Chapter 14
LORENZO
I showed her the rosary. I’ve never taken it out for anyone.
Not Dante. Not Giada. Not Nonna Rosa, who washes my clothes and knows what’s in the pocket but has never seen it in the light.
It has lived in the dark since we buried her.
Last night I held them in the silver light.
Let a woman I’ve known for weeks stand near enough to touch them.
She didn’t touch them. She waited.
That was worse.
I’m in the office before she is. Coffee made.
Files open. The routine that holds my days together when the rest of me is unraveling.
The old wound on my ribs aches. Knife wound.
Twelve years old. It does this when the weather shifts or when I’ve been still too long.
I roll my shoulder, adjust in the chair. The shirt pulls against raised tissue.
She arrives with wet hair and a mug she stole from Nonna Rosa’s kitchen. Sets up at her side of the desk without greeting me. Our rhythm now. Coffee, data, silence that used to be neutral but is now full of the things we said in a kitchen past midnight.
“I found an anomaly in the Crescent Holdings subsidiary.” She’s typing before her laptop is warm. “Three payments routed through a holding company in Panama. Same amount. Same date each month.”
“Money for protection.”
“That’s what I thought. But the amounts are wrong for protection. Too small for real coverage, too regular for a skim.” She pulls up a spreadsheet. “And the destination account sits inside a shell company that doesn’t produce or employ anyone.”
“Who controls the shell?”
“Working on it.” Her knee bounces under the desk. She catches it. Presses her palm flat. “I need to cross-reference with the property records from last week. The ones with the dead-end routing.”
“Pull them up.”
“I am pulling them up.” She doesn’t look at me. “You know, for a man who speaks in one-word sentences, you’re very bossy about what other people should be doing.”
I turn a page in the surveillance report. Nico’s photos from the Bourbon Street hotel. Three visits. Same room. Same night of the week. The woman who met Tomás in the lobby each time is a civilian in a sundress who held his hand in the elevator.
I close the folder. Not Tomás. Which meant the list got shorter and the names left on it got harder.
“You’re staring at that same page.”
“I’m reading.”
“You’ve been reading it for ten minutes. Either it’s riveting or you’re somewhere else.” Still staring at the screen. “I’m going with option two.”
I turn the page. She’s not wrong. The surveillance data is Nico’s. Clean. Thorough. But my eyes keep pulling away from it. Toward her. The shirt collar slipping off her shoulder. Bare skin.
I force my eyes back to the report.
My sleeve catches on the edge of the desk when I reach for the next file. The fabric rides up past my forearm. Scar tissue. Three lines, tight and silver, running from wrist to elbow. Training marks. The kind earned by a boy who learned to fight men who carried blades.
Her typing stops.
I pull the sleeve down.
“How many?” Her voice is different. Quiet. The sarcasm stripped out.
“Does it matter?”
“Humor me.” She turns her chair to face me. “I’m a data person. I like counting things.”
I don’t answer.
Her eyes are on my forearm where the fabric bunched. “Can I see?”
A question. Not a demand. Space for me to say no.
I push the sleeve up. The three on my forearm first. Then higher, past the elbow, where two more cross the bicep. Different angles. Different years.
She’s out of her chair. Standing beside me. Her shampoo and the coffee on her breath. Her finger touches the lowest scar.
My body locks. Not from pain. The opposite. Every nerve from shoulder to fingertip fires at once, a circuit dead for years coming back online without warning.
Cazzo.
I go rigid. My fists close on the armrests.
“This one?” she says.
“Knife.” Flat. Controlled. Everything else is not.
Her finger moves up. Traces the second line. Lighter. Older.
“This one?”
“Knife.”
“Creative.” She moves to the third. “Let me guess.”
“Knife.”
“You have a knife problem.”
“I had a training problem. The knives were secondary.”
Her finger reaches the bicep. She pushes my sleeve higher, exposing ink and scar tissue tangled together. The Sicilian patterns my artist worked around the raised skin, incorporating damage into design.
“This one’s different.”
Blade gouge. Wider than the others. She runs her finger along it and every nerve fires white. No one has touched me like this since before her. The sensation is so sharp it hits like being flayed open.
“Knife fight,” I say.
“Where?”
“Warehouse. Tchoupitoulas. Four years ago.”
“Not where on the map. Where on you.” She taps the scar. “How deep did it go?”
“Deep enough.”
“Lucky.”
“Depends on your definition.”
She traces the edge of the tattoo where it meets unmarked skin. My pulse drums in my throat.
“Until you.”
She looks up. “What?”
“No one’s touched them.” The words scrape out like they’re being dragged over concrete. “Until you.”
Her hand stills on my arm. She’s not breathing. I’m not breathing. The office is silent except for the hum of her laptop and the distant clatter of Nonna Rosa in the kitchen.
She doesn’t deflect. Doesn’t make a joke. Stands there with her fingers on my scars and I can’t read her expression. I don’t want to.
She steps back. Returns to her chair.
“Your filing system is still terrible, by the way.” She starts typing.
