Chapter Thirty
Cal
The thing about running the Renzetti family while trying to be a different kind of Renzetti than every other Renzetti before me is that the world does not cooperate with the distinction.
I learned this from my father, just in the negative. He would have said the world cooperates with strength, an iron fist, and nothing else. I’ve spent my whole adult life trying to prove him wrong. Some days I’m more successful than others.
Today is not a successful day.
Nico drops into the chair across from my desk in one of our warehouses on the north side and slides a folder toward me without ceremony.
I open it. I look at the first photograph and I close it again.
My jaw flexes and my control slips.
“Where did this come from?” I grit out from between my teeth.
“Contact inside the Volkov network.” Nico’s voice is even, but his jaw is tight. “They’ve been asking around. Not about the territory. About you.” He taps the folder. “About Max.”
I say nothing.
Seeing a picture of us walking out of the restaurant last week has anger drowning out every reasonable thought that might be in my mind.
The rational thinking is replaced by images of all their buildings and houses and setting them on fire, then driving home to Max to watch a good movie with the dog sprawled across our legs.
“They’re building a picture,” Nico continues. “They know you’re not like Dad. They know you don’t respond to direct provocation the same way. So they’re looking for what you do respond to.”
Building a picture.
I think about this morning.
Max at the counter making coffee, hair still down from sleep, humming something under her breath that she stopped when she heard me come in, embarrassed, which was one of the most endearing things I’d ever witnessed.
Every day I find something new to love about her.
The way she sits at her reading chair with her laptop balanced on one knee and her study notes on the other, balancing a pen and a teacup in one hand.
The smile she delivers without fail when I walk in the door at the end of the day.
The constant, adorable arguing for the sake of playing devil’s advocate.
The way she looks at Bart and then at me with this quiet satisfaction at night, like the three of us are a thing that makes sense.
His words echo: They’re looking for what you do respond to.
“Double the detail on her route to campus.” I lean back in my chair, trying to erase the images of Volkovs with their throats slit from my mind while fighting the feeling of pleasure they give me. “And vary it. Different car, different driver, change the timing. I don’t want patterns.”
“Already doing it.” Nico observes my reaction like he always does. “She doesn’t know?”
“No.”
He nods slowly. He doesn’t tell me she should know. He understands—probably better than anyone—the math of this. If she knows, that would change the way she moves through her days, and the way she moves through her days right now is one of the best things in the world I’ve seen.
She walks through campus with her head up and her bag over one shoulder and she tips her face up to the sun when it’s out.
She gets her coffee from the place on the corner that she prefers to the closer one because the barista remembers her name.
She finally doesn’t think twice about Gio or Rudi being a few paces behind her.
I will destroy anything that tries to take that from her.
Or take her from me.
“There’s a specific plan,” Nico’s voice is cold as he says the words slowly.
My eyes find his faster and with more precision than I’ve ever looked at someone in my life as I sit up stick straight.
“In between her classes on Tuesdays. They’ve been watching the timing.” His voice is very controlled. “We got a tip this morning.”
The silence in the room is eclipsing.
“When?”
“Tomorrow. Or next week. Depending on the weather.” He doesn’t elaborate. He knows I understand what depending on the weather means when it’s the kind of plan that requires a degree of foot traffic for cover.
I stand up in an attempt to, again, quell the nearly uncontrollable anger searing through me.
I reach for the jacket on the back of the chair, and I think with absolute clarity about what happens next.
I think about the folder.
I think about tomorrow’s weather.
I think about Max’s route and her Evidence class on Tuesdays and the morning light on her face when she tips her head back.
Nico stands too. He’s been reading me since before I knew I was readable.
“Cal…”
But his words don’t register.
I’m already moving.
“Cal.” He steps in front of me.
He puts a hand on my chest. He is one of approximately five people in the world that would make me stop, and he knows it.
Nico’s just a couple inches shorter than me, and we could be twins from behind, his hair just slightly lighter. But from the front, he’s clean shaven, and has dimples when he smiles, which is too often for my liking, but right now, his expression is blank.
“Let me go.”
“Move, Nico.”
“Listen to me.” His hand stays where it is.
His voice is low and certain. “You go out there like this and you lose yourself. I know you—I saw it happen last time. Everything you’ve been trying to build, everything you told those men about doing things differently after Dad died—you go out there like this and it’s gone.
” He holds my eyes. “Let me go. I’ll handle it.
