Chapter 8
Stacking Tore's files back into order was the kind of simple work Frederica enjoyed. Documents didn't lie. Documents didn't grin at you sideways while you tried to pretend you weren't thinking about them.
You should have sent Dario to a damn hotel and not let him have an excuse to stay longer.
The lamb kofta he had made everyone for dinner had been eaten, the plates cleared, and more of her father's good wine opened because Tore believed difficult problems deserved to be met with good wine.
Dario's cooking had been amazing again, and he seemed so genuinely happy to be doing it.
She had seen him carry dead bodies over his shoulder without batting an eyelid and create absolute carnage during the siege. Seeing him smiling just to be cooking for people was harder for her to reconcile. It was like a puzzle piece that didn't fit the picture she had created of him in her mind.
The table in the sitting room was covered in both columns of relics again, Foscari's defensive acquisitions on the left and Morosini's arsenal on the right, and she still couldn't find how they were connected.
She didn't even know why she was so certain they were. All she knew was that the magical world was relatively small and the chances of other players not knowing each other were slim.
"We need to call Rodrigo," Dario said, staring at the piles. He was fresh from a shower and wearing another black tourist shirt, this one with a Knight of St John on it.
Frederica stared at him for a long moment, the knight, the chest, everything down to the damp scent of his curls, made something in her start purring. It was…obscene. She wanted to go down to the harbor and jump in.
"We've had this conversation," Frederica said, looking away to keep her sanity.
"We had the beginning of it." He was leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed. "We found out there are two players. Someone who isn't Serapis is building a weapon, and Kon confirmed the magical shit is real and the objects are dangerous. My brother needs to know."
"Your brother needs the full picture, not half of one."
"Then we give him what we have. Do you think these two know each other?
Sure, they probably do. I'm thinking a bit further ahead than that, like what if they are allies?
Serapis attacked my family at my home, Frederica.
If Morosini is his friend and specializes in magical weapons, what if my family is facing them both next?
We need time to figure out how we can defend against two of them," he argued, genuine worry in his eyes.
Dario might have had many faults, but he loved his brothers more than anything. Frederica had seen it firsthand.
"We don't know who Morosini really is," she said as calmly as she could, not wanting to fight with him for once. "We have a name Baba used, a voice description, and a buying pattern. That's not enough to upset Rodrigo over. He'll start moving on Morosini before we know what we're moving on."
"He won't go after some guy unprovoked. He's not stupid."
"I never said he was stupid. I said he's reactive when your family is in the picture, and everything about Serapis touches your family." She set her pen down. "You know I'm right about this."
She saw something cross his face, not the grin or the lightness he usually defaulted to. Something older and more painful.
"What I know," Dario said, "is that every time someone in my family decided to keep something secret to protect everyone else, it cost us everything."
"We're not keeping it secret," she said, more carefully. "We're waiting until we know enough to make it mean something."
"And if Serapis makes a move in the time we're waiting to know enough?" he demanded. "We will be fucked."
"We don't even know if Morosini is working with him! Baba heard German underneath the Italian. That's it. That's all we have." Frederica put her hands on her hips. "It's fuck all, and you know it."
Tore retreated to his armchair by the window and was reading a newspaper because he had decided this particular argument was not one he planned to weigh in on. Despina had retreated to the kitchen to see what she had for dessert.
"I know how we can solve this," Dario said at last. "We arm wrestle for it."
Frederica stared at him. "What?"
"I'm serious," he said, smiling again. "You think we wait, I think we call. Arm wrestle. Winner decides."
"That is the most idiotic…"
"Unless you think you'll lose, then you might as well just let me call him now," Dario replied with a shrug.
Frederica was already pushing her sleeve up before she finished the thought about not engaging with him on this. She dropped her elbow on the table. He looked at her arm, and then at his own, and the smile went sheepish.
"This is going to be embarrassing for me," he said pleasantly and planted his elbow anyway. "I don't like the idea of hurting a girl."
Frederica rolled her eyes and got the better of him in about eight seconds. His arm went down, she pressed it flat, and she kept her face very neutral about the fact that her shoulder was burning from the effort.
"We wait," she said firmly.
