Chapter 4
The Alesci house sat at the end of a narrow gravel road lined with olive trees, perched on a rocky hillside with a view of the harbor that most people would kill for.
Frederica's mother had technically killed for it, though how Despina acquired the property was a story her parents only told at dinner parties after the third bottle of wine.
Frederica stood at the bottom of the front steps, boots crunching on gravel, and stared at the blue-painted door like it was a live grenade.
Behind her, Dario shut the car door and let out a low whistle. "This is not what I expected."
It wasn't what most people expected. The house was a sprawling, whitewashed stone building with terracotta tiles, bright blue shutters, and a courtyard tangled with bougainvillea and jasmine.
Mismatched pots crowded every step, most of them filled with herbs Despina used for cooking and, on occasion, for poisoning.
A fat orange cat was sunning itself on the garden wall, and a pair of Tore's work boots sat beside the door, caked in what was either red clay or dried blood. With her father, it was genuinely hard to tell.
It looked like a postcard and also a home where nothing bad could possibly happen, which was a lie so enormous that it was almost laughable.
"What were you expecting?" she asked without turning around.
"Something more... fortified. Gun turrets. Razor wire. A moat."
"The gun turrets are metaphorical. My mother is the razor wire." Frederica took a breath and climbed the steps. "Don't touch anything. Don't compliment her cooking if she offers you food, and for the love of God, don't flirt with her."
Dario's brows rose. "Why would I flirt with your mother?"
"Because you flirt with everyone. It's a reflex." She reached the door and paused, hand raised to knock. She hadn't knocked on this door since she was twelve years old. She always walked in, hollering for food because that was the rule. Alesci doors were never locked to family.
She was stalling because Dario Colleoni was standing behind her, smelling of a nightclub, and her mother would take one look at this picture and draw the worst possible conclusion.
The correct conclusion, a traitorous voice whispered. Frederica told it to shut up.
She didn't get the chance to knock. The door swung open, and Despina Alesci stood in the frame holding a Beretta 92 in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other.
Frederica's mother was a study in contradictions. Soft curves, a face that got more beautiful with age, dark bouncy curls in a loose knot, with a pencil holding it in place, and wearing a floral apron over a red linen dress.
She looked like someone's yiayia about to offer you loukoumades and homemade beauty products.
The gun and murderous intent in her eyes rather ruined the effect.
Despina's gaze went to Frederica first. A full scan, head to toe, the kind of rapid threat assessment that only came from decades of fieldwork.
Frederica watched her mother take in the hangover, the stained shirt, the half-unraveled braid, and put it all away for later interrogation.
Despina spotted the very large man standing two steps behind her daughter. The Beretta came up.
"Who is this malakas gigolo?" she demanded, eyes narrowing.
"Mama," Fredica groaned.
"I'm asking a simple question. Who is this tattooed giant on my doorstep at six in the morning, dressed as if he works in a Mykonos strip club? If he is after some euros, pay him, because I don't have any on me."
Behind her, Frederica heard Dario make a noise that was either a suppressed laugh or a choking sound. She prayed for the latter.
"He's not... He's a colleague. We work together. Sort of." The words were coming out wrong.
Frederica could lie to arms dealers, intelligence officers, and priests without blinking, but her mother turned her into a stammering teenager every single time.
Despina didn't lower the gun. She looked past Frederica at Dario. She had been a contract killer for twenty years and knew exactly what category to put him in.
"A colleague who picks you up from jail? In a silk shirt?"
She knows about the jail. Of course, she knew. Despina Alesci knew everything. She probably knew about the jail before the Cretan police had finished the paperwork.
"Kalimera." Dario stepped forward, hands open and visible, smiling with all the warmth and as many self-preservation instincts God gave a feral cat. "I'm Dario. Your daughter has told me almost nothing about you, which I'm sure was wise. I like your gun."
"It's a Beretta," Despina replied. "Don't move."
"Spina." The voice came from deeper inside the house, unhurried and dry. "Amore mio, put the gun down. He's a Colleoni."
