Chapter Seven
~ Aristoteles ~
The Florence palazzo smelled the same. Stone, beeswax, the faint musty smell of rooms that didn’t get enough air — none of it had changed in seven days, which was its own kind of insult.
I stood in the courtyard and let the evening settle against my shoulders. The lemon tree was still there. The stone bench was empty. The iron table had a thin layer of dust that Leon would have someone remove by morning.
Seven days. Three of them out of town on a contract dispute that should have taken one.
A shipping route through Livorno, a captain who thought his cut was negotiable, a conversation that ended with the man on his knees and my boot on his throat and thirty thousand euros walking back into Romano accounts where it belonged.
The other four days were what I’d told myself was discipline.
Discipline looked like this: a hotel room in Pisa with a view of a wall.
One phone call to Leon per day. No calls to Florence.
No texts. No updates on whether Zephyr was still in the building, still eating caramels, still rearranging the family’s financial records with the focused attention of a man who treated embezzlement like a puzzle and not a death sentence.
On Day Five, a subordinate walked into my hotel room without knocking. The door hit the wall hard enough to rattle the framed landscape above the bed — some generic Tuscan vista in colors too bright to exist in nature.
I had my gun out before my brain caught up, barrel level with the man’s sternum, finger on the trigger guard, the weight of the thing cold and familiar in my palm.
He froze. His mouth opened. Nothing came out.
I lowered the gun. Said nothing. The subordinate backed out of the room and closed the door without a sound.
That was the moment I knew the discipline wasn’t working.
I holstered the gun. Stared at the wall. The generic Tuscan vista stared back, all wrong greens and manufactured gold, and I thought about bare feet on cobblestone and the specific way a man’s throat looks when he’s eating a caramel and doesn’t care who’s watching.
None of it was helpful.
I packed and drove back to Florence. I took the mountain road slow because the Range Rover’s suspension had opinions about speed that my spine agreed with, and because going slow meant more time before I walked through the iron-studded door and heard whatever I was going to hear.
Now I was here. Boots on courtyard stone, denim vest fitted against my shoulders, the knives riding comfortable under my arms where they belonged. The silver herringbone chain caught the last light, threw it back amber.
I went inside.
The study was exactly as I’d left it. Desk, chair, the ledger open to a page I’d been reading seven days ago and had not thought about since.
The cigarette smoke in the curtains had gotten stronger, or I’d gotten more sensitive to it, which was Geno’s ghost doing what it did best: being inconvenient from beyond the grave.
I poured whiskey into a glass that was too clean. Three fingers. Maybe four. I didn’t measure. Measuring was for people who cared about the outcome, and I was fresh out of caring.
The lighter clicked open in my left hand. Held the flame. Counted to three. Snapped it shut.
Open. Shut. Open.
The rhythm matched nothing.
My pulse was its own thing, steady in the way things that have decided not to hurry are steady, and the lighter was just a piece of metal making noise because my hand needed something to do.
I crossed to the window.
Florence spread below the palazzo, ochre and amber and the hint gold that happened at dusk when the light decided it had done enough for one day and was going to make the exit memorable.
The Arno caught it, turned copper, and the bridges arched over the water like they’d been drawn by someone with a very confident hand.
Beautiful city.
I’d never particularly noticed. I never particularly cared.
Then I heard it.
Down the corridor, through a closed door, the rapid percussion of someone typing with the focused aggression of a man who was winning an argument with a spreadsheet and enjoying every second of it.
Keys. Fast. Certain. The rhythm had a rhythm — bursts of three or four, a pause, another burst, longer this time.
Zephyr.
I did not think about Zephyr.
I thought about the whiskey. I thought about the contract in Livorno. I thought about the subordinate with my gun in his face and the way his Adam’s apple had bobbed when he swallowed.
I did not think about the sound of typing down the hall, or what it meant that I could identify that specific rhythm after seven days away, or the fact that my body had registered it before my ears had fully processed it, which was the kind of mistake that got people killed in my line of work.
Good thing I was the one doing the killing.
The lighter clicked. Open. Shut.
