Chapter 19 #2
Giada notices him because she notices everything that's male and breathing within a fifty-foot radius. She dances in his direction, not directly, not obviously, but with the gradual drift of a woman who is steering herself toward a target while maintaining the appearance of random movement. I nudge Matteo down the bar so we’re within earshot, just in case things turn ugly.
She ends up beside him at the bar, and orders another wine, before turning to him with the grin that has launched a thousand terrible decisions.
"You look bored," she says.
"I'm not." His voice is low, accented, and the accent is something I can't place from across the bar, but Matteo stiffens beside me, which tells me he can.
"You're standing at a bar in a club watching people dance and you haven't moved in ten minutes. That's bored or serial killer, and I'm hoping for bored."
"Then you're hoping for the wrong thing."
He says it without humor, without inflection, and the line should be a red flag but Giada's response to red flags has always been to run toward them at full speed while laughing.
"I'm Giada," she says.
He doesn't give his name. He looks at her for a long moment, the scrutiny continuing, and then he picks up his drink and takes a sip and looks back at the dance floor as if she's stopped existing.
My best friend is not used to being dismissed. She's used to being the center of every room she walks into, and the dismissal does exactly what it would do to any woman with Giada's particular combination of ego and persistence. It makes her more interested.
She leans against the bar beside him. Not touching, but close. "Strong silent type. I can work with that."
"You can't."
"Is that a challenge?"
"It's a fact."
She's grinning that full chaos grin. The man beside her hasn't looked at her again, hasn't shifted his body toward her, hasn't given her any of the signals that men normally give when a woman who looks like Giada stands six inches from them at a bar.
The absence of response is driving her insane and the insanity is making her more determined.
She reaches for his drink. He catches her wrist before her fingers reach the glass. Fast, fluid, the reflexes of a man whose body is trained for speed. His hand wraps around her wrist and holds it, not hard, not aggressive, but firm enough that the grip is a statement.
"Don't touch my drink," he says.
"Then tell me your name."
He releases her wrist and picks up his glass and drinks.
"You're not going to tell me," she says.
"No."
"That's rude."
"Yes."
She leans in, still grinning, and her eyes drop to his hand on the glass, and the grin freezes.
Not dies. Freezes. The expression locks in place while her brain processes what her eyes just found, and I watch from across the bar as Giada's entire body language recalibrates in the span of two seconds.
Straining my neck to see what she sees, I notice what she’s staring at.
There is a tattoo on the back of his right hand.
Between the thumb and index finger. A star, small, dark ink, the specific style that I've seen in intelligence files and dossier photographs.
The particular category of briefing materials that Marco used to keep in a separate drawer because the contents belonged to a world that even we approached with caution.
Bratva. Russian mafia. The star tattoo is a rank marker, and its placement on the hand means its owner has earned it through action, not inheritance.
Giada looks at the tattoo, her mouth slack before her eyes roams up his body and stop on his face.
Any reasonable woman would walk away. Any woman with survival instincts calibrated by a lifetime inside organized crime would recognize the star, understand what it represents, and remove herself from the conversation with the urgent efficiency of a person who just discovered a live grenade in their handbag.
Giada's mouth unfreezes. "Interesting," she smirks.
The man looks at her. For the first time since she approached, he actually looks at her, not the assessment look from before but something else, something that registers that the woman beside him saw the tattoo and didn't leave and the not-leaving has changed the parameters of the interaction.
"You should go," he says.
"Probably." She picks up her wine and twirls it.
He watches her not go, and the corner of his mouth moves. Just a fraction of a degree of movement in the muscle that controls smiling, suppressed before it forms, but there.
"You don't know what you're doing," he says.
"I never know what I'm doing. It's my best quality." She extends her hand. "Giada. And I don't care what that tattoo means."
He looks at her hand. Looks at her face.
The assessment runs one more time, thorough, final, the last scan before a decision is made.
He doesn't shake her hand. He picks up his drink, finishes it, sets the glass on the bar, and walks away.
