Nadia
The bar is on a corner that the guidebooks forget. Black-tile awning. A half-dead neon Budweiser sign. A sticker on the door for a softball team that disbanded a decade ago. The kind of place men come to drink slowly, alone, for reasons no one is allowed to ask about.
The car is not mine. A Mazda I paid cash for at a Queens body shop that answers to my Geneva number. Plates clean. I will return it before sunrise.
Hair loose. Black jeans. A black t-shirt. A leather jacket I have not worn in years. None of it is mine in any way that the Morettis would recognize. La famiglia — the family. They would not know me on the street tonight.
Tonight I am not the consigliera.
Tonight I am the woman from Geneva.
My hands have remembered how she stands. The quarter-second slower she breathes in. I do not let myself think about how much I have missed her.
I let myself think about him.
He went into the bar at 8:31 p.m. He came on foot from the south, walking the way a man walks when his side has been recently opened and tied closed. Distributing weight in a way that only someone watching for it would catch.
Two men came and went. Both separate. Both left without finishing their drinks. Confidential informants. The first: Greek, old enough to remember Frank Donovan. The second: Italian, but not la famiglia Italian.
Sean is still inside.
The lawyer cannot warn a cop. The woman who patched him up cannot warn a cop. The only Nadia who can walk this man off the case is the one I left in Ginevra. And she does not arrive without a gun.
He has not met this version of me yet.
He is going to meet her tonight.
I check the Glock at my hip. Sicura — steady.
I get out of the car.
He comes out of the bar at 9:53 p.m. and turns left. I move first. Cross the street behind him on the diagonal. Step into the alley between the bar and the laundromat before he reaches it.
Two seconds.
Then I draw.
He hears me and turns the way a man with a hole in his side turns. Carefully. His hand is already moving toward the place his service weapon is not. He stops it before it gets there.
Two-handed grip. The stance she taught me. Lower, wider, weighted into the back leg. Not the stance an FBI agent takes.
He sees it. His eyes change.
"Nadia."
"Sean."
"You found me."
"You weren't hard to find."
"I wasn't trying to hide."
"I know."
He waits. His face does the thing it does. The half-smile he comes within a quarter-inch of and chooses against. The choice is hotter than the smile would be.
I cannot afford for it to work tonight.
"Hands."
"Already up."
"Higher."
"Bleeding hurts when I do that."
"Higher."
He raises them. I close the distance. Put the gun close enough to his sternum that he cannot talk himself out of the math.
"Why did you come to this bar?"
"You first."
"I am holding the gun."
"You are. And we both know you're not going to pull the trigger."
He delivers it the way he delivered I had time back in his kitchen. A man stating a thing he has decided is true.
Bastardo. Stronzo. Cazzo — bastard, asshole, fuck.
He is going to stand there with his hands in the air and let me hold a gun on him until I make the next decision. Because he understands the decision is mine. And the decision is not the trigger.
"You went home."
"You followed me home?"
"Not personally. I have channels. Channels answer to me. People answer to the family."
"Interesting."
"It is not for you to find interesting."
"It's interesting whether you want it to be or not."
"What did the men in the bar tell you?"
"Nothing I'm going to tell you."
"Are you investigating the Morettis?"
"I was." He holds my gaze. "I'm investigating something else now."
"What?"
A long second.
"A Greek man."
The Glock does not move. My grip tightens anyway. A quarter-inch of tension. Not enough for my Geneva training to hide from a man who has been watching me since the warehouse.
He sees it. He does not say anything about it.
Madonna mia — my God.
This is the danger of him. He listens with the part of himself that knows.
"What Greek man?"
"You know what Greek man, Nadia."
"I do not."
"You went pale when I said it."
"I did not."
"You did."
I put the Glock away. Slowly. Without taking my eyes off his face.
Never as a surrender. Always as a recalibration.
I step into him. Put my hand on his chest where the dressing is not. Push him into the wall.
He goes.