I stare at my arm where her fingers were. The skin hums. I pull down my sleeve.
She finds the book. Not looking for it. She’s reaching past my desk for a reference file on the shelf and knocks a stack sideways.
Papers scatter. Underneath them, wedged against the wall where I shoved it months ago, the field guide.
Birds of Louisiana. Worn spine. Pages soft from handling.
Dog-eared at warblers and raptors and the ibis section she’d make fun of me for caring about.
“What’s this?” She picks it up before I can reach for it.
“Put it back.”
“Is this a bird book?” She’s flipping through. Her eyes find the margins. “Wait. Are these drawings?”
I stand. Cross the space between us. Hold out my hand. She’s not giving it back.
Damn it.
She’s staring at the pencil sketches. A brown pelican. A roseate spoonbill. An osprey in flight, wing angles precise because I watched it for twenty minutes from the garden before I drew it.
“You draw.”
“Put it back, Isabella.”
“These are good.” She turns a page. A great blue heron. I spent an hour on the legs. “These are really good. The detail on the feathers.”
“My mother had a guide like this. I used to trace her illustrations when I was a boy.” I take the book from her. Close it. “A habit.”
“This isn’t a habit. Biting your nails is a habit.” She tilts her head. “This is art.”
“It’s copying.”
“It’s observation. Precision. Patience.” She’s studying me the way she studies data she wasn’t supposed to access. “The same hands that—”
She stops herself. But I heard the shape of it. The same hands that hurt people. Draw birds.
I put the book back on the shelf. Behind the files.
“Don’t tell anyone.”
“Who would I tell? I talk to you, your grandmother, and a laptop.” She crosses her arms. “Rosa would frame them.”
“Exactly why you don’t tell Nonna Rosa.”
She grins. Wide. The kind that turns her sharp features young.
I sit down. Open the report I wasn’t reading before.
“The osprey is my favorite,” she says.
“Noted.”
By evening, the garden is hers too. I don’t remember agreeing to this.
The roses are Mama’s. Have been since she planted them thirty years ago.
Iron trellis from Nonna’s village outside Palermo, shipped when Mama visited Sicily as a girl and fell in love with the garden walls there.
Mama grew up in New Orleans but her roots ran back to the old country through Nonna Rosa’s hands.
I’ve maintained them for eleven years. Pruning.
Watering. Keeping the beetles off the leaves.
No one else touches them. Gia offered once and I cut her down with a look that earned silence for a week.
But tonight Isabella followed me out and I didn’t stop her.
She’s on the stone bench near the broken fountain. Knees pulled up. Face turned toward the evening sky. The humidity has dropped enough to make the air bearable and the cicadas are loud in the oaks.
I’m standing near the roses. Checking new growth on the climbing variety Mama loved. Red so dark they’re black in this light.
“That’s a mockingbird.” She’s pointing at the oak. A gray bird in the upper branches, running through stolen songs. “I know about things that aren’t on a screen too.” She hugs her knees tighter. “I looked up New Orleans birds because I was bored. Don’t read into it.”
“I’m not.”
“You are. I can see your face doing that thing.”
“My face doesn’t do things.”
“Your face does one thing, which is nothing, and right now it’s doing a second thing, which means I’m getting to you.” She’s grinning again. “Two facial expressions. Growth.”
I turn back to the roses.
“What are those?” She points at the climbers. “They’re beautiful.”
“Mama planted them. The trellis came from Nonna Rosa’s village outside Palermo. Mama visited as a girl, saw the garden walls, and shipped one back.” I strip a dead leaf. “Papa thought she was losing her mind. She said a garden without roses wasn’t a garden. It was a yard.”
“She sounds like a person with strong opinions.”
“She had opinions about everything.”
“Good.” Isabella pulls her sleeves past her wrists. The evening cooling. “Opinions are underrated in this family.”
She’s shivering. The kind she’d deny. I don’t offer a jacket. I step closer. Stand beside the bench. My body between her and the breeze off the garden wall.
She leans into the warmth. Her shoulder presses against my leg. Neither of us moves away.
The cicadas fill the space between us. Not silence. Louder than silence. An agreement neither of us made out loud.
“Your mother would have been a good hacker.”
“My mother didn’t own a computer.”
“Doesn’t matter. Opinions, patience, and the stubbornness to ship a trellis across an ocean? That’s hacker energy.” She tilts her head back. Her chin tipping up. “That’s where you get it.”
“I’m not a hacker.”
“No. You’re a man who draws birds and carries what his mother left him and tends her garden alone and pretends he doesn’t care about roses.” She’s not smiling now. “You’re not what you think you are, Lorenzo.”
The mockingbird changes songs. Three bars stolen from a cardinal, then a sound I don’t recognize.
“Go inside,” I tell her. “It’s getting cold.”
“You should come inside too.”
“In a minute.”
She stands. Pauses beside me. Her hand brushes my arm where the raised skin is. Through the cotton. Not accidental.
The screen door closes behind her.
I stay in the garden. The roses. The mockingbird running through its borrowed repertoire.
Not yet.