Chapter 4
Chapter Four: Savannah
I told Leone everything.
Not because I trust him. Not because Emilio asked nicely.
Because I sat across from the man running this operation and watched his face while I talked, and the face didn't lie. Leone Costa is a lot of things, most of them terrifying from what I’ve heard, but he's not a performer.
When I said the name Kreiss, his jaw moved once and then locked.
So I gave him the pieces I could.
The marina south of the waterfront. The Meridian Star, a forty-foot cabin cruise I could describe because I'd seen the paperwork once when the club manager left it on the bar and I have a photographic memory.
Tuesday and Thursday handoffs, always after ten p.m., always two men arriving in separate vehicles, always one briefcase exchanged.
Physical intelligence, not digital. Paper.
The kind of information you don't trust to a server because servers get hacked and paper burns.
I gave him the physical descriptions. The tall one in the gray suit with the expensive watch, mid-fifties, silver at the temples.
The shorter one, heavier, younger, bad jacket, gun under his left arm, nervous hands that kept going to his drink.
I told Leone that the tall one did most of the talking and the short one mostly listened and took notes on his phone.
I gave him the names I caught. Vidal came up twice. A reference to someone called "the Custodian" that I didn't understand. The word "Foundry" used once. And Kreiss, obviously.
And I gave him the line that changed the air in the room.
"Both families. Bonaccorso and Castillo. They still think they're fighting each other."
“Like that exactly?” Claudio frowned.
“Yep, word for word.”
Leone sat with that for a long time. Alexandra typed so fast I thought her keyboard might catch fire. Emilio stood behind me, and I could feel him there without looking and it pissed me off, how hyper aware of him I am already.
When I finished, Leone said, "Thank you, Savannah. This changes things."
"I know it does. That's why I'm telling you."
"Is there anything else?"
"Probably. I heard like, eleven minutes of conversation two weeks ago and I've been replaying it in my head ever since. There might be details I haven't pulled out yet. Things that didn't seem important at the time but connect to whatever you already know."
Leone nodded. "Emilio will work with you on that. Take your time. Let it surface."
"I don't do let it surface. I do give me something to do and my brain works better."
Leone looked at Emilio. Emilio shrugged. Leone looked back at me with an expression that said he wasn't used to being told how to run his mafia by a bartender, but he was too tired and too smart to argue with a method that worked.
"Find her something to do," he said to Emilio, and that was that.
Three days later, and the something to do hasn't materialized.
I've walked every corridor in this Godforsaken cement shit-house.
I know the guard rotations on the second floor, shift change at six a.m. and six p.m. I know which floorboards creak, third and seventh on the left side of the hall outside my room.
I know which doors are unlocked, kitchen, common room, laundry, and which ones need keycards I don't have.
I know that the kitchen coffee pot gets refilled by a soldier named Dante who looks about nineteen and is scared of me, which is flattering and also kind of sad.
I know that Charlotte Richardson exists in the kitchen at seven a.m. every day with a laptop and a mug of black coffee and enough energy to power a nuclear facility.
I met her on day two. She looked at me the way you'd look at a new appliance, not hostile but deciding whether I was going to be useful or take up counter space.
"You're Savannah," she said.
"You're Charlotte."
"Claudio mentioned you."
"What'd he say?"
"That you gave Leone good intel and threw a lamp at his twin’s head." She took a sip of coffee. "I like you already."
"That's the nicest thing anyone's said to me in weeks."
"Don't get used to it. I'm not nice, I’m just real.
" She pushed the fruit bowl toward me across the counter.
“Eat something.” She says with a small smile.
The kind of smile one woman gives another in a room full of men, not because they're friends but because they know the same things without needing to explain them.
I took a banana and she went back to her laptop, and we didn't speak again that morning, but the silence was fine with me. I’m not much for mornings anyway.
Gigi always said you can tell everything about a woman by how she acts in another woman's kitchen.
Charlotte acts like she built it. I respect the shit out of that.