You stay. Then, when she comes home, you’re there for her.
Your hands are clean. That’s how this works now. ”
I look at him for a long moment before I respond.
“Go.”
He turns without a word at the order and is out the door.
I am in the kitchen when she comes home.
I made dinner—the one Mom taught me, the one with the sauce that takes two hours and is worth the time, and I didn’t have a choice because if I didn’t have something to do with my hands, I would have driven down to campus and thrown her over my shoulder to drag her back home myself.
I’m at the stove when I hear the door, and then her footsteps, and then Bart’s nails on the floor running to greet her.
“Something smells incredible,” she calls out and my shoulders drop an inch in relief at her voice.
I know Nico took care of it. I knew she’d walk through the door and be perfectly fine. He fixed the problem and I had nothing to worry about.
“Twenty minutes,” I call back.
She appears in the kitchen doorway a minute later and stops. She looks at me. Her eyes go to my shirt.
I forgot about the shirt.
I look down. There’s blood on it—not a lot, just a streak across the front where I’d checked Nico when he came back, when I needed to know he was intact. He was. The plan worked cleanly and he came back whole. But the shirt is a detail I’d meant to deal with before she got home.
“Cal,” she says my name very carefully.
And I realize this is the first time; the first time she’s had to see shades of grey—shades of red—like this on me.
“I’m fine,” I respond carefully, watching for her reaction. “It’s not mine.”
She comes into the kitchen. She stops two feet from me, and she looks at the shirt again and then at my face and she’s doing what she does—reading, assessing, running the calculation behind those blue eyes.
“Is everyone okay?”
Something breaks inside of me. Because I know what she is saying. Everyone, meaning Gio, Rudi, Nico.
Meaning the people she has learned to think of as ours.
Not just my family, her family, too.
In a split second, I regret every selfish bone in my body that brought her here, that made her fall in love with this place and these people under such dangerous and wavering conditions.
The greedy bastard inside of me revels in her presence, her falling deeper into the hole of this life.
The other side of me wants to put her on a plane back to Abbott and find a way to keep her away from this forever.
The greedy side wins.
“Everyone is fine.”
“Okay.” She breathes out. “Okay.” She opens the cabinet and gets plates, pretending like this is normal. “Tell me when twenty minutes is up.”
I watch her set the table. My hands are still on the stove, turned toward the sauce, and I’m watching her move around the kitchen like she’s been here forever and I think: this is what I’m protecting.
This specifically. This—her, barefoot in our home; Bart following her from cabinet to cabinet and the careful ease of a person who has decided to allow me to make her my home.
And maybe find a home in me, as well.
“Max.”
She looks up.
“I changed my mind,” I say. “Timer can pause.” I turn off the burner. “Come here.”
She steps tentatively towards me as I lift the shirt over my head and toss it in the corner. She puts her hands on my chest and I put my arms around her.
And I hold on, which is not something I do—holding on is not in the vocabulary of a man raised to show nothing—but I’m doing it anyway, and she lets me, and Bart sits on both our feet.
“It scared me a little,” she admits into my shoulder.
“I know.” I press my face into her hair. “And thank you for being honest with me about it. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize.” She pulls back and looks at me. Her eyes are clear and steady. “Just promise to tell me when I need to know something.”
This is what she always says.
Tell me when I need to know something. Not tell me everything, not don’t keep secrets, because she understands the shape of this life better now than she lets on. She just wants the things that matter.
And the guilt settles in my gut.
Because I didn’t tell her about the plan the Volkovs had to take her today.
But I was protecting her. Right?
“You need to know—” I swallow, but continue carefully, “that I’m handling something. And it will be handled soon. And until it is, your route to school might look a little different.”
She looks at me with confusion laced with concern. “Different how?”
“Different car. Different times. Nothing that will make you late.”
A pause. She reads my face.
“Okay.” She makes it sound nonchalant, but I can see the gears in her beautiful mind turning.
“That’s it? Okay?”
“You said you’re handling it.” She holds my eyes. “I believe you. Do I want to ask questions? Sure, you know that’s how I’m built. But I trust you. I believe you.”
I look at her for a moment that I will remember—the kitchen, the light, her face, the absolute straightforward trust of those words—and I file it in the place I keep the things I refuse to lose.
“Thank you,” I breathe the words into the space between us.
“Now.” She turns back toward the cabinet. “You said twenty minutes and I believe that too, so let’s go, chef, get to it.”