Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen: Savannah
He's been gone thirty minutes, and I've wiped the counter four times.
The bar doesn't need wiping anymore, but my hands need a job, and the rag is here and Emilio is not, so the counter gets wiped. Repeatedly.
I pour myself the rest of the Macallans because I need it. Cheap liquor makes anxiety louder. Good liquor gives it manners.
I don't even know why I'm anxious. Emilio went to greet Aurelio's daughter, not storm a building. But everyone has been holding its breath since Leone called Dahlia three days ago, and the arrival of someone's child to say goodbye to their dying father is a lot of weird energy to be around.
Technically, I shouldn’t feel any type of way about it, because I didn’t really know him.
Except I do feel something about it. Gigi died in a room that smelled the same way Aurelio's room smells, and I sat beside her bed for six days counting the seconds between breaths, and nobody called anyone to come say goodbye because there was nobody to call.
It was just me. Me and the hospice nurse and a sixty-three-year-old woman who raised me and whose lungs quit working on a Thursday afternoon while I was in the cafeteria buying a Sprite.
I wasn't even in the room.
Years and that fact still sits in my stomach and I haven’t bought a Sprite since.
The bottle cap comes out of my pocket. I roll it between my fingers and drink the whiskey and wait.
Emilio comes back with an entourage.
I hear them before I see them. His voice, loud and warm and doing the thing he does when he's trying to fill a room with enough energy to drown out whatever everyone's actually feeling.
Then other voices. Claudio's and Charlotte's, asking something about food.
And a voice I don't recognize, female, with a flatness to it that says the woman speaking is holding herself together with effort and practice.
They round the corner into the bar, and I get my first look at Dahlia Bonaccorso.
She's shorter than I expected. Mid-twenties, dark hair pulled back tight, leather jacket, black jeans, boots that have been walked in hard and often. Pretty face, strong jaw, and eyes that do the same thing mine do when I walk into a new room. They scan.
Same playbook. Different teacher.
The man behind her is a problem.
Not a threat. A problem in the sense that he takes up so much physical space that the bar, which felt normal-sized five seconds ago, now feels like a closet.
He's massive. Not tall-massive, built-massive, the kind of body that comes from years of violent use.
Wide through the shoulders, thick through the neck, arms that make Emilio's look decorative.
His head is buzzed short, and his face is flat and blunt and designed to end conversations before they start.
He stands behind Dahlia. Not beside her. Behind. Two inches of space between his hand and her lower back. He doesn't touch her and he doesn't need to. It’s an invisible tether that says mine in a language every woman in this room understands.
Claudio and Charlotte file in behind them.
Charlotte's got flour on her sweater, which means today was a four-dozen-cookie day, which means the compound's emotional barometer is at fuck-this-shit and Charlotte's been baking her way through it.
Claudio is Claudio. Black clothes, no expression, hand around Charlotte's waist.
"Savannah," Emilio says, parking himself at the end of the bar with his hip on the counter, "meet Dahlia. And that lovely mountain of flesh behind her is Bam."
I nod at Dahlia. "Hey."
She nods back. We look at each other, not hostile, not friendly. Two women deciding whether the other one is going to be a headache. Whatever she sees, it passes, because she pulls out the stool in front of me and sits down.
"You're the bartender," she says.
"Yep."
"Good. I need a drink. Something that doesn't come with a speech about how glad everyone is that I'm home." She puts both elbows on the counter. "I've been here forty-five minutes, and I've already gotten three speeches. From men who couldn't look me in the eye while they gave them."
I pull the next best whiskey and pour three fingers. The woman earned it by walking through those gates at all.
She picks it up, smells it, drinks half in one pull, and sets it down. Her face doesn't change. She's been drinking whiskey since before it was cool, or she's too tired to react, or both.
"That was my father's bottle," she says, looking at the label.
"It was buried on the bottom shelf behind the gin. I moved it."
"He'd bitch about using it for twenty minutes and then join us." She finishes the glass. I pour again without asking because that's what you do when someone's about to lose their father and they're sitting at your bar trying not to think about it.
Bam takes the stool beside her. I pour him one too.
He picks it up and holds it without drinking.
His eyes haven't stopped moving since he walked in.
