Chapter 5
Chapter Five: Antonia
A few days in and I've memorized every exit, every camera blind spot, and every shift rotation in the building.
I've also learned that Charlotte bakes when she's stressed, which means the kitchen counter has been covered in cookies since I arrived.
Oatmeal raisin on Tuesday, chocolate chip on Wednesday, snickerdoodles this morning, and the woman shows no signs of stopping.
Giada has eaten fourteen cookies in three days and is now referring to Charlotte as her new religion.
"I would die for that woman," Giada says through a mouthful of snickerdoodle, crumbs falling down her shirt. We're in my room, door closed, her sprawled across my bed while I sit on the floor sharpening Vita.
"You've known her for seventy-two hours."
"Love doesn't operate on a timeline, Toni. Love operates on butter content. Those cookies have European butter. I asked."
"You interrogated a woman about her butter."
"I engaged in meaningful culinary dialogue. She was flattered. We bonded. She told me Claudio proposed with a custom knife set, and I told her that was the hottest thing I've ever heard, and she blushed and now we're best friends."
"You have a best friend. Me."
"I can have two. My heart is large and my standards are flexible." She rolls onto her stomach and props her chin on her hands. "Speaking of large things, have you seen Carmelo?"
"I've seen Carmelo."
"The man is enormous, Toni. Enormous. And quiet. Do you know what enormous quiet men are? They're a fucking project, is what they are. I want to ride his dick and see if it’s as big as the rest of him."
"Carmelo will kill you."
"He can try. I'm very fast." She grins and then her face shifts, the ADHD pivot that I've known for a decade, one topic abandoned mid-sentence for whatever her brain grabbed next. "Have you talked to your husband since the corridor?"
"He's not my husband. And no."
"It's been three days."
"I'm aware."
"You're on the same floor. You eat in the same kitchen. I saw him in the corridor this morning and he nodded at me. He nodded, Toni, that means he’s warming up to the whole thing, obviously."
"Groundbreaking."
"My point is, you can't avoid the man forever. You're marrying him in five days."
"Watch me."
"I am watching you. I'm watching you sit on the floor and sharpen a knife you sharpened yesterday and the day before that, and the blade is already so fine it could split a hair, which means you're not sharpening. You're hiding."
I stop the stone and glare at her. The accusation is accurate, which is why it's annoying. Giada has the specific talent of cutting through my bullshit.
"I'm not hiding. I'm preparing."
"For what?"
"For the possibility that I'm going to have to share a room with that man in five days and pretend I don't want to open his throat."
"With Vita or Morte?"
"Both. The X."
"Hot." She rolls off the bed and lands on her feet, a move that should be graceful but instead involves her knee hitting the nightstand and the lamp wobbling.
She steadies the lamp with one hand, grabbing her drink with the other.
"Come to the gym with me. I need to hit something, and you need to stop sharpening that knife before you wear it down to a toothpick. "
"Nah, I'm going to the gym alone. I need the space."
"You need a therapist is what you need, but since this compound doesn't have one, the gym will have to do." She drains her drink and sets the glass on my nightstand next to Morte. "If you run into your husband down there, try not to kill him before the wedding. It'll create paperwork."
"Get out of my room, Gia."
"I'm going, I'm going." She stops at the door. "Oh, by the way, I asked Emilio if Carmelo has ever had a girlfriend and he laughed for forty-five seconds straight and then walked away without answering. I'm taking that as encouragement."
"You're taking that as a warning."
"Same thing." She leaves, closing the door behind her, and I hear her humming down the corridor toward her own room, off-key and loud and completely unconcerned with the fact that we're living in a building full of men who could kill us both.
That's Giada. The world is falling apart and she's asking about the butter content of the cookies and whether the silent assassin down the hall has ever been loved.
I put Vita down. Pick up Morte. Spin it once on my finger, watching the curved blade catch the light. Then I sheath both karambits, lace my boots, and head for the gym.
The gym is in the basement. Industrial. Concrete floor, cinder block walls, fluorescent lighting that makes everyone look like fucking vampires.
Heavy bags, speed bags, a wall of free weights, a mat area in the back for sparring.
