glass comes down on the table harder than before.
“You know, I’ve been hearing things.”
“I don’t care what you’ve been hearing.”
“People are saying Raffaele D’Amico’s losing his edge. Skipping galas. Missing meetings.” He drags it out. “Keeping a new girl up on the executive floor.”
His eyes flick toward Bea and come back to me.
“Now, what’s that about? Because the way I was told it—and correct me if I’m wrong—the people up here get vetted.
Trained for years. They’ve either been in the life themselves or they know someone who has.
That’s the whole point of this floor, right?
Your receptionist’s grandfather did six years in Allenwood, or whatever the hell it is. ”
“Antonio.”
“I’m getting there.” He waves a hand. “That chick in the back, for example—that one’s here because your boy Castellano can’t wipe his own ass without someone holding his calendar for him. Fine. That, I understand. That’s a favor with a receipt.”
He tilts his head.
“But this one’s new. Fresh off the street. And she’s sitting outside your office. People are asking questions, Raffaele. Not the kind of questions that stop on their own.”
“Careful.”
“I’m just telling you what I’m hearing.”
“Choose the next sentence carefully.”
He doesn’t.
“Maybe the rumors are true. Maybe you’ve gone soft. Or lost your nerve. Or whatever bullshit people are saying now—I’ve stopped keeping track. “
The air in the office tightens by a notch. One of his men behind him stops picking at the arm of the chair. Bea has gone still at the sideboard. She’s turned her head a half-inch toward us. Not all the way. She’s a woman who’s already learning how to listen without looking.
I keep my expression even.
“Your guys in County will wait,” I say. “Your money will move. Your witnesses will stay quiet. It will happen on my timeline. You can take that and be grateful, or you can take it and complain to someone who hasn’t kept you out of a federal cell for the last eight fucking years.”
“Grateful,” he mutters. “Unbelievable.”
He stands too fast. His knees knock the underside of the coffee table. His arm is already in the air for a gesture he hasn’t landed on yet—saying something about deadlines and respect—and he’s turning as he stands, and that’s when it happens.
His elbow catches the bottle in Bea’s hand.
The bottle doesn’t break. The glass she’s just picked up off the side table does.
It hits the hardwood and explodes outward, whiskey and shards splattering across her shoes and the hem of her skirt.
She steps back on instinct, one quick, small movement, and her eyes go wide in a way I’ve only seen once before—the morning she carried that manila folder down the hall and heard me on the phone.
Antonio doesn’t register it.
“—and I’m paying you premium for this horseshit, and the least you could do is—”
I’m already moving.
I don’t plan it. There’s no decision. My body launches itself out of the chair, and I’m across the room before he’s finished the sentence, and I hit him once, clean, the way I was taught when I was sixteen and angry and had nothing else. Center of the jaw. A short punch, no windup, all shoulder.
He goes down sideways over the coffee table. The table holds. His weight doesn’t. He ends up on the floor among the glass, on his back, looking up at me with the dazed, offended expression of a man who didn’t think he was allowed to be hit.
Both of his men are halfway to their jackets.
I don’t move. I don’t have to. Their hands stop where they are. They remember whose office they’re in and whose name is on the building.
“Get out of the jacket,” I say to the one on the left. “Slowly.”
His hand comes away empty and goes to his side.
I look down at Antonio. The split is already coming up on his lip. He spits once onto my floor, and I let him, because the floor can be cleaned and he can’t.
“You fucking—”
“When you’re in my office, you respect the people working in it.”
I crouch. I put my forearm across my knee and lean in.
“When you speak to me, you speak with deference. And when you spill a drink on a woman standing in my office, you apologize to her before you apologize to me.”
“You’re done, D’Amico. You’re fucking done. When Vincenzo hears—”
“Vincenzo will hear what I tell him.”
His eyes move. He’s calculating. He’s not stupid, which is the only reason he’s been useful.
“The lawyers. The dates. The money. All the rest of that bullshit we’ve been talking about for an hour.” I wave a hand. “It happens on my timeline. That hasn’t changed because you’re bleeding on my floor.”
“What has changed,” I say, “is that if you ever raise your voice around someone working in this office again, I’ll find a way to get every one of your motions denied on procedural grounds.
Airtight. Appealed to death. Your own grandkids will be reading about it in law school, wondering how a guy with this many lawyers still managed to die in a cell. ”
He doesn’t answer.
“Nod if you understand, Antonio.”
He nods.
I stand. I step back. I don’t rush it.
“Get him up,” I tell his men. “Take him home. I’ll call when I want him back in this office.”
They move fast. They know how to move fast around a body.
One under the shoulders, one under the legs, and then Antonio is upright and leaning into the smaller one’s side, spitting again, into a handkerchief this time.
They don’t look at me on the way out. The door clicks shut behind them, and the latch settling into the frame sounds deafening in the quiet that replaces them.
I turn.
Bea is still by the window.
She hasn’t moved. Glass fans out around her shoes in a rough half-circle, and the hem of her skirt is darker in a patch at the thigh where the whiskey hit her. Her hands are at her sides. Her chest is moving too fast.
She’s looking at me.
I start toward her.
Slowly. One step. Then another. There’s glass between us, and I watch where my shoes land because I don’t want to track it toward her.
I don’t reach for her. I keep my hands visible.
I lower my shoulders a fraction because I know what I look like when I haven’t, and I don’t want to look that way right now.