Chapter 14 #2
Marco’s hand found the small of my back—a silent anchor against the rising tide of new faces, new information, new calculations I needed to make about where I stood in this constellation.
Gemma was last, emerging quietly from the kitchen with a tea towel draped over one shoulder.
Smaller than I’d expected from the briefing materials—barely five foot three, with wide brown eyes that missed nothing.
She moved like someone who had spent years trying not to be noticed and was only now learning to take up sound.
I held out the ceramic dish Rosa had returned to me. “I made biscotti,” I said, then felt immediately foolish for stating the obvious. “My grandmother’s recipe. From Palermo.”
Gemma took the dish, noticing the hand-written card tucked under the cloth: Nonna Agata’s recipe, 1962. Her eyes did a small specific thing—a softening at the corners, the recognition of something familiar in a stranger.
“Grazie,” she said softly in Italian. “Thank you for bringing us your grandmother.”
I needed to sit down.
The small clean fracture from the threshold widened a degree.
Gemma had named exactly what I had done without my having to explain it.
The biscotti weren’t just food—they were the only person who had ever seen me whole, translated into flour and almond and orange peel, carried across an ocean because I couldn’t bring the actual woman.
Marco’s hand pressed gently against my back, steadying me. I glanced up at him, found his eyes already on me—warm, steady, a lifeline in a room suddenly too full of people who could see through walls I’d spent a lifetime building.
“Drink,” Donatella declared, reading my face with unsettling accuracy. She snapped her fingers at Santo, who actually moved in response, bringing over a glass of something deep red and expensive. “Immediately. Doctor’s orders.”
“You’re not a doctor,” Marco said.
“I could have been,” Donatella replied without missing a beat. “I chose to be fascinating instead.”
The room laughed, and I felt myself carried along in the current of it—not swept away, but held, buoyed by the easy rhythm of family language I hadn’t realized I was starved for until that moment.
Dinner at the long oak table felt like a choreographed dance I hadn’t learned the steps to, yet somehow was stumbling through.
Rosa directed traffic with the confidence of a woman who had been feeding this family since before I was born.
“Marco, left side of Serafina. Santo, you here. Donatella, not there—here.” Bodies shifted, chairs scraped, wine glasses clinked.
I found myself between Marco and Gemma, with Dante at the head of the table and Santo across from me, those dark eyes still calculating something I couldn’t read.
Rosa brought out everything at once, platters and bowls arriving in a procession that transformed the table into a geography of scent and color.
Orecchiette with sausage and broccoli rabe—the pasta shaped like small ears, slick with olive oil and dusted with pecorino that melted into little pools of salt and sharp.
A tray of eggplant involtini, the thin slices wrapped around ricotta and pine nuts, charred at the edges.
A salad of bitter greens that made my mouth water just looking at it.
And then the wine—three bottles of Nero d’Avola that made my throat close because my father drank the same one. The label was so familiar it felt like a family member.
“You all right?” Marco murmured, too low for anyone else to hear.
I nodded, but the lie felt flimsy even to me.
Midge had stationed herself under Cora’s chair with the tactical awareness of a much larger animal, head on paws, eyes locked on Santo like a sniper with a target.
When Santo shifted to reach for the wine, Midge emitted a high-pitched alarm bark that was so precisely tuned it could have shattered crystal at thirty paces.
“Jesus,” Santo muttered, freezing mid-reach.
“She’s like an alarm system,” Cora said without looking down. She passed the wine to Santo with a small, satisfied smirk.
“But louder,” Santo said, filling his glass.
Dante, at the head, raised his glass. He did not make a long speech—I had already learned enough about him to know that Dante Caruso did not waste words, even on ceremony. “To Serafina,” he said simply. “For the work she has done on our behalf, and for the courage it took to do it.”
Every glass lifted. The moment stretched, held, glass rims catching light like small fires.
I could not speak. The recognition was so direct, so public, that it lodged somewhere behind my sternum. My father had never once—not once in eight years—acknowledged my work in front of others. This stranger had just done it in his first sentence.
The meal began and something miraculous happened: for the length of this dinner, I was just a person at a table. The Scordato envoy, the analyst, the woman who had built files on everyone in this room—that version of me receded like a tide, leaving behind someone I barely recognized.
