Chapter 7 Emilio
Chapter Seven: Emilio
I’m getting four stitches above my left eye from a medic named Russo who has the bedside manner of a corpse and the hands of a man who learned to sew using socks.
He doesn't ask how it happened. Nobody in the medical wing asks how anything happened.
They stitch and they bandage and they hand you ibuprofen and they send you back to work because the compound doesn't have sick days and sympathy costs extra.
The stitches sting, but I don't really care about the pain.
I care about the fact that I can still taste Savannah, and feel her curvy little body against mine and hear the sound she made when I grabbed her jaw, and I'm sitting on a medical cot.
All I can think about is going back to that corridor and finishing what the Castillos interrupted.
Which makes me a selfish prick, because four men just breached our east wing and I should be thinking about security protocols and access codes and how the fuck they got keycards that aren't supposed to exist outside of our own men.
But I'm not thinking about that. I'm thinking about the way she said make me in a hallway full of impending death.
Russo finishes the last stitch and tapes a bandage over it and tells me to keep it dry for forty-eight hours. I nod, hop off the cot, and walk to the kitchen because the adrenaline crash is going to hit soon and I need coffee or whiskey or both before it does.
Charlotte is already there.
Of course she is. Charlotte exists in the kitchen at all hours because she’s developed a habit of baking or cooking for Claudio when she’s stressed, and since it’s Claudio, she’s stressed a great deal of the time. She's sitting at the counter with a mug and a plate of freshly baked cookies.
She looks at me, then at the bandage above my eye, then at my hands, which I washed in medical but which still have blood under the fingernails because blood gets into places soap can't reach.
"You look like shit," she says.
"Thank you, Charlotte. Always a pleasure."
"Sit down. There's coffee."
I sit. She pours. The coffee is hot and black and strong enough to dissolve the cup if you left it long enough.
"How's Alexandra?" I ask.
"Furious. Someone tried to walk into her office with a gun and she's taking it personally, which is the correct response. She's already helping Leone reprogram the security protocols for the east wing. Claudio didn’t want to help, but I told him if he didn’t, there would be no sexy-time for a week.
So, she made him move her desk so it faces the door, which Claudio did without complaint because he does everything I tells him to without complaint and if you tell him I said that I'll deny it. "
"Noted."
"Leone's with her now. They've been in the war room since the all-clear. Claudio and Carmelo are burning the bodies" Charlotte takes a sip of her own coffee and studies me over the rim. "How are you?"
"Four stitches. Bruise on my ribs where the vest caught the round. I'll live."
"That's not what I asked."
I look at her and roll my eyes.
"You kissed her," Charlotte says.
"Does everyone in this compound have access to the cameras in the hallways? Damn, you are all a nosy fucking bunch."
"You have a smear on your shirt collar that's too low to be from your own face, you smell like compound soap mixed with someone else's sweat, and you keep touching your bottom lip every thirty seconds.
You kissed her during the attack, and you haven't showered because you're not ready to wash her off you. "
I stare at her. "What the fuck? Are you a witch?"
"Claudio says the same thing. Drink your coffee."
I drink my coffee, grabbing a cookie and eating it in two bites, and Charlotte goes back to her laptop.
"She's good for you," she says without looking up from her screen. "For what it's worth."
"How would you know? You've talked to her once."
"Twice. Once in the kitchen when she took a banana and didn't make small talk, and once tonight when I passed her in the corridor on my way to Alexandra's office and she was standing against the wall with her hand in her pocket.” Charlotte pauses.
"A woman who keeps a promise she doesn't want to keep is a woman worth trusting. "
I don't have a response to that and Charlotte doesn't need one. She closes her laptop, picks up her mug, and stands. Her phone beeps and she takes it out and sighs.
"Claudio's now in the war room with Leone. They want you."
"Now?"
"The Castillo attack isn't the only thing that happened tonight. Alexandra found something in the financial transfers, and Kreiss isn't just moving money, he's moving it toward something specific." She walks past me toward the door. "Whatever she found, it spooked Leone.”
