Twenty-One
TWENTY-ONE
Mia
TWO DAYS LATER, SHANI showed up at the restaurant with a couple of teenagers in tow. The family resemblance resided mostly around the eyes, but it was definitely there.
Ayden and Maleeka were my sous chef’s nephew and niece. Maleeka, an alpha, towered over her brother and littermate, who was an omega. Both had the same steady air of competence about them as their aunt, despite only being nineteen.
“Ever since Aunt Shani decided to go to culinary school, I’ve been curious,” Maleeka said. “I want to finish my business degree first, but once that’s done, I’m strongly considering following in her footsteps.”
“I waited tables last summer at The Mapletree in Columbia,” Ayden told me. “Hard work, but I liked interacting with the customers. Plus, a little bird told me that the tips here at the Elderflower Inn are excellent.”
I couldn’t help a huff of amusement. “You’ll have to let me know. You’re both hired, obviously. Did Shani give you the low-down on what we’re facing, and what your responsibilities will be?”
Maleeka sobered. “Yeah. We lost two kids in my graduating high school class to street violence. I can’t tell you how sick I am of the gangs getting their noses into every damned thing.”
“And we can do you one better,” Ayden added. “When Aunt Shani told me what was up with the Bella Vita, I might’ve started dropping in there for the occasional meal. I also might’ve got some up-to-date photos of all the menu prices and a head count of the number of customers at various times during the week.”
My heart kicked against my ribs in startlement, a burst of adrenaline popping in my veins at the thought of an omega alone in Blaze Berlusconi’s restaurant. “You did what ?”
Ayden shrugged. “Not like they know me from Adam. I just moved back here from attending the University of Missouri a few months ago. I’m just another customer taking advantage of suspiciously cheap food.”
I glanced at Shani, who didn’t look overly concerned either.
She raised an eyebrow at me. “If they start shanking random customers for daring to post menu photos on MenuPages, then I expect the police will take more of an interest.”
Part of me understood they were right, and the risk had been practically nonexistent. But still...
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll give you Nat’s phone number—he’s the other owner here. Send him the info you collected, but don’t go back there again. They’ve been known to send people here to snoop on us, and I don’t want them making a connection like that.”
“As it stands, he’s just a kid who grabbed a few meals there, and now that he works here, it’s cheaper to get food here.” Shani still didn’t sound worried. “That’s assuming they even recognize him.”
I got the distinct impression that Aunt Shani’s fingerprints were all over this bit of shady corporate espionage. If so, she seemed distinctly unrepentant about it.
“Next time, send the person who’s going to be working in the back on the spy mission, not the one working front of house,” I said mildly.
“Noted,” Shani replied.
The siblings shared an amused glance, but wisely kept their mouths shut.
I sighed. “Right. Well. I’m afraid I still don’t have a solid reopening date for us, but it’s likely to be within a week or so. Nat’s actually at the U.S. Attorney’s office today doing an interview, or he would have been here to meet you in person. Oh! One more thing. I don’t suppose either of you have any special social media expertise.”
Ayden and Shani immediately turned their stares on Maleeka, who smirked.
“Does having two million Insta followers and three-point-five million TikTok followers count?”
Christ on a crutch . The restaurant had... maybe twenty thousand followers, the last time I’d bothered to check?
“Did I mention you’re hired? And you need to get with Nat as well. Consider yourselves on the payroll immediately. We’ll get the paperwork sorted out first thing tomorrow morning.” I reached out to shake first Ayden’s hand, and then Maleeka’s.
Shani looked positively smug, as well she might.
Nat’s interview had ended up taking all afternoon. Not because it was far away—the U.S. courthouse was downtown, barely two miles from the restaurant. And not because the meeting itself was long—it had barely been more than half an hour.
He’d just ended up sitting around for three hours first, while an overworked and understaffed office tried to plow their way through too many appointments in too short a time.
In the end, he’d called me to give me a report over the phone, rather than coming back to the restaurant afterward. The aide he’d talked to hadn’t been rude or dismissive at all, but there had been a definite vibe of ‘ sure, we’ll put this report on top of our extremely tall stack of other reports, and maybe get around to addressing it sometime next year if you’re lucky .’
I couldn’t say I was shocked, although I’d have been lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed.