But three days of walking hallways and eating bananas and drinking coffee alone at the counter is making me want to put my fist through something, and when Emilio finds me in the kitchen on the fourth morning with my bottle cap spinning between my fingers fast enough to blur, he takes one look at me and says, "Gym. Now."
"Excuse me?"
"Gym. Downstairs. You're about to vibrate out of your skin and I'd rather you hit a bag than a wall. Come on."
"You can't just tell me to go to the gym. You're not my fucking dad."
"I'm basically your boss. Leone said so. And right now your boss is telling you to come downstairs and hit things because you've been climbing the walls for three days and everyone on this floor can feel it."
"Everyone?"
"Carmelo asked if you were okay. Carmelo. The man who communicates exclusively through grunts and violence asked about your emotional wellbeing. That's how obvious it is."
I look at him. He's in gym clothes, basketball shorts and a black tank top that shows every tattoo from shoulder to wrist, dark ink on olive skin, designs I can't read from across the kitchen but that cover enough real estate to count as a wardrobe choice.
His hair is pushed back, and his arms are crossed and he's got that look on his face, the one where the grin is trying to form but he's holding it until he knows which way this is going to go.
"Fine," I say, and pocket the bottle cap. "But if you try to go easy on me, I’m out."
"Wouldn't dream of it, vixen."
"Stop calling me that. My name is Savannah. Sav. Ann. Uhhhhh."
"Stop being one."
The gym is in the basement. Concrete floor, heavy bag in the corner, speed bag on a mount, a rack of free weights along the wall, a bench press that's seen better decades. The ceiling is low, the ventilation is barely adequate, and the whole space smells like rubber mats and sweaty ball sacks.
It's the best room in this building.
Not because it's nice. It's a concrete box with bad lighting, but I can do something useful here. I've needed this room for three days and the second I walk in my shoulders drop and my breathing changes and something in my chest loosens a half inch.
Emilio notices. I see him notice. He doesn't say anything about it, which is the right call. If he'd said something encouraging I would have walked back upstairs and never come down again.
He moves to the heavy bag and starts wrapping his hands with tape from a roll on the shelf.
I find wraps in a bin by the door, pull out a set, and start winding them around my knuckles.
The muscle memory is still there from Gigi's lessons fifteen years ago.
Under, over, between the fingers, around the wrist, pull tight.
The compression on my knuckles feels like coming home.
"You box?" he asks.
"Gigi made me start when I was fourteen. Said a woman who can throw a punch doesn't need a man to throw one for her."
"Smart woman."
"The smartest woman who ever lived, and I will fight you on that."
"I believe you." He holds up the pads, one at face height, one at my ribs, and braces his stance. "Whenever you're ready."
I throw a jab. It connects and the sound is flat and satisfying and I throw another one before the first one finishes ringing in my ears.
"Good," he says. "Again."
I go again. Jab, cross, jab. The combinations come back in pieces, fragments of Gigi's voice in the gym on Eastern Avenue telling me to keep my elbows in and turn my hip into the cross and stop dropping my left hand because a dropped hand is an invitation and she didn't raise me to invite anybody to do shit.
Emilio absorbs every hit. He doesn't flinch, doesn't step back, doesn't adjust. His arms stay locked and his eyes stay on me, watching my form, reading my movement, and I hate how much I like being watched by him.
I hate it because it's distracting and I don't get distracted and I definitely don't get distracted by men with crooked grins and too many tattoos and arms that look the way his arms look when they're braced against the impact of my punches.
Fuck.
"You're pulling the cross," he says after a minute. "You've got the rotation but you're stopping short. Hit through the pad, not at it."
"Don't coach me."
"I'm not coaching, I'm observing."
"Observe quieter."
"That's literally not possible for me."
I adjust the cross anyway because he's right and I know he's right and the next one lands with enough force to push him back half a step. The surprise on his face is genuine and brief and extremely satisfying.
"Better," he says.
"I know."
We work for twenty minutes. He feeds me combinations and I throw them and the sweat starts and the breathing gets harder and the thing that's been wound up in my chest since Delaware, the restlessness and the caged energy and the need to do something with my body other than walk corridors and count floorboards, starts to loosen.