"That was one round," he pointed out. "Arm wrestling is always best of three."
"No."
"I let you win so you wouldn't be embarrassed. I didn't put my full strength into that one."
"You absolutely did."
"Frederica." He said her name the way he always did, as if it were the setup for something. "Best of three."
Frederica would blame what happened next on the wine, or the hour, or the fact that she was tired enough to strip away her good judgment.
She shoved her chair back, got to her feet, and said, "Fine. Get your oversized ass up. If we're doing this, we do it properly."
"You want to fight me, Spartana?" The look on Dario's face was delighted in a way that should have been a warning enough.
"You are spoiling for one, so let's get it out of your system, arkoúdos. Unless you don't want to have to tell your brothers you lost a wrestling match to a girl."
"You've done it now, Dario." Tore lifted his wine glass with unhurried calm and moved it to the windowsill, where it wouldn't get knocked over.
There wasn't a great deal of space once the chairs were pushed back, but there was enough.
Dario was bigger than her, but she had been trained by her mother, and her mother's philosophy on fighting men with greater mass had always been efficient and simple: make them commit to a direction before you change theirs and put them down hard and fast.
They clashed in a grapple, and he may have been big, but she was quick.
Frederica aimed a strike for his face, making him block before she pulled her punch, ducked, and swiped his legs out from under him.
"The bigger they are, the harder they fall," she said, right before he did something too quick for her to follow. His long legs were suddenly locked about hers, and she hit the rug beside him.
"They sure do," Tore commented and turned a page of his paper.
Frederica recovered first, rolling quickly. Dario made a lunge for her but fell on his stomach just an inch short of catching her.
Frederica grabbed his overstretched arm, locked it behind him, and sat on his back, pinning him face down on the rug. He struggled, swearing in Italian, and she got an arm around his neck from behind, tightening until she had the position she wanted, and pushed him face down.
"Yield," she snarled in his ear.
He made a sound that was not yielding.
She tightened her arm. He got a hand under him and pushed, which she countered by shifting her weight, and they ended up at an angle she hadn't planned, both of them breathing hard, her arm still locked and his face very close to hers.
"Yield," she said again, her breath panting out of her.
Dario's face was turning red, but he still grinned and whispered, "Harder, baby…"
Frederica's eyes went wide in surprise as her mind went to a dirty place very fast. Dario used the half-second to grab her wrist, break the lock, and pivot.
The room tilted. Her back hit the floor again, and he was above her, one hand braced by her head, his shirt ridden halfway up and his hair loose around his face. Neither of them moved.
Frederica was aware of the weight of him, the warmth, the look he was giving her that had nothing to do with the fight. There was a flash of heated desire in his dark eyes that left her stunned and unprepared for.
Men like Dario didn't look at women like her that way. She wasn't their type. She was built strong, not sweet and feminine like her mother. She was too tall, too muscular, too loud, and too capable.
The doorbell rang, making them both jump in surprise.
"I'm not expecting company," Tore said softly.
Dario was off her, and they were on their feet in a blink. Frederica pulled out a gun that Despina always had stashed under the side table, while Dario was already drawing a knife out from his boot.
Tore hadn't moved from his armchair. He glanced toward the door and then at the two of them and their weapons.
"Stay there in your chair and let me check who it is, amore mio." Despina appeared in the kitchen doorway, drying her hands on a cloth. "You are always too trusting."
"Yes, darling," he said, a besotted smile on his face. He always got that face when Despina went into violence mode. She had always been Tore's protector, and Frederica knew to stay out of her way.
Despina walked to the door and took her Beretta from the back of her pants. The professionalism was back in her like a switch had been thrown, shoulders squared, weight evenly distributed. There was nothing in her expression that you could read before she wanted you to.
She looked through the peephole.
"The light is shit, and his back is to me, but he looks like an older man," Despina whispered.
"Please forgive the intrusion at this late hour, Despina," a smooth voice said from the other side of the door. "But I need to have a word with my nephew."
They all turned to look at Dario. His olive skin went pale, and his grip on his knife tightened.
"It's Serapis," he said.
"Well," Despina said, her gun lowering. "This night just got interesting."