“It was worth a try,” I told him. “In the meantime, Shani found you a corporate spy and a social media whiz kid.”
“ Yes, I got some very interesting texts while I was waiting around. Including some about the Bella Vita that were arguably awkward to receive while sitting inside a U.S. District Attorney’s office .” His tone was wry, even over the cell connection.
“I told them you’d come in tomorrow morning and go over the hiring paperwork with them. If there’s nothing else that needs to be done, I’m going to call it a day.”
“ It’s a day ,” he agreed—the kind of small, stupid joke that had flowed back and forth between us so easily during the early days of our marriage.
I tried to stifle my smile, before deciding there wasn’t a good reason to do so. “Oh, one more thing. Emiel didn’t just want to play helicopter alpha about the gang stuff the other day. He genuinely wants to be your friend. And trust me, you could do worse on that front.”
There was a pause.
“ I saw him at the gym again this morning. We chatted a bit. Interesting guy .”
My inner twelve-year-old cheered, even as the rest of my brain stalled out for a moment over Emiel chatting .
“Gym bros forever,” I managed. “I dig it. Good night, Nat.”
“ Good night, Mia ,” he said.
I disconnected the call, feeling a bit of warmth kindling in my chest, despite the setback with the U.S. Attorney’s office. We had two trustworthy new employees with some useful side skills, and Emiel was making himself a friend.
All in all, I’d take it.
I locked up the restaurant and headed to my car, one hand on the can of pepper spray in my pocket. No boogeymen jumped out of the shadows; no suspicious headlights followed me when I pulled into traffic. My levels of paranoia waxed and waned these days, but the drive back to Ladue was uneventful, just like always.
It wasn’t even a late night. We’d entered a sort of limbo period, where pretty much everything that needed to be done at the restaurant was already done, except for bringing in fresh food. That would have to wait until the last minute—we couldn’t afford to have stuff sitting around on a shelf inside a closed restaurant, slowly going bad.
The smell of organophosphates was almost completely undetectable now, after days of rigorous cleaning and airing. Once it was competing with the smell of delicious food being cooked, it would be completely undetectable.
The remaining hurdles to our reopening were all external, and we were scratching them off the list one by one.
I arrived at the house during a reasonable supper hour, to find a pizza delivery driver pulling out as I was ready to pull in. The others’ vehicles were all present except for Luca’s, and the smell of pizza greeted me as I stepped inside.
The three alphas were gathered in the kitchen with an impressive array of boxes. They all looked up as I entered.
“Hi, Mia,” Zalen greeted. “We weren’t sure when you’d be back, so I declared pizza night. I tried to get one with fennel as a topping, but apparently that’s only for ritzy joints.”
“Ha. Ha,” Byron said flatly.
“Clearly they aren’t a discerning establishment,” I told him. “Still, pepperoni and mushrooms have their place.”
“Their place is in my stomach,” Emiel said. “More eating. Less talking.”
We opened boxes and grabbed huge slices.
“Where’s Luca?” I asked around a mouthful of stretchy cheese. “Big grant due tomorrow or something?”
Emiel grunted. “He’s stopping by that counseling place in Frontenac to fill out paperwork and get on the waiting list. Said not to wait on him.”
“There probably wasn’t much danger of that,” I said, with only faint stirrings of guilt as I went in for a second piece of pizza. I was relieved Luca was following through with his decision to join Emiel in getting some professional help.
He hadn’t been as withdrawn as before these last few days, but I still caught him zoning out sometimes—a pale, drawn look on his face when he thought no one was looking. He arrived about fifteen minutes after I did and joined us in laying waste to four large pizzas... but I caught that same look on his face when he excused himself and headed upstairs to his nest.
Part of me wanted to push, to intrude on his space and demand he tell me if he was all right or not. Instead, I watched TV for a bit, browsed stupid cat pictures on my phone until I was tired, and went to bed... alone .
Sleep took longer than I would have liked, but I was firmly tethered in dreamland when something ripped me back to wakefulness hours later. My breath froze in my chest as a full-throated scream of fear and pain reached me through the ceiling of my bedroom. I scrambled into a sitting position, dizzy with interrupted sleep as it came again—the high-pitched cry of an omega in terrible distress.