The brick is cold against the back of his coat. My hand is on his chest. His heart does a dangerous thing under my palm. He has not figured out how to keep his heart from doing it.
"This is a bad idea."
"Yes."
"Worse than the last one."
"Yes."
"You're holding a gun on me again."
"It's away."
"It's in reach."
"Everything's in reach for me, Sean."
His eyes are the dark gray they get when he has decided to stop pretending. I have seen that color twice. Once in my kitchen. Once in the warehouse.
This is the third.
"Tell me to stop," he says.
"You first."
I kiss him.
His hand comes up into my hair. His other hand finds my waist under the jacket and pulls me into him. The pull presses my hip into his wound, which makes him make a sound I will think about for the rest of my career.
I do not stop.
He does not stop.
His mouth comes down the column of my throat. Mine finds his jaw. I push his coat open. Find the dressing on his side and do not touch it. Find every other part of him through fabric.
He turns me.
My back goes to the brick.
His hand goes inside my jeans before I have finished registering that he has gotten them open.
I am already wet.
He makes a low sound when he feels it.
"Cazzo — fuck," I breathe into his mouth.
"Yeah."
His fingers work me open. Two, then three. The way a man does when he has been thinking about this. The way a man does when he is going to use the answer.
"Stay with me, Nadia."
"I'm here."
"Not the consigliera. Here."
"Here."
He gets his belt open with one hand. The other does not stop what it is doing. He gets one of my legs up around his hip.
He pushes inside me on the first try.
Deep. Stays there for a second that nearly undoes me. He is bigger than the registry of him I have been keeping in my body since the cabin. He is filling it now. Overflowing it.
"Tell me you want this."
"I want this."
"Like you mean it."
"I want this, stronzo — asshole."
He laughs into my throat. The first laugh he has given me like this. The laugh of a man who has been holding still the entire time we have known each other and has been given permission to stop.
He fucks me against the wall.
His hand goes to my throat the way it did in the warehouse when he was bleeding out, and I was deciding whether to keep him alive. He does not press. He just rests there.
"Whose are you?"
"Don't."
"Whose are you, Nadia?"
"Sean —"
"Say it."
I do not say it.
I do not say it because if I say it tonight, I will mean it tomorrow. And tomorrow I am supposed to walk into Alessandro Moretti's office and lie to him about the man whose hand is on my throat in this alley.
He fucks me through the not-saying, harder now. Like he is going to fuck the answer out of me one way or another.
I come with his hand on my throat and his mouth at my ear, saying my name in a voice I am going to hear in every quiet room I sit in for the rest of my life.
He comes a second after me.
I fix my jeans. He fixes his belt. The jacket goes back on my shoulders.
The alley goes back to being an alley.
"If you keep coming for the Morettis, I am going to be the one who buries you."
"I know."
"Then stop."
"I can't."
"There is no version of this where you walk out alive if you keep going. You think the Greek is one man. He isn't."
"There is a bottom to it. And I am going to find it. And I am going to find out why it has been there my whole life, waiting for me."
He turns it.
"What are you to the Morettis, Nadia? Exactly?"
I do not answer. He cannot survive what I would tell him.
"Walk away, Sean."
"Not from you."
"From the case."
"They are the same case."
"They are not."
"They are. You just don't want them to be."
He is right.
Stronzo — asshole.
I turn. Walk to my car. Do not look back.
I start the engine.
My phone buzzes on the passenger seat.
ALESSANDRO.
Three messages. Each has its own line. Alessandro does not write the same sentence twice.
MY OFFICE.
NOW.
STAVROS.
Cazzo. Cazzo. Cazzo.
He has noticed the probes. He has noticed the file I have been building for months.
I pull away from the curb.
The smell of Sean is still on my throat. The front of my jacket is dark where my hand was pressed to the place on his side that is bleeding through.
The consigliera does not have the answers Alessandro will want.
The woman from Geneva does.
I drive.