The ventilation is loud enough to cover conversation, which is why soldiers come down here to talk shit about each other, and why I've already gathered more intel in three gym sessions than I have from any of the briefings.
It's empty at two in the afternoon. Most of the soldiers train in the mornings or after the evening shift. The midday slot is dead time, which is why I chose it.
I wrap my hands, pull Vita and Morte with their sheaths still on, and go to work on the heavy bag.
The X-slash is my warmup. Right hand down, left hand across, the blades crossing in front of my body and meeting in the center of the bag with a sound that I've been hearing since I was thirteen. The bag absorbs the impact and swings back and I reset and do it again.
Right down. Left across. Reset. Again, again and again until my shoulders strain.
My body knows this the way other people's bodies know breathing.
Marco put karambits in my hands when I was a kid and made me practice the X until my fingers bled and then made me practice it again the next day with the blisters still open.
He said pain is a teacher and discipline is the lesson and the combination of the two would make me lethal.
He was right. I hate that he was right, but the muscle memory doesn't care about my feelings toward the man who programmed it.
I work the bag for twenty minutes. The rhythm settles my brain the way the sharpening does, giving the fury somewhere to go that isn't a corridor confrontation with a man that’s far too hot for me to ignore when we’re sharing a bed.
But I’ll have to. Either that, or I’ll hate-fuck him and be done with it before planning how to embed my knife in his neck without bringing down repercussions on my head.
I haven't spoken to Matteo since the war room.
Three days of existing on the same floor, and not one word exchanged.
He nods when we pass in the corridor. I don't nod back.
He sits at the opposite end of the kitchen table during meals.
I eat fast and leave. He goes to Leone's office every morning and stays for hours, doing whatever scheming bastard sons do when they're trying to steal a chair that doesn't belong to them.
The avoidance is deliberate on both sides. We're circling each other, and the circling is its own kind of communication. Every non-interaction is a message. Every avoided gaze is a negotiation. We're establishing the terms of the hostility before the hostility has to share a last name.
I'm mid-swing when the gym door opens.
Carmelo.
He walks in without acknowledging me, goes to the weight rack, and starts loading a barbell. He's in a black t-shirt and the muscles underneath it are the kind that don't come from vanity training. They come from years of using your body as a weapon and maintaining it accordingly.
His new knife is on his belt. Different from the one the file referenced, darker handle, longer blade. He carries it the way I carry Vita and Morte, close, constant, an extension of his body that he reaches for when his hands need something to hold.
I go back to the bag. We work in silence for ten minutes. No conversation, no acknowledgment. Two people occupying the same space and respecting the boundary between them.
Then he speaks.
"Your footwork is wrong."
I stop mid-swing and turn. He's not looking at me. He's looking at the barbell, midway through a set of deadlifts that would snap my spine.
"Excuse me?"
"On the cross-slash. You're dropping your left heel before the blade connects. It bleeds power from the cut." He sets the barbell down and stands. Still not looking at me. "Rotate the hip instead. The power comes from the core, not the arm."
I stare at him. The Bonaccorso Butcher, the man whose file recommends avoiding eye contact, just corrected my technique unprompted.
"Show me," I say.
He turns and looks at me for the first time. Dead-gray eyes, flat expression, the face of a man who communicates through violence and silence and apparently unsolicited training advice. He walks to the mat area and stands with his feet shoulder-width apart.
"The X. Show me."
I step onto the mat and hold my babies.
I execute the X-slash. Right down, left across, blades crossing, the motion I've done ten thousand times.
"Again," Carmelo says. "Slower."
I do it again, slower, watching my own body, feeling for the thing he noticed.
"There." He points at my left foot. "The heel drops. A centimeter, maybe two. You won't notice it at speed, but the target will, because the cut lands with eighty percent of the force instead of a hundred."
He's right… I can feel it now that he's named it. The micro-drop in my heel, the slight wobble in the transfer of power from hip to blade. It's a flaw I've been carrying for twelve years, and nobody caught it because nobody I've trained with knows karambits well enough to see it.
"Fix it by driving through the ball of the foot. Keep the heel up through the full rotation. The hip does the work, the core transfers it, the arm is just the delivery system."
I adjust. Plant the ball of my left foot. Drive through the hip. Execute the X.