She leaves. I sit in the kitchen for a moment before checking the time and heading to the war room.
Leone is at the head of the table. Alexandra beside him, laptop open, her face lit by the screen.
Claudio against the wall, which is where Claudio always is during war councils because standing behind everyone else gives him the angle he wants on every face in the room.
Carmelo sits in the corner wiping blood off a knife with a rag.
"Sit," Leone says.
I sit for the debrief.
"The Castillo breach is handled. Four shooters, all dead, none carrying identification. Keycards traced to a set that was decommissioned six months ago but never physically destroyed, which means someone in our logistics chain kept copies. I've assigned Claudio to find who."
Claudio nods from the wall. He'll find whoever it is, that's not even a question. The only question is how long they'll keep breathing after he does.
"But that's not why you're here," Leone continues. "Alexandra."
Alexandra turns the laptop so I can see the screen.
Financial data, accounts and transfers and routing numbers that look like gibberish to me but clearly mean something to her.
Her eyes are bright and her fingers are twitching, her face has that expression she gets when a trail she's been following suddenly turns a corner and shows her something she wasn't expecting.
"Kreiss is consolidating," she says. "Every account connected to the Meridian Star operation, every shell company, every intermediary, they're all funneling into a single account. One destination. He's pulling his entire financial infrastructure into one place."
"Which means what?" I ask.
"Two possibilities. He's preparing to run, closing down the operation, converting everything to cash or crypto and disappearing. Or he's preparing to deploy, concentrating resources for a single large-scale action."
"Which one is it?" I ask.
"I don't know yet. But the volume is significant. We're talking tens of millions moving in the last seventy-two hours. Whatever he's doing, it's happening fast and it's happening now."
Leone leans back in his chair. His face is the mask it always is during operational briefings, neutral, giving nothing away to the room, but I've known this man since I was fifteen and I can read what sits behind.
He's worried. Not scared, Leone doesn't scare, but worried in the way that commanders get worried when the enemy starts doing things that don't fit the patterns they've been tracking.
"The marina surveillance deploys tomorrow night," Leone says. "Tuesday. If Kreiss is still running the handoff schedule Savannah described, there should be activity. I want eyes on the Meridian Star, and I want confirmation that Vidal is still operating."
"I'll lead the team," I say.
"Take four men. Two-night deployment, Tuesday and Thursday, to catch both handoff windows. If Vidal shows, we photograph and we track. We do not engage."
"And if Kreiss shows?"
Leone's eyes find mine. "He won't. Kreiss doesn't get his hands dirty. He's a handler, not a soldier. But if somehow he does show up at that marina, you call me before you do anything. Nobody touches Kreiss without my authorization."
"Understood."
"One more thing." Leone stands and walks to the window. The courtyard below is lit by floodlights, soldiers moving in the aftermath of the attack, vehicles being repositioned, the organized chaos of a compound that just took a hit and is already rebuilding its defenses. "Aurelio had a bad night."
The room goes still.
"The doctors called me at midnight, before the attack. His oxygen dropped. They stabilized him, but the trajectory is..." Leone stops. His jaw moves once. "The trajectory is what it is. I told him about the Kreiss operation. He said to finish it."
"That's it?" I ask. "Just finish it?"
"He’s given all control to me, with title transfer upon his passing.
” Leone turns from the window. His face is the mask again, neutral, commander, Don-in-waiting.
But his eyes are red at the edges and the skin under them is dark and the man who told me to sit down five minutes ago looks like he hasn't slept in a week because he probably hasn't.
"Tuesday night. The marina. Find Vidal, confirm the operation, and get back alive. All of you."
He walks out and Alexandra follows. Claudio pushes off the wall and pauses beside me.
"You need sleep," he says.
"So does Leone."
"Leone is a lost cause. You are still salvageable." He looks at the bandage on my face. "Barely."
“Yeah, have a good night.” I don’t feel like talking anymore. I just want to go to fucking bed.
"It's four a.m. There's nothing good about it." He leaves.
