Chapter Seven #3
“I don’t watch much NBA, but I’m a huge Indiana Fever fan.”
“Football?” Curtis pressed.
“That’s where it gets complicated. The Pittsburgh Steelers and the Indianapolis Colts. I refuse to choose.”
Leo looked at Curtis. “I’ve tried. She gets hostile.”
“I get specific.”
“See?”
Curtis chuckled and lifted his glass. “Pirates, Fever, Steelers, and Colts. That’s an interesting collection.”
“I’ve lived in both states,” Anja replied. “I spread the loyalty around.”
He turned back to Leo, something shifting just slightly in the warmth. “Did you hear about Vic Shaw?”
“I did.”
“Terrible news. Absolutely terrible. You never know what personal demons people are dealing with. Were you close?”
“I’m not sure anyone was with Vic.”
“These things are so hard to see coming.” Curtis shook his head, and the grief on his face was real. “He was a complicated man, but he loved this business. Always will be a shame.”
“It will,” Leo agreed.
Curtis squeezed his arm once more and moved on to the next arriving guests, because that was what Curtis did. The room was a river and he was the current. Leo watched him go. Beside him, he felt Anja’s hand tighten ever so slightly on his arm.
“Well,” she murmured, “he’s very charismatic.”
“Yeah.” The champagne a passing server offered arrived in Leo’s hand before he’d decided to take it. “He always has been.”
He spotted Devonte near the window with Andrea beside him in gold. Both were engaged in a lively conversation with the couple next to them. Nothing in Devonte’s posture flagged distress from fifty feet away.
That either meant he hadn’t been contacted or he was holding it together better than Leo would’ve managed.
He tasted the champagne and decided he was going to find out soon.
“Don’t look at Brad again for the next five minutes,” Anja murmured, steering them both gently toward the far side of the cocktail floor. “He noticed you watching.”
“I didn’t watch him.”
“You looked at him for two seconds after I asked who he was.”
“That’s normal human behavior.”
“Not tonight, it isn’t.”
Leo pointed his gaze at the string quartet and kept it there. “You’re going to be like this all evening, aren’t you?”
“You say that,” Anja replied, taking a sip of champagne, “like it’s a problem.”
#
Dinner was announced at eight. Leo found his seat, held out Anja’s chair, and watched the table fill in around them.
Brad arrived with Renee on his arm, his tie looser than it had been an hour ago, his cheeks redder.
Jasmine Ortega, Pinnacle’s general counsel, took the chair across from Leo.
Two senior partners Leo liked, Marv Collins and Hal Blake, filled the far end with their significant others.
Curtis sat at the head, Lydia beside him, and they moved through it all with the ease of having hosted these events for two decades.
Devonte and Andrea landed on Leo’s right.
Devonte Cross was six-four and built specifically to make cornerbacks regret their life choices, but none of that was what you noticed first. It was his laugh.
It arrived before he did, rolling ahead of him into whatever space he was about to occupy.
Leo noted it the first time he’d walked into a film room at LSU and found a twenty-year-old kid making the equipment manager lose it over a story about a missed flight and a very confused airline employee.
He dropped into the chair beside Leo and brought it in with a fist bump that turned into a shoulder grip. “Uncle Leo. Looking clean.”
“You’re not bad yourself.” Leo glanced at Andrea, resplendent in something golden that had clearly not been bought in a ninety-minute back-room fitting. “Andrea, you look stunning.”
“Thank you.” She reached past Devonte to squeeze Leo’s arm, then fixed her attention on Anja with open curiosity. “Hi. I’m Andrea.”
“Anja.” She waved. “It’s lovely to meet you.”
“Leo never brings anyone to these things.” Andrea shot him a look that was equal parts delight and accusation. “I’m going to need details later.”
“You’re going to be disappointed,” Leo told her. “The details are boring.”
“They are never boring,” Andrea replied, and turned back to Anja with an expression that communicated the conversation was not over, merely tabled.
Devonte was grinning, clearly enjoying himself.
His posture was easygoing, with no tension visible in his neck or hands.
But Leo had known him for years. He’d sat with him in waiting rooms and contract negotiations and, once, in a hospital corridor at two in the morning when the baby came early and the doctor’s update was running long.
He knew how Devonte reacted when something was working beneath the surface.
The salad arrived. Leo asked Devonte about the Titans’ offseason, which was a conversation Devonte could recite on autopilot, and he let him run it while he listened for the thing underneath the words.
