Chapter 11 Amber
AMBER
Ikeep telling myself these aren’t dates.
They’re meetings. Check-ins. A truce held together by bourbon and mutual distrust. I refuse to call them anything else, even in my own head.
Still.
I find myself watching the clock at work. Not in a hopeful way. In a vigilant way. Like if I don’t keep an eye on time, it might slip past me and I’ll miss something important.
The pub is always the same when I get there. Dim lights. Sticky tables. The same bartender who never remembers my name but remembers my drink. Giovanni is usually already seated, back to the wall, jacket draped over the chair beside him like he owns the place without needing to prove it.
He never waves me over.
He doesn’t have to.
At the pub, the nights blur together.
“You always sit with your back to the wall,” I say one evening, nodding at his chair.
“Habit,” Giovanni replies.
“From what?”
“From living long enough to keep it.”
Another night, I gesture toward the jukebox crackling in the corner. “If I have to hear this song one more time, I’m smashing it.”
“You won’t,” he says.
“And how do you know that?”
“Because I own the place.”
I know I should be shocked, but we are way past that. He’s a mafia Don, after all.
The bartender slams our drinks down one night, liquid sloshing over the rim, and I swear Giovanni nearly slams him into the table.
I take over before he can. “You’re watering these down,” I say.
“They’re fine,” the bartender mutters.
“They’re not.” I smile. “Make us new ones. And don’t ever try to swindle a colleague again.”
“Look, Miss—”
That’s when Giovanni’s face goes dark. His hand slams on the table and his ring catches what dim light there is to catch. “The lady said to make them again.” He doesn’t rise from his seat, but his tone is hard enough to bruise. “Make. Them. Again.”
Maybe it’s the danger in Giovanni’s tone. Maybe it’s the second the bartender’s eyes snag on the ring and widen in recognition.
The guy blanches. “Of course, sir. Apologies, sir.”
“Don’t apologize to me.” Giovanni nods my way. “Apologize to the lady.”
“M-My apologies, Miss.”
My jaw nearly drops.
Once the guy leaves, I stare at Giovanni. “Do you scare everyone like that?”
“Only when they deserve it.”
Another night, I watch him finish a game of darts without missing a single shot.
“Do you ever smile?” I ask.
“I smiled once,” he says. “Didn’t care for it.”
I snort into my drink.
A few nights later, I catch him scanning the door again.
“Expecting trouble?” I ask.
“Always.”
“You must be exhausting to live with.”
“I don’t live with anyone.”
“Shocking,” I say sarcastically.
A corner of his mouth twitches.
The silences stretch, but they don’t press as hard anymore.
His updates aren’t much. Most of the time, he has nothing to report. But I always look him in the eye as he says it, and despite every instinct telling me not to trust men like him, I see nothing but the truth in them. Just a sea of burnished brown with hints of russet. Like rum, or sherry wine.
I tell myself Rose is safe. That the second she’s not, I’ll see it in his eyes.
And I keep showing up at the pub.
One night, after too many half-conversations and too much unsaid, I lean back in my chair and say, “Can I ask you something?”
“You already did.”
“Ha-ha. Very funny.” I knock back my drink. “How come you don’t have one of those?”
“One of what?”
I gesture vaguely. “You know. A right-hand man. A second. Whatever they’re called. The others always do. There’s always someone hovering behind them like a shadow, waiting for instructions.”
His mouth twitches. “That’s an unflattering description.”
“Accurate, though.”
He hums, considering. Takes a slow sip of his drink.
I watch his throat move before I can stop myself.
But the slow bob of his Adam’s apple sticks with me, enough to make me wonder what it would be like to touch it, feel the hint of beard that trails almost all the way down to it. Run my fingers over it.
Or my lips.
I kill that thought dead in its tracks.
“My second is on another assignment,” he says finally. “Has been for a while.”
I jump on the chance to distract myself. “How long is a while?”
“About two years.”
That surprises me. “That’s a long assignment.”
“It is.”
I wait. He doesn’t elaborate.
