Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
RAFAEL
She has no choice but to wear the dress.
That was the whole idea when I left her wardrobe with nothing but the black one hanging in it. I imagine all the emotions she went through before she realized she had no choice but to wear it.
I try to keep the grin off my face when she comes downstairs a few minutes later.
The venue is one of Matteo's — a private club in the old city, stone floors and high ceilings and the kind of lighting that costs money to look this effortless.
By the time we arrive the room is already full, the particular density of people who come to these events because they have to rather than because they want to. Dark suits. Expensive jewelry.
Gia takes my arm at the entrance without being asked.
A performance, her hand on my sleeve, her posture immaculate, her face composed into the specific expression she wears in public, present, pleasant, giving away absolutely nothing.
I know this face now. I've catalogued it the way I catalogue everything that matters for operational purposes, which is a lie I tell myself, because the reason I know her faces has nothing to do with operations.
We make the necessary rounds. Greetings, handshakes, the ritual of appearing unified and uncomplicated in a room full of people who are paid to notice cracks.
Gia handles it efficiently, with the light touch of a woman who grew up in this world and learned young which smiles to deploy and when.
She introduces herself where introduction is needed.
She laughs at the right moments. She keeps herself close enough to be credible and far enough to be untouchable.
Then Alessia Romano crosses the room toward her.
Gia registers her from ten feet out and the constructed posture gives way to something that actually belongs to her. Alessia reaches her and grins.
"You look incredible," Alessia says. "Is that new?"
"It was chosen for me," Gia scoffs.
“Hello Rafael, you are looking rather dapper yourself,” she smiles at me.
I nod with a smile. “Hello.”
Alessia's eyes move back to Gia.
"And how are you finding… all of this?" Alessia gestures, a small, contained movement that manages to encompass the room, the event, the marriage, and probably several other things.
And just like that, they’ve forgotten I exist.
"It's fine." Gia picks up a glass from a passing tray. "The canapés are good. The company is mostly terrible. I've been told four times that I look just like my mother, which is not the compliment people think it is, because my mother was miserable."
Alessia laughs and Gia's mouth curves.
"Should we get more drinks and find somewhere easier to gossip?"
"Immediately," Gia beams. "Point me at the bar."
They move together and I realize I keep staring at them and when I finally catch myself, I grunt in annoyance and redirect myself toward Dante and Matteo at the far edge of the room.
The problem is she's still visible from here.
She's visible from everywhere in this room, which I have confirmed over the last thirty minutes.
I track the men who keep finding reasons to face her.
The one by the bar who's looked over four times in ten minutes.
The younger one near the window who hasn't stopped since she laughed.
The older man from the Ferri family, silver-haired, who turns his head toward her on a twelve-second rotation he probably doesn't know he's keeping.
What the mafia world would think of me if I went on an eye-gouging spree tonight is something I consider with complete seriousness.
All three of them. Starting with the Ferri man.
The Brotherhood's reputation, the diplomatic fallout, whether Matteo could smooth it over, I run the actual numbers on it and the numbers are unfortunately not in favor.
I push the idea aside. Not permanently.
Matteo appears at my shoulder.
"I see you're enjoying the evening," he says.
I look at him. Say nothing.
He tries not to grin and fails woefully. "You know, most men at these things look bored. Or tired. You look—"
"Don't."
"I was going to say focused."
"You weren't."
"Well then, try not to look so murderous, will you?" He chuckles.
"I don't look murderous."
Matteo says nothing. He looks at where I'm looking. He looks back at me. The silence does the rest of the work.
After dinner the room reconfigures. Tables pushed back, the low strings of the band starting up, couples beginning to move toward the floor. The conversations that actually matter continue at the edges under cover of the noise.
Matteo turns to me. "Go," he says simply, a tilt of his head toward where Gia stands with Alessia. "Be a husband. Publicly."
I cross the room.
Gia and Alessia are close together near the far wall, still talking, and I catch the end of something that makes Alessia press her lips together before I reach them. I stop in front of them both.
"Good evening, ladies." I let my eyes move to Gia. "Wife."
I hold out my hand.
Gia looks at it. Her chin lifts a quarter inch. Alessia, who misses nothing, finds somewhere else to be.
"We're being watched," I say, low enough that it's only hers. "You know what we agreed."
“Of course.” She mutters as she looks at my hand again. Something moves through her face and then she puts her hand in mine.
Her palm is warm. I close my hand around it and turn and she falls into step beside me.
We reach the dance floor, and I turn to face her and she takes position without being guided, one hand in mine, the other settling at my shoulder with practiced ease.
I bring her in. Not close enough to cause comment. Close enough.
She's stiff. Technically correct, the right distance, the performance of closeness without any of the reality. My hand sits at the small of her back and we begin to move and I wait.
It takes two minutes. I count those too.
The stiffness releases by degrees, a shoulder dropping, the spine under my hand losing its deliberateness, her weight shifting from managed to actual. She stops measuring the space between us and just stands in it. Her eyes, which have been fixed somewhere past my shoulder, come back to my face.