He switches to body shots. I work his midsection, hooks and uppercuts, and my arms burn and I'm breathing hard enough that talking would cost me air I don't have. He's breathing too. The tank top is dark with sweat across his chest, and the tattoos on his arms shift when his muscles flex.
I'm looking at his body because he's standing right there and he's built and his skin is flushed and his chest is heaving and his forearms cord every time I hit the pads, and I am a woman with functional eyes and functional nerve endings and the combination of those two things right now is becoming a problem.
He catches me looking. I don't look away because looking away would be an admission, and I don't admit shit to men I've known for four days.
Not even men who look the way he looks right now, sweating through a tank top with his hair falling in his face and his arms flexed and his eyes bright from exertion.
"You're staring, vixen," he says. My line from the diner, thrown back at me with a grin that knows exactly what it's doing.
"You're in my eyeline. Move."
"Make me."
I throw a hook that snaps his head sideways.
Not hard enough to hurt, not really. Hard enough to make a point.
He laughs, and the sound fills the basement, and I want to hear it again, which pisses me off because I am not the kind of woman who gets butterflies from a man's laugh.
I am the kind of woman who throws hooks at men who tell her to make me and then thinks about it later when she's alone.
"Gigi taught you well," he says, resetting the pads.
"Gigi taught me everything."
"Everything?"
"Everything that matters." I wipe sweat off my forehead with the back of my wrapped hand. "She died four years ago, and I still hear her voice every time I make a decision. Every time I size someone up. Every time a man smiles at me, and I have to figure out what the smile actually means."
Emilio lowers the pads. The grin is still there but it's quieter, the volume turned down.
"What does mine mean?" he asks.
I look at him. The gym is quiet except for our breathing and the buzz of the overhead bulb and the muffled sound of the compound above us.
His face is open in a way that faces shouldn't be open when you've known someone four days.
He's not performing. He's not deploying charm.
He's asking a real question and waiting for the real answer
"Haven't figured it out yet," I say.
He nods and raises the pads again.
"Take your time. I'll be right here."
I throw the next punch harder than any of the others and he absorbs it without blinking.
We keep going. Another ten minutes, and by the end my arms are shaking, and my lungs are on fire and I feel better than I've felt since before Delaware.
Since before the club. Since before any of this, when I was just a bartender closing out a Tuesday and the worst thing on my mind was whether the ice machine would survive the weekend.
Emilio unwraps his hands and tosses the tape. I do the same, peeling the wraps off my knuckles, and the skin underneath is red and tender and sweaty.
He hands me a water bottle from the shelf. I drink half and pour the rest over the back of my neck, and the cold runs down my spine and I don't care about the mess because the relief is worth it.
"Same time tomorrow?" he asks.
He's leaning against the heavy bag with his arms crossed and his hair in his face and his chest still heaving, and the casualness of the question doesn't match the way he's watching me.
He wants me to say yes. Not for the intel, not for the assignment.
He wants me back in this gym tomorrow because thirty minutes of hitting things together is the most intimate either of us has been since we met.
I know this because the same thing is sitting in my chest right now, and impossible to pretend isn't there.
"Nah, let’s do six," I say.
“A.M?!”
“Yeah, I hate mornings and I hate you, so might as well knock two birds out with one stone.”
He grins. The full one. The one that takes his whole face and makes him look younger and less dangerous and more oblivious to how much trouble the woman he's supposed to be handling is going to cause him.
I walk past him toward the door, and my shoulder brushes his arm on the way by. The contact is brief, fabric against hot skin, and the heat of him registers through my damp t-shirt and settles behind my ribs where the bottle cap can't reach.
I don't look back. I take the stairs two at a time. By the time I reach the second floor my hands have stopped shaking but the attraction I feel has doubled and I’m going to need a long, hot fucking shower to calm the traitorous demon between my legs.
But six a.m. tomorrow I'll be in that gym.
And so will he.
And I'm fucked, so very, very fucked.