Tore appeared in the hallway behind Despina, coffee in hand, reading glasses perched on his nose, looking like a retired professor and not a master thief who had been stealing priceless artifacts since before Frederica was born.
He was lean, with silver-streaked black curls, and still handsome in the way that some Italian men seemed to manage no matter what age they reached.
"A Colleoni who dresses like a stripper?" Despina demanded, but the gun dropped a fraction.
Tore sipped his coffee. "He's the middle one. You know, the Charmer. Dario." He said it the way another man might say 'ah, yes, the Monet' or 'that particular strain of influenza.' "I met his mother once. Terrifying woman. You can see Niccolò in him, though."
Something flickered across Dario's face at the mention of his father.
It was gone in an instant, replaced by the Charmer's easy grin, but Frederica caught it.
She tucked it away next to all the other small, real things she had been collecting about Dario Colleoni.
To use against him if she needed to, she always told herself.
"Come in, both of you." Tore stepped back, pulling Despina with him by the waist and kissing her on the neck to distract her enough that the gun finally lowered. "You look like you haven't slept or eaten, and your mother has been cooking."
"I wasn't cooking for a Colleoni," Despina said, already heading toward the kitchen. "I was cooking for my daughter, who, by the way, was arrested and didn't call her own mother."
Frederica winced. Here it comes.
Despina's voice carried from the kitchen with the relentless force of mortar fire.
"Instead, she calls a strange man in the middle of the night.
Not me, who labored for thirty hours to give her life, who taught her to field-strip a rifle before she could ride a bicycle, who flew to Morocco when she got stabbed because she forgot to check her corners.
No. She calls a man in a fucking silk shirt. "
"It's a very nice shirt," Dario offered, sounding amused. "And I owed her a favor."
Frederica turned to glare at him. He was standing in the middle of her parents' hallway, taking in the controlled chaos of the Alesci household with an expression she couldn't quite read. It wasn't the Charmer's grin he liked to put on like a mask. It was something quieter and more curious.
His gaze moved over the framed photos on the wall, the display cabinet full of things that were absolutely stolen, the hand-painted tiles, and the small shrine to Saint Phanourios that Despina maintained because Tore always said that she needed a patron saint more than most. He, on the other hand, had a patron god with a statue in the garden, generally surrounded by burned candles, wine, and other offerings, depending on the job Tore was about to do.
Dario's expression landed somewhere between wonder and hunger, like a man pressing his face to a window, looking into a room he had never been invited into.
Frederica's pulse went erratic, and she blamed it on too much booze and not enough food.
Tore was watching Dario, too. Her father missed nothing. He had survived four decades in a profession where carelessness got you killed or imprisoned, and he read people the way other men read newspapers.
"Gioia mia, why is there a Colleoni in my house?" Tore's voice was quiet, for her ears only. He had appeared beside her without making a sound, which was the most unsettling of his many unsettling skills.
"He bailed me out. He was in Istanbul."
"That's how," her father said. "I asked why."
She didn't have an answer for that. Not one she was willing to say out loud, and not one her father would believe even if she tried.
Tore studied her face for a long moment before nodding, which all but shouted, 'I see exactly what is happening here, and we will be discussing it later.'
She could hardly wait.
"Come through," Tore said to Dario. "Before Spina comes back with the gun."
He walked toward the kitchen, and Dario followed him, ducking slightly under the low doorframe. Frederica stood alone in the hallway for a moment, surrounded by the evidence of a lifetime of being loved loudly, chaotically, and without condition.
She could still feel the phantom warmth of Dario's shoulder against her cheek. She didn't remember falling asleep on the plane, but she did remember waking up and feeling the careful stillness of his body, as if he had been holding himself rigid to avoid disturbing her.
Nobody apart from her parents had ever been careful with her before. She didn't know what to do with it.
From the kitchen, she heard Despina's voice rise. "Sit. Eat. If you're going to court my daughter, you will do it on a full stomach."
"Mama, he is not courting me!" Frederica shouted back.
Dario's laugh carried through the house, warm and delighted, and Frederica closed her eyes and briefly considered whether it was too late to go back to jail.