the yacht party
Chapter 19
LORENZO
The tires protest as I pull out of the underground garage.
The pressure in my chest is still there lodged somewhere between my ribs. The marina is a ten-minute drive from the building. I make it in four. I am aware of this only in the vague, distant way you are aware of things when your hands are on the wheel but your mind is somewhere else entirely.
I roll down the window.
The night air comes in fast and salt-sharp, and I let it.
Alaric is at the pier gate when I pull up the night guard, a man of very few words and absolute reliability, which are the two qualities I appreciate most in people right now. He waves me through without ceremony.
I park near the yacht and cut the engine and sit there for exactly one second then participated ,taking in the lights and the crowd and the sound of it already reaching me through the glass — the bass, the voices, all the energy of two hundred people who have decided that tonight belongs to them.
This is your chance to switch off. I remember myself
I hold onto that thought. Let it sit for a moment.
And get out.
The crowd is thick near the entrance to the pier. I move through it and ignore the voices that call out to me. Ignore the hands that reach. Ignore the attempts to begin conversations that I have neither the bandwidth nor the interest for tonight.
And board the yacht.
The moment I step onto the deck the DJ's rhythm reaches through the floor and into my feet and I feel something in my chest begin — very slightly, very slowly — to loosen.
I pick up a glass from the bar, take the first drink standing up, and reach up with my free hand to undo the top two buttons of my shirt. The jacket is gone. The tie is gone.
The rest of me is still very much in the building I just left, but the rest of me is going to have to catch up.
"There he is." Ben's voice cuts through the music before I've fully registered him, and then he is in front of me broad grin, team jersey with his number on the back. He looks me up and down and the grin widens. "Bro. I know there was no dress code but a suit?"
Alex materializes at his shoulder, equally amused, equally far into the night.
Both of them are wearing the team's Green and white the serpent crest visible on their chests, the one whose teeth seem to drip something and both of them find my outfit considerably funnier than it warrants, which tells me they have been here a while.
"Where's Matteo?" I say, ignoring them entirely, letting my gaze move through the crowd.
Ben shrugs. "No idea."
"Deck three, I think." Alex grins absently at a girl passing behind me. "Somewhere up there."
The upper deck is quieter. Not silent, nowhere on this boat is silent tonight but the noise up here is different.
More air. More sky. The city lights spread out below the marina, and above them the stars, and against the railing on the port side, with his girlfriend tucked under his arm and his eyes on the water, is Matteo.
This is one of the things I have always respected about him , this specific ability he has to find the quiet corner of any loud room and inhabit it completely. To be at a party of two hundred people and somehow locate the one pocket of stillness it contains and make it his own.
I have never been able to do that. I have always been the party, whether I wanted to be or not.
He turns before I reach him.
His gaze finds mine and then, in a fraction of a second, drops. To my mouth. To my cheek.
The split lip and the cheekbone that is by now doing exactly what a cheekbone does after an impact and has been doing it consistently for the last minutes.
He holds what he sees for just a moment before his expression settles back into neutral but I caught it.
I always catch it with Matteo, because he almost never lets anything through, which means the things that do get through are worth paying attention to.
He says something quietly to Melody ,almost certainly an apology and she nods and he steps away from the railing and comes toward me.
"What happened," he says.
"What do you think happened," I answer my voice still filled with anger.
He looks at me for a moment. Then he simply nods and says nothing more about it.
That is Matteo. That has always been Matteo.
He doesn't push. He doesn't probe. He doesn't perform concern for an audience that isn't there.
He simply receives the information, files it in the place where he keeps the things that matter, and moves forward.
His eyes travel over my suit instead and he presses his lips together against something that is almost a smile.
"Didn't have time to change," I say flatly, before he can say it.
He holds up both hands.
I pull my sleeve back and check my watch, then reach past him for a beer from the ice bucket beside the railing, open it against my car key, and let the cold settle somewhere in my chest.
Below us, the crowd on the main deck fills the night with noise, celebrating a win that already feels like it happened in a different lifetime, though it was this afternoon, though I was there.
The bass from the deck below moves through the floor and into my feet.
Slowly, steadily, something in me begins to decompress.
"Is she here?"
The words are out before I have made a decision about them. Before I have even fully acknowledged to myself.
Matteo looks at me.with that look. The one that says he knows exactly who she is, has known since the moment I said it, and finds the whole thing more interesting than he will ever openly admit.
"You mean the little one?" he asks and shakes his head."
Haven't seen her. Maria's down on the main deck with her group ,saw them dancing about ten minutes ago."
He nods toward the lower level and I follow his gaze briefly, finding the movement of the crowd without finding the specific person I am apparently looking for without having decided to look.
"Lorenzo." Matteo swaps the empty bottle in my hand for a fresh one from the bucket. The gesture is so practiced it's practically invisible. "Just let it go. Enjoy the party."
I know his tone. It's his diplomatic way of saying.
I know what you're plotting, and it's a terrible idea.
I take a swig. He's right.
My motives are simple. I just need a distraction to drown out my own head, and she's the perfect target. I want to see the exact moment she realizes she doesn't belong in this world. That's the only reason I'm thinking about her. The only one.
"Guys, we have an idea." Ben and Alex appear at the top of the stairs, practically vibrating with mischief. Matteo's eyelids flutter shut a silent prayer from a man who has survived these two long enough to sense incoming disaster.
"What kind of idea?" I ask.
Alex thrusts a phone toward me.
I take it, weighing it in my palm. Matteo shrugs, entirely unhelpful. Ben and Alex high-five each other, grinning like they've just pulled off the heist of the century.
It's a pink phone case, glittering under the lights.
"Why are you handing me a random phone?" I ask.
"That's not a random phone," Ben says.
"That's Maria's phone," Alex finishes.
They both beam. Matteo lets out a heavy breath through his nose, turning his back on us completely. "Leave me out of this," he mutters, stepping toward the railing to focus on Melody and the stars.
I look down at the phone in my hand.
And then , I see it.
"This is how we get her here," Ben says.
"Saw her enter the PIN earlier." He takes the phone from my hand, enters it without hesitation, and hands it back. The screen unlocks.
I look at it.
Then out at the water.
Then at the lit-up expanse of the marina, the dark sky above it, the two hundred people on this boat who are celebrating something I barely remember caring about this afternoon.
I think about the way she said it quietly, like the words arrived before she'd decided to give them to me. The way something in her expression shifted the moment they did, like she'd surprised herself.
Well let's find out