Carmelo finishes cleaning his knife, folds the rag, puts both in his pocket, and stands. He walks past me without speaking, which is standard, but at the door he stops and turns and looks at me with those dead-gray eyes.
"The bartender," he says.
"What about her?"
He doesn't answer. He just looks at me for three seconds and then nods, once, and walks away. Savannah just made Carmelo's list. That list is short and the people on it tend to stay alive longer than the people who aren't, which is the closest thing to a blessing this compound offers.
I walk back to my room. Her door is closed, her light is off. She's either asleep or pretending to be, and either way I'm not knocking at four in the morning with blood under my fingernails.
I stop outside her door and press my ear to the wood. Long enough to hear nothing, which means she's quiet, which could mean she's sleeping or could mean she's sitting on her bed with the bottle cap in her hand and her shoes on and her back against the headboard.
I want to knock. I want to open that door and sit on the edge of her bed and tell her about the marina operation and Kreiss's money and Aurelio's oxygen and the fact that Tuesday night I'm going to sit in a van on a dock and watch for a man I've never met because of information she gave us over eggs at a diner.
I want to tell her she changed the trajectory of this war by being brave enough to talk.
But I don't knock. She needs sleep more than she needs me right now, and the selfishness of wanting to wake her up just so I can look at her face is a kind of weakness I can't afford the night before an operation.
Tomorrow night, the marina, and with any fucking luck… Vidal. Kreiss's money flowing toward something none of us can see yet. Aurelio dying in the private wing while the empire he built shakes under his feet.
I go to my room and stand in the middle of it and realize I still smell like her. The compound soap that smells different on her skin. The sweat from the gym that morning that never got washed off because Leone called before either of us showered. She’s everywhere.
I strip and get in the shower because I need to get clean and because standing in my room smelling her while she sleeps three doors away is going to make me do something stupid.
The water is hot. I put my hands on the tile and let it hit my back and I close my eyes and I last about fifteen seconds before the images start.
Her hips rolling against me in the gym. The slow, intentional grind that dragged her body along the length of me.
The sound she made, bitten off in the back of her throat.
The way her fingers dug into the back of my neck and pulled.
Her mouth opening under mine and her tongue finding mine and the taste of coffee and salt and her.
The heat coming off her through her jeans when I pressed my palm flat against her and the sound, God, the sound that came out of her, loud and raw and the single best thing I've ever heard in my life.
Her against the wall in the corridor. The red light on her face.
The way she grabbed the front of my vest and hauled me in.
I wrap my hand around myself, and I don't pretend I'm doing anything other than what I'm doing.
My forehead against the tile, hot water running down my spine, and Savannah Cole behind my eyelids, panting against my mouth, saying don't you fucking dare stop in a voice that went straight through me and settled at the base of my spine.
I think about what would have happened if Leone hadn't called.
My hand sliding inside her jeans instead of pressing against them.
My fingers finding her wet, because she was wet, I could feel the heat of it through the denim.
Her back arched against the wall and her thighs opening for me and the sound she'd make when I pushed two fingers inside her, that same raw noise but longer, drawn out, with my name somewhere in the middle of it.
Her coming on my hand and her face when it hit. Her body clenching around my fingers. The way she'd look at me after, flushed and furious and wanting more.
It doesn't take long. My hand moves fast, my grip tight, and when I come it hits hard enough that my knees buckle and I have to brace against the wall with my free hand.
Her name is in my mouth. I don't say it out loud because the walls in this building are thin, but it's there, behind my teeth, pressing to get out.
I stand under the water until it runs cool. Wash my hair. Wash the blood from under my fingernails. Wash everything off me except the memory of her, which isn't going anywhere no matter how much soap I use.
I get out and dry off. Pull on shorts and lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling and for the first time all night my brain is quiet enough to think about what's ahead instead of what just happened.
The operation that starts the endgame. And somewhere between here and there, the woman three doors down who changed the trajectory of this war because she was brave enough to talk and stubborn enough to stay.
I close my eyes and all I see is her.