Chapter 30
BEA
He’s getting ready at the foot of the bed.
He’s checking the gun for the third time. He ejects the magazine, looks at it, slides it back in.
He hasn’t looked at me since he started.
“I don’t trust him.” I say it to his back.
“Neither do I.” He says it without turning.
That stops me.
“Then why are you going?”
“Because Victor thinks he’s setting a trap.” Now he turns. He’s still adjusting the jacket. “And I want to see what kind.”
“You’re willingly walking into a trap.”
“I’m walking into a meeting where I have to figure out what the trap is before it closes. That’s a different thing.”
“Is it?”
“He’s been playing both sides for weeks,” Raffaele explains.
“Maybe longer. I don’t know what he was doing the night the casino went up.
I don’t know how much of Nico’s mess he’s been feeding or feeding off of.
I don’t know what kind of deal he thinks he can build out of this.
But he came to my driveway, alone, hands up, in the middle of the night.
That’s one hell of a risk, and I don’t know what it means. ”
“It means he’s good at theater.”
“It means he wants me to think it means something. Same thing for our purposes.” He pulls a second magazine out of the dresser drawer and slides it into his inside pocket.
“Raffaele.”
“Mm.”
“Have you actually thought about—”
“All of it. Yes. I thought about it in the shower. I thought about it on three different phone calls this morning. Every scenario where it goes wrong, and every version of him I can imagine on the other side of the table.” He crosses to me.
He sits on the edge of the bed, close, and takes my face in his hands.
“I’m not walking in blind. I’m walking in with a list.”
“What if it’s not on the list?”
“Then I adapt. That’s what I do.”
I stare back at him.
He’s tired. I can see the marks of the long days under his eyes. He’s not afraid. That’s the part I can’t argue with. There’s no version of me that’s going to talk him out of going.
I try anyway.
“What if going is exactly what he wants? What if the whole point is to get you in a room?”
“Like I said, then I’ll be in the room he wants. And I’ll find out what for.”
“Raffaele.”
“Bea.”
He kisses me on the forehead. He stays there a beat. Then he pulls back.
“I have to move now. If I sit on this another day, Nico consolidates. If I sit on it two days, the families start picking sides, and I lose the ones I haven’t talked to yet.
Victor’s offering me a meeting before either of those things happens.
Whatever he’s offering me is something he wants me to take now, which means he’s pressured, too. I can use that.”
“Or he’s confident.”
“Or he’s confident. Either way, it’s information I get by going.”
He stands. He buttons the jacket.
I want to keep arguing. I can feel a dozen sentences waiting in my throat, all of them variations on please don’t, none of them with anywhere to go. He’s already ten steps ahead of every one of them. I can see it in the way he’s standing.
“I don’t like it.”
“You don’t have to like it.”
He’s at the door now. He pauses. “Eight men on the property. Four on the perimeter, two on the gate, two on the dune side. Lorenzo’s deputy’s in the kitchen if you need anything. Nobody comes in or out without me on the phone. You’ll be safe.”
“What if I don’t want to be safe,” I mumble back. “What if I just want to be with you?”
“Then you’ll get your wish… after tonight.”
This time, he doesn’t even bother lying before closing the door behind him. There is no I love you to echo in the stillness, only silence.
I sit there for a few seconds with the duvet still in my hands. Then I get up. I walk to the window and pull the curtain back two inches.
Down on the gravel I spot two black SUVs, engines running.
Lorenzo by the lead car with his phone to his ear, talking and watching the drive at the same time.
A man I don’t recognize at the back of the second SUV, opening the door.
Raffaele crosses to it, head down, shoulders set, not looking back at the house.
He gets in, and the SUVs start down the gravel. I watch them all the way down the drive until they’re a moving smudge against the trees. Then I watch the space where they were.
He’ll come back, I tell myself. He came back yesterday. He’ll come back today. He’ll come back tomorrow.
That’s what we are now.
I’m the woman waiting. He’s the man who comes back. The space between us is a driveway and a clock, and the work of the woman in waiting is to not count the seconds.
I close my eyes.
I count them anyway.