Chapter Five #2
The remaining men—two from the dock crew who’d lingered near the doorway, plus the head of security who’d been standing in the hallway—were already in motion. They’d seen the gesture. They’d seen my face. They didn’t need the context.
Context was for people with time, and we were fresh out.
I picked up the phone. Typed back. Four sentences, no wasted characters. My thumb moved across the screen with the efficiency of a man writing his own name on a death certificate.
Location, now. Stay where people can see you. Do not go anywhere dark. I am coming.
I didn’t add anything warmer. Warmth was for people who weren’t currently calculating how many minutes it would take to reach central Florence, how many men I would need, and what I was going to do to my cousin when I found him standing anywhere near Zephyr Kontos.
The response came before I’d set the phone down.
Piazza del Duomo.
I filed this away with the cold precision I applied to everything that mattered.
Piazza del Duomo. The cathedral square. Open, crowded, tourist-heavy even at this hour.
The kind of place where a man could vanish into a crowd if he needed to, or where a man could be easily found if someone was looking.
Zephyr had chosen well. Deliberately well. The kind of well that suggested his self-preservation instincts were considerably sharper than his apparent indifference to danger would have you believe.
Reassuring.
Also irritating.
A man with good instincts had fewer excuses for walking into a mafia boss’s house and making himself impossible to ignore, and I would have preferred the excuses.
Excuses were simpler than the warm, inconvenient thing currently sitting behind my sternum that had nothing to do with security and everything to do with the fact that someone had followed him, and I hadn’t been there to prevent it.
I pocketed the phone. Pulled my denim vest straight with one hand, feeling the weight of the knives settle against my ribs where they belonged. The silver herringbone chain caught the overhead light, threw it back.
“Piazza del Duomo,” I said to the room. Not raised. Didn’t need to be. The men were already at the door, already moving, boots on hardwood, the sound of them fading toward the garage where the vehicles were kept running because in my house, vehicles were always kept running.
Leon was at my shoulder. Of course he was. His hand was already on his firearm, not drawing it, just resting there, the particular stillness of a man who understood exactly what came next and had already decided how many bullets it would require.
“Range Rover,” I said. “You drive. I need both hands free.”
He nodded. Didn’t ask why. Didn’t need to.
The study emptied in under thirty seconds. Door closing behind us, the cigarette smell left to settle back into the curtains where it belonged, the overhead light still burning because nobody had thought to turn it off and nobody was going back to check.
The hallway was cool and dark and empty. The garage door was already rolling up when we reached it. The Range Rover’s engine was running, exhaust pooling on the concrete in pale gray clouds, the headlights cutting twin beams through the gathering dark.
I didn’t look back at the house. Didn’t need to. The fifty-three problems on the list would be there waiting, patient as graves.
Right now, there was only one problem that mattered, and it was standing in a crowded square in central Florence with caramel on his fingers and my cousin behind him, and I was going to solve it the way I solved most problems.
With my hands.
The lighter clicked open as I slid into the passenger seat. Held the flame for a count of two. Snapped shut.
The Range Rover pulled out of the garage and onto the street, tires biting into cobblestone, and Florence waited for us, amber and ancient and entirely unprepared for what was coming.
The Range Rover took the road like it was personally offended by the concept of curves. Leon drove the way he did everything—with cold efficiency and absolutely no concern for whether the vehicle’s suspension would survive the experience.
I didn’t care.
Suspensions were replaceable.
What wasn’t replaceable was currently standing in a public square with my cousin’s eyes on him, and that fact occupied approximately ninety percent of my available mental bandwidth.
The remaining ten percent was running the calculation I should have run two days ago. Theo had found Zephyr. Which meant Alexios knew Zephyr existed.
Which meant someone on the staff had talked—a driver, a guard, someone who’d seen the blond civilian carrying a laptop bag through the hallways and thought that information was worth sharing with the silver-haired uncle who still believed the family seat belonged to him by right of blood and decades of mediocre decision-making.
I wasn’t surprised. Annoyed, yes. Concerned, certainly. But surprise implied I’d expected better from people, and I’d stopped doing that around the time I realized Geno’s loyalists would rather see the family burn than follow a dock worker, illegitimate or otherwise.
What I hadn’t accounted for was Theo moving this fast.
Theo. My cousin. The man who smiled at everyone and meant nothing by it, who’d spent thirty-two years using charm as a substitute for substance because charm was easier and required significantly less courage.
The Range Rover hit the city center area and the road narrowed instantly, ancient stone walls crowding in on both sides, close enough that I could have reached out the window and touched the mortar if I’d wanted to waste the arm.
We didn’t slow down.
Leon didn’t believe in slowing down for architecture, regardless of its historical significance, and the cobblestones transmitted every jolt directly through the frame and into my spine.
Tourist foot traffic scattered ahead of us.
Americans in sun hats, Germans with maps, the breed of visitor who came to Florence expecting Renaissance tranquility and instead got a two-ton British SUV doing forty through a pedestrian thoroughfare with a man in the passenger seat who looked like he’d be entirely comfortable breaking several of the Ten Commandments before dinner.
The dome of the cathedral grew larger through the windshield. Brunelleschi’s masterpiece, brick and ambition and the kind of architectural confidence that made modern buildings look apologetic.
The late amber light caught it from the west, turned the white marble facing gold, and for approximately three seconds I registered the beauty of the thing before my brain returned to the more pressing matter of whether Zephyr was still standing where he’d said he’d be standing, and whether Theo was still within reach of my hands.
I didn’t examine too carefully what it meant that my first instinct upon reading Zephyr’s text had not been strategic.
Not about the family. Not about timing. Not about what Theo’s surveillance implied about Alexios’s next move or which staff member had betrayed me or how many men I would need to station at the Florence villa going forward.
It had been simpler than that. Considerably less civilized.
Nobody followed Zephyr. Nobody watched him on a dark street. Nobody got that close to him without me knowing about it and deciding whether to allow it, and the answer, as a general policy, was no.
I was aware this was not a rational position for a man who had known Zephyr Kontos for forty-eight hours. Rationality had limited jurisdiction over certain categories of want.
I had crossed into Zephyr’s category somewhere around the moment he’d slid a pre-signed NDA across a desk and said “so?” to the mafia with the calm of a man who either didn’t understand what the word meant or understood it perfectly and had decided it didn’t apply to him.
Both possibilities were problematic.