Door, window, me, Claudio, Charlotte, Emilio, back to the door.
The man blinks about once every six seconds, which I know because I counted, and the fact that I'm counting a stranger's blink rate tells me Gigi's paranoia lessons are alive and well in my nervous system.
Claudio sits at the far end. Charlotte takes the stool beside him, crosses her legs, and leans into his side. He puts a hand on her knee, and she covers it with hers.
Emilio stays standing. He's doing the thing where he fills the silence with himself, talking, gesturing, making the room feel occupied so nobody has to sit with the quiet. He tells Dahlia about the bar, how I found it, how I cleaned it, how I’ll be running it as long as I want to.
I pour for Claudio, a vodka, neat. Water for Charlotte because she doesn't drink during the day and I've learned her patterns.
"How long has this bar been here?" Dahlia asks, running her finger along the counter.
"Longer than any of us. I just cleaned it up."
"It used to host visiting dignitaries," Claudio says from the end of the bar. "Aurelio would bring allies and business partners down here for drinks after dinner.”
"Huh, guess I really never paid much attention to what he did," Dahlia says. She's not bitter about it. She's stating a fact the way you'd state the weather.
I recognize that voice. It's the one I used for six months after Gigi died. The one that keeps everything at the same volume, so nothing unexpected punches through.
"So." Dahlia picks up her glass and looks at me over the rim. "You're the one who heard the conversation at the club."
"That's me."
"And you're fucking my father's ward."
I don't flinch. Emilio, to his credit, doesn't either, though his knee stops bouncing for a full second which is basically a flinch in Emilio language.
"Also me," I say.
"Hm." She finishes the last of her drink off. "Good. He needed someone. He's been a disaster for years."
"Hey," Emilio says. "I'm right here."
"I know. That's why I said it." Dahlia looks at him with an expression that's half fondness and half exasperation, and I realize they know each other.
Not just in passing, not just as family acquaintances.
They grew up together, or near enough, and the dynamic between them has the worn-in feel of siblings who fight and love each other in the same breath.
"She threw a lamp at me," Emilio tells Dahlia. "The first time we met. A floor lamp. Brass."
"I already like her more than I like you."
"Everyone likes her more than they like me. It's becoming a pattern."
"It's not a pattern, it's natural selection." Dahlia's mouth does a thing, an almost smile before her eyes grow sad and it dies on her lips.
Charlotte steers the conversation. She asks Dahlia about the drive in and how her and Bam are enjoying their space.
Bam answers with one word. "Long." Charlotte nods, waiting for more. Dahlia adds that they drove for hours and Bam refused to stop when she needed to pee because they had a time crunch.
"Alexandra's pulling together a briefing for tomorrow," Claudio says, and the room shifts. "Kreiss's hard drives had more data than we expected. The trafficking pipeline we shut down connects to a larger network. She's mapping it."
"How large?" Dahlia asks. The daughter is gone. The woman asking this question has heard operational briefings before and knows which questions matter.
"International. Multiple countries. Multiple pipelines. Institutional-level funding." Claudio pauses. "The word she used was network, not operation."
"Lovely. So you killed the branch manager, and the corporation is still open for business."
"That's the short version, but we already knew that, we just didn’t know it ran this deep."
"What about the Castillo alliance?" She looks at Emilio.
"Holding." He uncrosses his arms and leans both forearms on the bar. "Ferrara's been solid. His rank and soldiers, less so. We had an incident reported at the shared checkpoint outside the port facility. Bonaccorso soldier mouthed off to a Castillo guard. Carmelo corrected the situation."
"Corrected how?"
"The soldier lost two teeth and gained a lasting appreciation for interorganizational cooperation."
"Carmelo's methods never change." Dahlia shakes her head. "And the data from Kreiss? What's Alexandra found?"
Charlotte leans forward. "We're running pattern recognition on the encrypted files.
Most of it's financial. Routing patterns that connect to accounts outside the country, shell companies layered three and four deep.
But there are communication logs that reference organizational structures we haven't seen before.
Code-named positions within a hierarchy.
" She pauses. "The word Custodian appears seventeen times across four separate files. "
Dahlia's face does a thing.