“So tell me about the clubs in Palermo now,” Donatella said, twirling pasta on her fork with practiced precision. “Still the same sad little places playing Euro-trance from 2006, or has someone finally opened something worth sweating in?”
I found myself laughing again. “Depends what you consider worth it. There’s a place called Malox that’s essentially a pharmacy by day, nightclub by night.”
“A pharmacy?” Marco asked.
“Complete with original shelves stocked with vintage medicine bottles,” I confirmed. “Cocktails served in little brown prescription bottles. It’s . . . specific.”
“It sounds hideous,” Donatella said with delight. “I need to go immediately.”
“I’ll take you,” I said, then realized what I’d promised. I’d be back in Palermo soon. I’d be gone. The table would continue without me.
Something must have shown on my face, because Donatella’s eyes softened briefly before she launched into a story about a club in Prague that had been converted from a Soviet nuclear bunker.
Halfway through the meal, I felt something brush against my ankle.
I glanced down to find Midge emerging from under Cora’s chair, her tiny paws making deliberate progress across the rug.
She paused at my feet, tilted her head, and assessed me with enormous brown eyes—as if weighing factors I couldn’t fathom.
After a full three-second appraisal, she settled on top of my left foot.
Cora looked up from her plate, fork halfway to her mouth. “Huh.”
“Traitor,” Santo muttered across the table. Midge ignored him completely, her small warm weight pressing into my foot like she’d decided this was her new home.
The conversation flowed around me—Dante asking Gemma about a gallery opening, Donatella teasing Marco about a supplier contract, Rosa appearing periodically to refill plates no one had emptied.
I found myself studying the room the way I had studied intelligence reports—mapping connections, noticing how Dante‘s gaze returned to Gemma every few minutes, how Santo’s hand sometimes found Cora’s wrist on the table, how Donatella directed traffic with a raised eyebrow or a tilted chin and everyone responded.
Halfway through the meal, Santo leaned across the table and switched to Italian. “What’s your honest assessment of Enzo Valenti?”
The question cut through the warm haze of food and wine like a knife. Direct, no preamble. I felt the table shift its attention to me—Dante’s eyes lifting from his plate, Donatella pausing mid-gesture, Marco going very still beside me.
I answered in Italian without missing a beat, my voice dropping into the Marchetti’s register—flat, surgical, unadorned.
“A patient man with an impatient wound. He wants what your father denied him in 2003, plus interest for the waiting. His network is twice the size of yours, even after his issues. His political connections are better, and his organisation is eager for revenge. But he’s been waiting so long that he’s started making mistakes. ”
I stopped, realizing I’d revealed information I hadn’t intended to share. Santo held my gaze, his face unreadable. Then he gave me one nod—small, precise, a receipt for payment rendered.
Marco, beside me, pressed his knee against mine under the table. I felt the warm pressure of it through the wool of my dress, an anchor in rough waters.
“The food is exceptional, Rosa,” I called, deliberately switching to English. Rosa beamed from the kitchen doorway.
The rest of the meal passed in a pleasant blur, but I could feel Santo’s eyes on me occasionally—not hostile, not friendly, just aware in a different register than before. I had, I realized, passed some kind of test.
Midge stayed on my foot throughout, occasionally emitting a tiny sigh of contentment that vibrated against my ankle like a tuning fork.
After dinner, the men drifted toward the leather armchairs at the far end of the loft, gravitating around a bottle of grappa like planets finding their orbit.
I watched Marco settle into the chair nearest the window, his profile outlined against the city lights, laughing at something Santo said.
The women peeled off to the kitchen under the archway with the practiced efficiency of a tradition I recognized from every Sunday of my childhood—though in this case, I suspected Rosa’s oldest trick was less about tradition and more about creating a space where certain conversations could happen without male ears.
Donatella took the high stool at the marble island with a glass of wine and made no pretense of helping.
Her crimson silk draped artfully as she crossed her legs, her ring catching light as she turned it on her finger.
Cora moved to the counters with the efficiency of someone who had been in this kitchen before, wiping surfaces with quick, practiced motions.
Gemma started putting food away in lidded containers, her movements quiet and precise.