Chapter Nine
Nine
The hours following Sonia’s text had been unsettling and difficult.
Nikki had closed up work and gone home for a quick bite and some time at the punching bag, her mind replaying the moment in the restaurant when her fury had taken control.
The little girl’s disconsolate wailing had given excruciating insight into who the dead woman had been to her.
Nikki had some sense of Claire now—the animated kindness of that shy smile.
She could picture her rushing in to comfort the girl.
But Nikki hadn’t helped anyone. Instead, she’d shouted at Fiona Lake for fuck’s sake to do her job properly.
Shame washed through her in hot, uncomfortable surges.
She’d never lost control so completely in a professional setting.
She knew better—should have been better!
Sonia had warned her that the credibility of Phoenix Seven hung by a thread, and what had Nikki done?
Only pulled out the biggest, gnarliest knife she could find, and slashed the line.
She’d squandered the only currency she carried: respect.
Angelo’s words echoed in her thoughts: This isn’t like last time.
You don’t get to pretend to be a detective.
As she approached the studio doors, a dark figure in an overcoat peeled away from the shadows and stalked towards her.
Nikki tensed.
She seemed to know that posture, the boxer’s frame filling the coat: the angular lines, the surety of his stride.
Unbidden, her mind filled in the version of Tito as a teenager as he grew into that bulk.
It was a sudden, visceral memory—the warmth of his body beside her, the cedar smell and pepper taste of him, that small twitch of his left hand, the rare flash of a sudden smile.
But the illusion of Tito collapsed the next moment, a trick of the light. The figure approaching her seemed to shrink, resolving at last into the compact form of Benedetto De Rosa.
“Signorina Serafino,” he said.
Nikki nodded, keeping her face fixed.
“Signor De Rosa,” she replied, crouching to unlock and heft the heavy metal grate on its rails. “I’d prefer you not meet me here.”
His expression, always enigmatic, had a particular intensity this evening.
“The situation’s changed,” he told her. “We need to talk.”
He isn’t worse than Tito, she told herself. Nothing could be worse than finding Tito here.
But the sight of De Rosa cast a shadow in Nikki’s already troubled mind.
She unlocked the glass door and he followed her into the cool empty space. It smelled of mildew and damp plaster. Nikki hit a switch and fluorescent bulbs buzzed and flickered.
—
In the sudden brightness, he was diminished even further, standing only a few centimeters taller than her.
His features were delicate and refined. He wore a stylish dress shirt and grey overcoat with a bone-white cashmere scarf.
So close, his heavily lashed grey eyes bored into her, and she smelled his cologne.
“You need to stop your classes,” he said without preamble.
She faced him. “I’m not doing that.”
From his breast pocket, he extracted one of Nikki’s flyers.
“You’ve posted your schedule online, and advertised with these. This makes you an easy target.”
“Easy target for whom?” she challenged.
He stared. A muscle flexed in his jaw.
“No,” Nikki snapped, that familiar knot of anger forming in her throat. “Do you think it helps to tell me I’m being targeted, and not give some idea of the actual threat? I’m not a target, unless it’s that fucker who attacked me—and I don’t need your help with him.”
De Rosa dismissed this with a gesture. “That man and his friends are no longer a problem.”
“Then what’s the danger? Who could possibly want to fuck with me?”
“I won’t discuss that with you.”
The intensity of his look jolted Nikki. Her heart thudded rapidly, the taste of metal and bile in her mouth. This class was her refuge, normalcy in a world that had become chaotic and ugly.
“Why am I a target?”
His tone was derisive: “You’re not a foolish or ignorant woman, Nicole. Don’t feign it now. It’s no secret that you and Calandra were intimate once.”
Intimate. Nikki pushed against the word.
She had once called Tito caro, dear—and she could still hear his voice, a whisper in her mind: Mio piccolo mostro. “My little monster.”
“We were just kids…teenagers!”
“That may have protected you once,” said De Rosa. “But you changed that. You! When you came to him…when you asked a favor.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “I can’t possibly be the only person asking Tito Calandra for favors.”
His crooked mouth warped into a snarl. “Do you imagine that anyone can demand to speak with him, to be allowed into his sanctuary? To have him immediately grant so great a request? Calandra is known to be a man without weakness. Consider what he permitted with you! Consider who witnessed it!”