Not toward the door. Toward the back of the club, where the VIP section sits behind a velvet rope and two men who are built the same way he's built are standing with their arms crossed and their eyes on the room.
Giada watches him walk away. Her hand is still extended. She lets it drop and turns back to the bar and picks up her wine and drinks the rest of the glass in one long swallow.
Then she starts laughing.
"Oh fuck," she says to nobody. "Oh, fuuuuuuck."
I take a couple of steps and put my hand on her shoulder. She looks at me, her eyes wide and glassy.
"Gia."
"Did you see that?"
"I saw it. I saw the tattoo."
"Bratva, Toni. Russian. The real kind, not the movie kind.
" She's still laughing, the breathless, slightly unhinged laugh of a woman who just had her entire romantic trajectory redirected by a star tattoo on a man's hand.
"He didn't even tell me his name. He just walked away.
Who does that? Who walks away from me? Nobody walks away from me. "
"The big Russian man apparently walks away from you."
"He's going to regret that." She says it with absolute certainty, the confidence of a woman who has decided that the man who walked away is the man she's going to pursue, and the pursuit will be relentless and chaotic and will probably cause an international incident.
"She's going to get herself killed," I say to Matteo.
"Or she's going to get him killed," he says, and we both look at the VIP section where the man with the star tattoo is sitting with his associates, not looking at Giada, performing the specific discipline of a man who is choosing not to look at something he really fucking wants to look at.
And he wants to look. I can see it from across the club. The discipline is the tell, the same way Vita's spin is my tell, the same way Matteo's jaw flex is his. The man is controlling his interest, and the controlling means the interest is strong enough to need controlling.
Giada is going to be a problem. A loud, persistent, beautiful, reckless problem that the Russian man is not prepared for.
"Home," I say. "Before she tries to follow him to the VIP section."
"Too late," Matteo says.
Giada is already walking toward the velvet rope, wine glass in hand, grin in place, the chaos engine at full power.
One of the bodyguards steps forward. She says something to him that I can't hear over the music.
The bodyguard looks confused. The second bodyguard looks amused.
Giada looks like she's having the best night of her life.
The man at the table looks at her. His face does the thing again, the fraction of movement in the muscle that controls smiling, and this time he doesn't suppress it all the way.
A ghost of something appears and disappears, and then he shakes his head and looks away, and the looking away is the most interested gesture he's made all night.
"We're going to have to drag her out of here," I tell Matteo.
"I'll get Emilio."
Twenty minutes later, we're in the car. Torres is driving. Emilio and Savannah are in the back row, her head on his shoulder, his arm around her. Giada is in the middle seat beside me, her phone in her hand, typing furiously.
"Who are you texting?" I ask.
"Nobody. I'm googling Russian mafia tattoo meanings."
"Giada, this is ridiculous."
"The star means he's a Vor v Zakone, vor for short. A thief in law. It's a rank. He's not just Bratva, he's ranked Bratva. Do you know what that means?"
"It means you should never see him again."
"It means he's important. It means he's dangerous. It means he walked away from me, and I need to know why because men don't walk away from me, Toni, they just don't, and the ones who do are the ones worth chasing."
"The ones who do are the ones who will get you killed."
"Same thing." She goes back to her phone, and the glow of the screen illuminates her face in the dark car, and the expression on it is the one I know best, the grin that means someone is about to have a very bad day.
Except this time the someone might be her.
Matteo's hand finds mine in the dark between our seats. He squeezes once. The squeeze says: we can't stop her and we both know it.
I squeeze back. I know, and when it goes wrong, we'll be there.
The compound is twenty minutes away. Giada researches Russian mafia hierarchies the entire drive while Savannah sleeps on Emilio's shoulder.
Matteo holds my hand and the city lights pass outside the windows.
The night that was supposed to be a break from blood and legal documents has instead introduced a new variable that nobody in this car is prepared for.
A Russian with a star tattoo who wouldn't give Giada his name and who walked away from her at a bar and who is going to discover, very soon, that Giada doesn't accept rejection the way normal women accept rejection.
She accepts it as a starting gun.
And God help the man on the other end of the race.