“What kind of assignment?” I press.
His eyes lift to mine, and something in them cools. Not anger. Distance.
“You need to stop prying into things that don’t concern you,” he says. “For your own sake.”
I bristle. “You brought me into this.”
“I didn’t,” he replies calmly. “You waltzed into it.”
I hate that he’s right.
“People who dig too deep end up in the dirt,” he continues. “Usually without anyone noticing they’re gone.”
The words land heavier than he probably intends.
“People disappear anyway,” I say, my voice sharper than I mean it to be. “All it takes is crossing paths with the wrong man.”
He stills.
The silence stretches between us, thick and uncomfortable.
“Has that happened to someone you know?” he asks.
My chest tightens. “Now who’s snooping into things he doesn’t have a right to know?”
I expect him to retreat.
Instead, he reaches across the table.
His hand closes over mine, warm and steady.
“Tell me,” he says.
The words shouldn’t undo me.
But they do.
I swallow hard. “Her name is Coral.”
He doesn’t interrupt. Doesn’t rush me. His thumb shifts slightly, grounding.
“She’s my sister,” I continue. “My big sister. She was… everything. Loud. Confident. Always ten steps ahead of me.”
My voice wobbles. I hate that it does, but I can’t help it.
“She started acting strange a few weeks before she disappeared. Jumpier. Tired. Like she was carrying something she didn’t want to share. I noticed. I tried to tell people. No one listened.”
I stare at the table. At the ring his glass left in the wood.
“Then she just… didn’t come home.” I force myself to look up at him. “It’s been three years. Even the cops couldn’t find her. Not that they tried very hard.” I shake my head. “They said she ran away, but I know her. She wouldn’t do that.”
“They didn’t look?” There’s a flash of something in Giovanni’s voice. For a second, I think it might be anger. “At all?”
“I think they tried, but it was beyond them. Whoever got to her knew what they were doing.” I suck in a breath.
“I kept seeing this man, a few days before she went missing. A well-dressed guy in a red dress shirt and black suit. But when I told the cops, they dismissed me outright. Said I’d been imagining things.
” I exhale shakily. “I think Coral got mixed up with him. And now she’s gone. ”
Giovanni studies me for a long moment. Something dark flickers behind his eyes.
“I can look into it,” he says.
I almost laugh. “It’s been years.”
“That doesn’t matter,” he replies. “I have reach the police don’t.”
The words shouldn’t comfort me. But they do.
I nod once. “Okay.”
“Tell me about her.”
I immediately start to narrate all that comes to mind.
I tell him what she looked like—bronze skin, like mine; hazel eyes, like mine; a spray of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it freckles on her cheeks and nose that I don’t have; the same shade of coffee-brown hair as me, but curly instead of straight—and he jokes, “Sounds like your twin.”
“We were often mistaken for that.” I allow myself a private smile. “Just one year apart.”
I tell him that she loved music. That she wanted to be a soprano when she grew up. That she did sports with me only because she was obsessed with growing a pair of lungs worthy of an opera diva.
That she was everything to me.
Giovanni listens intently. Interrupts only to ask clarifying questions or perk me up with a dry joke. Weirdly, it helps.
I’m not holding out much hope. Like I said, it’s been years. I’ve had to learn to live with Coral’s absence. To skirt around the hole that opened up in my world the day she left and try my damnedest not to lose myself in it. Like my parents did.
Once I’m done, Giovanni releases my hand and stands. I hate that I already miss his touch. “If someone took her, I’ll find her. But you have to promise me you won’t go looking yourself. Not until I know for sure what we’re dealing with.”
I force myself to nod. “Okay.”
“Good.”
One more brush of his hand, and then he’s leaving.
I hear myself say to his back, “Thank you.”
He pauses, just long enough for me to think he won’t answer.
Then he inclines his head. “You never have to thank me, gemma.”
I sit there long after he’s gone, puzzled by that odd word he threw my way, staring at the empty chair across from me. Trying not to think about how safe I felt for those few minutes.
Or how dangerous that feeling is.