Chapter 3 #4
The service corridor between the private room and the front of the house was narrow and warm, lined with hanging furs, smelling of cold ash and other people’s perfume, and I had contrived to be the last one down it, sending Pietro ahead for the car, and I would like to say I was surprised when I heard her heels behind me.
I was not surprised. I had baited the hook and she had taken it in under four minutes, and my pulse was up before I even turned around, which was its own piece of intelligence, filed under problems.
“You forgot this.” She held out the manifest, folded once, her voice pitched under the music. Up close, in the narrow light, she was a full head shorter than me and gave up not one millimeter of it. “Careless.”
“Keep it.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“Read page two when you’re alone. The reservation schedule.
It’s your network being pre-sold, Yelena Lvovna.
I’d think the majority shareholder would want a copy for her files.
” I watched that land—the flicker, fast and fierce, at majority shareholder, at the confirmation that I knew exactly whose companies were on that table tonight. “I have others.”
Her eyes narrowed. The paper disappeared—not into her hand, somewhere into the dark silk, a magician’s economy—and she stepped closer, and the corridor got smaller.
“Then let’s not waste the privacy,” she said. “Did your family send you to inspect this alliance, or to sabotage it?”
“That depends entirely on what the alliance is hiding.”
“How diplomatic. And the question at dinner—the compressor, the contractor. Addressed to me, past my father, in front of his men.” Her chin came up. “Was that reconnaissance, or were you simply enjoying the trouble it made?”
“Both. I’m efficient.”
“I noticed.” She said it like an accusation.
Then her voice dropped further, and the temperature dropped with it.
“Now hear me, Sicilian, because I’ll say this once.
Whatever you were doing at that table—whatever you think you saw—” and her right hand moved, involuntary, a half-inch toward her other wrist before she caught it and stilled it—“do not mistake my fiancé’s hand for an invitation.
What Gianni does is Sokolov business, and Scordato business, and no business of yours.
I’ve managed men like him since before you learned to knot that tie.
I don’t need an audience, and I certainly don’t need a foreign cousin deciding my wrists are his cause. ”
I looked at the wrist anyway.
“I don’t require invitations to dislike a coward,” I said. “I’ve disliked him for free since we were boys. And how do you feel about marrying a patricide?”
She met my stern gaze with her own.
“The facts are disputed.”
“I watched him kill his own father, in cold blood.”
“A stray bullet.”
“Vengeance will come for him.” Maybe I shouldn’t have said it.
“You’re threatening my fiancé?”
“I would never.”
Something moved through her face—not softening, nothing so cheap, but a recalibration, the look of a woman revising a figure. Then it was gone, and the barbed wire came back up, and she stepped in another half foot.
“Good.”
“Just know that a man who killed his father would have no qualms about hurting his wife.”
Her pale eyes were level and merciless and inches from mine. “Noticing a cage does not make you a rescuer, Salvatore Scordato. It makes you one more man standing outside it with opinions. I’ve had a lifetime of those.”
I stepped closer.
I didn’t decide to. She did not retreat and we stood there among the hanging furs with the music muffled behind us, not touching, and the air between us went thick and electric and undeniable.
I could see the fine grain of her skin. I could see the exact place where the dark honey of her hair escaped its pins at her temple.
I could hear her breathing, which had changed, and mine, which had too, and I said, quietly, into that narrow charged space:
“I didn’t mistake you for a woman waiting to be rescued.”
Her lips parted. Closed. When she spoke it came out low and even and cost her something—I could see what it cost, I was close enough to itemize it.
“Good,” she said.
But her pulse jumped.
There, at the wrist she’d tried to angle away from me, under the fading shadows of my cousin’s fingers—the beat kicked, visible, once, twice, fast, betraying her the way bodies betray everyone, and she knew I’d seen it, and I watched fury and something that was not fury fight for the same square inch of her face.
I was still watching the bruised skin and the small wild drum beneath it when she stepped back, unhurried, immaculate, restoring the corridor to its proper distances.
“Enjoy Chicago,” she said. “Give my regards to whoever sent you.”
For one instant I thought the corner of that wide, unsmiling mouth moved.
Then she turned and walked back toward the gold light and the noise and the men who owned her on paper, spine straight, chin up, the manifest hidden somewhere against her body like contraband, and she did not look back, and I stood among strangers’ furs with my heart going like a winch under load.
Outside, the cold came off the ocean hard and clean. Pietro had the car at the curb, engine running, and he looked at my face for a long moment as I got in, the way he looks at a wall of evidence.
“Well?” he said.
“Lev knows and won’t look. Gianni confirmed the routing in front of six witnesses. We’ll have partial records within the week.” I looked out at the boardwalk, at the neon firebird burning above the door, wings spread, forever out of reach of the painted hands. “Serafina gets her rope.”
Pietro pulled into traffic. He drove two blocks before he said, in the mild tone he saves for detonations, “And the daughter.”
I watched Brighton Beach slide past the glass—the fur shops, the signs in two alphabets, the old men smoking under awnings.
“The daughter is really something. Really, really something.”
Facts, my cousin had said. Not chivalry.
I had the facts. It was everything else I was flying home with that broke the mandate—a fascination lodged under my ribs like a splinter of hot metal, and thirteen years of ice already, quietly, starting to run.