I don't say anything. Neither does she. The music does its thing and we move through it and somewhere in the second minute her hand at my shoulder stops being placed there and just rests, and the distance that was managed becomes something else, closer without either of us having moved.
Her eyes drop to my mouth.
One second. She pulls them back up.
My hand tightens at her back and I feel her breath change, the catch of it, the slight parting of her lips that she closes again immediately with the expression of a woman who is furious at her own body.
"Gia—"
"Hey, Rafe."
I turn to see Enzo at my shoulder, low and immediate.
Something is wrong.
His face is already set. Already moving. I read it in under a second and step back from Gia in the same motion, turning to put myself between her and the direction Enzo came from, instinct before thought.
“What’s up?”
“We have an issue. Dante will take the women home," Enzo says. "Now. We step out."
I take Gia's arm. She's already reading the room, her eyes moving fast across the space, the color in her face from the dancing gone, something that looks very much like fear sitting underneath the composure she's pulling up over it. I bring her attention back to me.
"Go with Dante." I hold her eyes until I'm certain she's here, fully, hearing me and not the noise of the room. "Stay with him. Don't separate from him. Don't stop, don't wait, go directly to the car." A beat. "Don't lose him."
She nods. Her hand is still in mine and I feel it tighten once before she lets go.
I watch her reach Dante, watch him steer her efficiently toward the exit with Alessia, and I feel something I don't have a name for—wanting to be the one walking her out, wanting to be between her and whatever is coming rather than going toward it.
Enzo's hand closes on my arm. “Come on, man.” He said and we move.
Outside the service exit the cold hits clean and immediate, Enzo is already talking. “The northern transport run. They were hit at the checkpoint exchange point, two vehicles down, men on the ground.”
Fucking hell!
The window was specific, twelve minutes between the last check-in and the next one, and whoever planned this knew the exact width of that window.
He talks and I listen as we walk fast toward the car and I am thinking about the list of people who know that route, that timing, that specific twelve-minute gap between check-ins.
It is a short list. I know every name on it.
I keep walking.
The warehouse district is ten minutes out. We smell it before we see it, acrid, chemical, the specific bite of burning metal and rubber that means vehicles, not structure. We come around the corner into the lot and the scene is already in motion.
Two of the transport cars are on their sides.
One burns at the rear, the fire low now but steady, throwing orange across the concrete in long guttering sheets.
Our men have pushed the attackers back but the line is fractured.
I count three of ours down in the first sweep, one more being held upright against the warehouse wall by the man beside him, his legs not cooperating.
Spent casings across the ground. A body near the gate that isn't one of ours.
Enzo and I split without discussing it.
I come in from the left flank where the line is thinnest. The first man turns at the sound of my footsteps and I close the distance before he finishes turning, driving my forearm into his throat hard enough that the sound he makes is mostly air and he folds.
I step over him and keep moving because the second man is already up and the third is reaching.
The second one is bigger, trained, balanced, the way he sets his feet before he swings tells me he's done this more than a few times.
He leads with a right that I slip, roll inside, and the elbow I put into his ribs finds the sweet spot, the one that takes the breath out completely regardless of how big you are.
While he's gasping, I take his collar with both hands and introduce his face to the side of the burning car at speed. He goes down and stays there.
The third has a blade.
He knows how to use it—short grip, elbow in, not the wide theatrical swings of a man trying to look dangerous but the tight controlled movements of someone who's been trained to finish it fast. He feints left and comes right and the cut he opens on my left side is shallow but immediate, a clean burn below the ribs that I register and file without stopping.
I grab the wrist on the backswing, twist it past the point where the joint is happy about it, and the blade hits concrete.
I put him down with two knees and leave him there.
Across the lot, Enzo is working through the cluster near the gate with the focused efficiency of a man for whom this language is native.
He moves between them in close quarters, no wasted motion, everything direct and terminal—an elbow, a takedown, a knee applied with the patience of someone who knows exactly how long these things take and is not rushing any of it.
One man tries to run. Enzo lets him get in four steps and then is behind him instead, and the man goes face-first into the concrete with Enzo's knee in his back and one arm wrenched skyward at an angle arms aren't designed for.
He zip-ties that one. The radio man. The one who was calling the shots.
Around us, the lot settles.
The fire has dropped to a smolder. The remaining attackers have either run or are on the ground or are zip-tied against the wall in a row, the ones still conscious making the face men make when they've arrived at the end of a plan and the end is not what the plan described.
Three of ours need a hospital. Tonight. Two of theirs are dead in the lot.
Heavy. The monetary loss alone is going to land like a crater—the cargo, the vehicles, two drivers in hospital, a route that's now burned and will need to be rebuilt from scratch. I walk through the damage the way I always do, methodically, without the luxury of reacting to it.
I'm pressing my hand to my side when Enzo appears beside me. He looks at it, then looks at my face. He has blood on his shirt, most of it not his, the particular spatter pattern of close-range work. He exhales once through his nose.
Then his arm comes around my shoulders, steadying, weight-bearing, the grip of a man who has been here before and knows what after looks like.
"I'll take you home, bud."