The story was good. It involved a new defensive coordinator, a rookie receiver who’d apparently shown up to camp with opinions about route trees, and a scene in the weight room Leo was fairly certain had been embellished for the table’s benefit.
Andrea interjected twice to correct the exaggerations.
Devonte refuted both corrections. Brad Hatton laughed too loudly at the end of it and reached for his wine, downing half the glass in one gulp.
Leo ate his salad and waited.
The bread arrived. Andrea chatted with Christine Collins about a restaurant in Nashville she’d tried the week before.
Anja, to Leo’s left, was in private conversation with Jasmine Ortega about something that had started with corporate liability and had apparently become genuinely interesting to them, which was both useful and, if he was being honest with himself, not remotely surprising.
He angled slightly toward Devonte.
“Hey.” He kept his voice easy. “You good?”
Devonte turned his fork over on his salad plate. “Always.”
“You look tired.”
“It’s April. Every receiver in the league looks tired in April.” He took another bite and chewed. “Andrea had me up at six to get a run in before the event. She’s on a wellness kick.”
“Six in the morning in April. Damn, that’s rough.”
“Tell me about it.” Devonte’s smile was forced. He set the utensil down and reached for his water glass.
Something was going on. He was holding information back.
Leo recognized it because he’d been wearing the same expression since yesterday afternoon.
He kept his voice at the same easy pitch. “Your mom doing okay? I keep meaning to call her.”
“She’s fine. She’s good.” A beat too long. “Had a weird week, but she’s good.”
“Weird how?”
Devonte turned to him then, a quick, direct look that lasted less than a second before he glanced away. “Just one of those things. Nothing major.”
He picked up his fork again.
Leo let it sit for thirty seconds, the length of time it took Marv Collins to finish a thought about the stadium expansion and for the table to laugh and return to normal.
Then he scooted a couple of inches closer to Devonte, elbows on the table, the posture of two men having a sideline conversation at a dinner they both had to be at.
“V.”
Devonte looked at him again. This time he didn’t look away.
“If something’s going on,” Leo murmured, “I need you to tell me.”
The table hummed around them. Silverware clanged against china. Curtis’s voice boomed at the head. Andrea laughed at a story Christine told.
Devonte put his fork down again, and this time he didn’t pick it back up.
“I got a call this morning.” His voice was so low it didn’t carry past Leo. “My mom. Something came to her house.”
“What kind of something?”
“A photo.” Devonte’s jaw set. “Of my sister. Coming out of her building at school.” His hand moved to his water glass and stopped short. “There was a circle on it. Around her head. Hand-drawn in red marker. Creepy-ass horror movie stuff.”
The ballroom kept moving around them like a stream bending around two stones.
Leo didn’t let anything change on his face.
He’d been hearing Anja’s voice in the back of his head since they’d walked in.
He’s going to want to give you the clean answer.
Don’t let him. And if he’s already been contacted, he’s scared.
Scared people need to hear that someone knows before they’ll say the rest of it out loud.
“How long ago?” Leo asked.
“Thursday. The package came to her house in Baton Rouge. No return address.” Devonte’s voice was controlled. “I told her it was probably nothing. A mistake. Wrong address.”
Seriously? When it was a picture of his sister? “Do you believe that?”
A long pause. Finally, “No. Hell, it was a snap of my little sis.”
Leo nodded once. He kept his hands loose on the table and his eyes on Devonte. He didn’t reach for his phone, look at Anja, or do any of the things that would’ve told the rest of the table something was happening in the corner of it.
“I need you to trust me on something.”
Devonte’s eyes sharpened. “I do.”
“Your family is going to be fine, but I need you to keep this conversation where it is right now.”
Devonte studied him with the intense focus he usually reserved for reading a safety’s pre-snap alignment. Then he gave a single, curt nod.
“Copy.” It wasn’t a word Devonte Cross used, and the fact that it came out anyway told Leo everything about how much weight the man across from him had been carrying.
The entrée arrived. Devonte picked up his fork and turned back to the table, and Leo did the same.
The conversation around them folded them back in without missing a beat.
Andrea was explaining to Christine that Nashville had better hot chicken than anyone in St. Louis wanted to admit. Brad Hatton was refilling his wine.
Anja’s knee pressed once, briefly, against Leo’s under the table.
She’d heard enough.