She would never forget the humiliation and fear of that night.
Her brother Gianni, hunted by loan sharks, had needed fifty thousand euros to protect his family.
She’d been forced to turn to Tito. De Rosa had been there; she’d followed him through a crowd of beautifully dressed men and women, seen the way they stepped aside at Tito’s gesture, felt their eyes on her as she made her case to him.
“You’re saying Tito has a weakness for me?”
“People interpret it that way,” said De Rosa.
“That’s ridiculous…paranoid. You think people watch so carefully—”
“Of course they do!” The words exploded with sudden emotion. “Rats are always the closest observers of the snake! Calandra isn’t like other men. He must not be seen to be like other men.”
Her cheeks burned.
“That was months ago,” she protested.
“Enough time for whispers to spread,” he growled. “Are you really so blind to the trouble you’ve caused?”
“It should be clear by now,” she said. “Neither Tito nor I have any desire to see one another. If anyone really is watching, they’d notice this.”
He seemed surprised. “You haven’t seen Calandra since then?”
“Of course not!”
She’d tried to stay calm, but rage tightened her throat. She spat it out. “I never want to see Tito again. The only reason anyone could possibly believe Tito has a weakness for me is because you keep coming here. Leave me the hell alone, and maybe they’ll lose interest.”
As quickly as it had come, De Rosa’s anger seemed to depart, his attention turning suddenly inward. He scanned the room as if hunting for an answer.
Nikki watched and considered him, her own anger retreating.
Benedetto De Rosa was so unlike the coarse thugs she knew from Tito’s world.
It was tempting to be lulled by the calm demeanor; the understated sophistication that belied the certain ruthlessness of the man.
But he was Tito’s right hand, and Tito chose his lieutenants carefully.
As children, and then teenagers, Nikki had watched the way he culled the herd to find the brightest and best. The most loyal. The most merciless.
It struck her as suddenly odd that De Rosa would spend any of his attention on her—not once, but twice this week. After such a long silence from Tito, why send his deputy now?
“What’s happened?” she asked.
De Rosa seemed not to hear.
“What?” he said, eyes flicking to her face.
“You said the situation’s changed,” Nikki said. “Why weren’t you worried about this before now? What’s happened?”
He began buttoning his overcoat.
“You’ve made your feelings clear,” he said.
Nikki felt a shimmer of dread, and that whisper in her memory: mio piccolo mostro.
“Has something happened to Tito?” she asked.
His body was rigid, expression hard. “I owe you nothing.”
He moved for the door, then stopped and glared at her.
“Change your patterns. Stop teaching. I won’t tell you again.”
—
Long after De Rosa was gone, Nikki stood frozen, crowded with the monsters he’d dragged in: their bullying weight and stinking breath, the catch of their claws. Some dark knowledge, which she’d long ago pressed into a cage, broke its bars.
Nikki had spent years removing every remnant of intimacy with Tito: a chaotic, anguished spasm followed by painstaking work to shield herself from his influence. It had once seemed impossible to separate who she was—who she really was—from him. They’d merged completely. Two sides of the same coin.
Now, alone in the studio, she seemed to feel him still, to hear his voice in her thoughts: Don’t do anything halfway, he used to say. Don’t carry a gun unless you’re prepared to pull the trigger.
This knowledge seemed instinctive in Tito, whose response to his father’s beatings had been to internalize the lessons of power. He had a profound capacity for observation, and tested what he learned methodically, with the patience of a laboratory scientist.
Perhaps she should have realized then what Tito was—guessed what he would become.
Every child of Naples had some understanding of what il Sistema, the System, was.
No doubt this was why her family had disapproved of her youthful affiliation with Tito’s gang.
But on the streets of Naples, the boundary between crime and survival had eroded so completely—a low wall to step easily across.
And in those days, the police actions she learned about from her father and brother seemed disconnected from the petty crimes she witnessed—or the secret transgressions she committed daily with her friends.
Her brother Adriano, who’d worked in an elite carabinieri unit that dealt with organized crime and terrorism, had seemed to recognize the peculiar alchemy that brought boys like Tito inside, that fed off their desperation and ambition and ate them whole.
You must see—must understand the players and how they fit together, Adriano had told her.
He said that organized crime was like the mythical hydra, with new heads growing whenever one was chopped away.