The typing stopped. A pause — two seconds, maybe three. Then it started again, slower this time, more deliberate, the rhythm of someone verifying something they’d already verified because verification was the point and finishing was secondary.
I drank the whiskey. It burned the way it was supposed to, all the way down, honest in its simplicity. Pain was honest. Wanting was complicated in ways I didn’t have vocabulary for.
The knock came soft. Two taps, quick.
I already knew.
“Come in.”
The door opened. The air changed. It always changed when he entered a room — something in the density of it, the way the molecules rearranged themselves around a body that carried itself like it had never once questioned whether it belonged.
I didn’t turn from the window. Not yet. The amber light was doing something useful with the Arno, and I needed the useful thing more than I needed whatever was about to walk through that door.
Then he did walk through it, and useful became theoretical.
I turned.
Zephyr stood in the doorway of my study with his laptop bag slung over one shoulder and a caramel in his right hand and absolutely no shoes on his feet.
Tight black capri pants. White cotton T-shirt that had slid off one shoulder, exposing the sharp line of his collarbone and a strip of skin that my eyes found before my brain could redirect them.
Bare feet on my hardwood floor, toes painted turquoise with something that caught the fading light and threw it back in small, defiant sparks.
His blond hair was doing that thing where it looked both deliberately messy and entirely accidental, pushed back from his forehead on one side, falling across his eyebrow on the other.
He had a caramel between his fingers, gold foil half-unwrapped, and he was looking at me like he’d been expecting me and the expectation had been confirmed, which was irritating because I hadn’t told anyone I was coming back tonight.
I took him in once. The full inventory. The shoulder. The bare feet. The turquoise sparks on toenails that had no business being on my hardwood floor or in my field of vision or anywhere near the part of my brain that was currently doing something complicated with that information.
Then I looked away. Out the window. At the Arno. At the bridges. At anything that wasn’t Zephyr Kontos standing in my study like the room belonged to him, which was the problem.
He stood in every room like it belonged to him, and my brain had apparently decided that was attractive rather than the liability it objectively was.
“Hey,” he said.
I nodded because I didn’t trust my voice. The whiskey was doing its job, which was to give my hand something to hold that wasn’t reaching for him, and I was grateful for the distraction even if the distraction tasted like regret.
Zephyr crossed to the desk and set the laptop bag down with the ease of a man who had been working at this piece of furniture for seven days and had developed opinions about its ergonomics.
“I found more money,” he said. Brisk. Efficient.
Getting to the point with the directness he applied to everything that wasn’t himself.
“Embezzlement. Structured. Cleaner than the vendor thing, which means either a different person or the same person who learned from their mistakes, and my money’s on different because people who steal five million usually don’t level up to five hundred million without changing their methodology, but I’ve been wrong before. Once. In 2019. It was traumatic.”
He unwrapped the caramel. Put it in his mouth. His cheeks hollowed slightly as he sucked on it, and something warm and inconvenient settled behind my sternum that had nothing to do with the whiskey and everything to do with the way his lower lip glistened when the caramel hit it.
I watched him do this. I was aware I was watching. I was also aware that watching was its own kind of problem, and the problem was getting worse by the second, and the whiskey wasn’t helping as much as I’d hoped.
“Options,” Zephyr said around the caramel.
“One: report it. Correct, slow, invites questions from people who have no business asking them, and given the current standing of the Romano family with certain regulatory bodies, I’d classify that as stupid.
Two: move it back. Faster, quieter, raises different questions internally about who knew what and when, which is your problem, not mine, and also my preferred solution because it involves me doing the thing I’m good at instead of the thing I’m mediocre at, which is talking to regulators without making them develop facial tics. ”
He waited. The caramel shifted from one cheek to the other. His eyes held mine — Aegean blue, wide.
“Move it back,” I said. My voice came out lower than I’d intended, rougher.
Zephyr nodded. Once. Decisive. He flipped open the laptop, set it on my desk — my desk, the mahogany one that had outlived three generations of Romano men and was now hosting a five-foot-five blond with turquoise toenails like this was simply an extension of his workspace, which it apparently was.