Chapter Seven #2
His fingers moved over the keys. Fast. Certain. The rhythm was different now focused and precise, He had a quiet confidence of a man who treated international finance like a game he’d already solved.
The typing went on for several minutes. I stood at the window and drank whiskey and did not think about how many caramels he’d eaten in the last seven days or whether he’d slept or what the turquoise polish on his toenails would feel like under my thumb.
Not helpful.
“Done,” Zephyr said. He didn’t look up. His eyes were on the screen, tracking something I couldn’t see, his lower lip caught between his teeth in that way it did when he was verifying.
Then he looked up. Those blue eyes found mine across the study, and the expression in them was pleased.
My phone chimed.
I pulled it from my pocket. The screen glowed blue-white in the dimming study, cutting through the amber haze from the window with the cold efficiency of something that didn’t belong there.
The notification was from the family account. A transfer. Amount received: five hundred million dollars.
I stared at the screen.
The number did not change. Five hundred million. Eight zeroes in a row, neat and patient, the kind of number that changed what a family could do, what a family could be. The kind of number that turned a broken legacy into something that might, with work, stand on its own feet.
Almost every dollar Geno’s people had stripped out before the end, before the bombing, before everything went to hell. Returned in a single evening by a man eating a caramel on my hardwood floor.
I did not let my face do anything. My face had rules. My face did what I told it to do, and right now I was telling it to do nothing, which was the hardest thing I’d asked of it in seven days.
I looked at Zephyr.
Zephyr looked back. Those blue eyes held mine with the calm of a man who had just moved five hundred million dollars across international borders without breaking a sweat and was now waiting for me to say something, preferably something that acknowledged the scale of what he’d done without making him uncomfortable, which was a needle I had never been particularly good at threading.
My restraint developed a crack.
Not a collapse. A shift. The kind of shift that happens when something under pressure finds a weak point and begins, very slowly, to give way.
I crossed to the desk. My desk. Which meant crossing to Zephyr, because Zephyr was at my desk, sitting in my chair, his turquoise-sparkle toenails resting on my hardwood floor like they’d been invited.
I did not stop at the reasonable distance. Reasonable had left the building approximately seven days ago, when I’d pulled a gun on a subordinate for walking into a room too loudly because the sound had reminded me of something I was trying not to think about.
I stopped close. Close enough that I could see the fine lines at the corners of his eyes, the way his lashes cast faint shadows on his cheeks when the light hit them from this angle.
I looked down at him. Six-foot-three looking down at five-foot-five, which put his eyes level with my chest and my eyes looking down at the top of his head, and that was its own kind of problem.
Zephyr did not step back. He tilted his chin up. Held the eye contact. His throat worked once — a swallow, small, deliberate — and then his expression settled into something that looked like curiosity with a warm undercurrent I didn’t have a name for.
“You should know what you just did,” I said. Quiet. The kind of quiet that made the air between us feel thicker.
“I transferred money,” Zephyr said. His voice was steady. The caramel was gone, but his lower lip still held a faint shine, and I was aware of the shine with a specificity that my brain had apparently decided warranted its own dedicated neural pathway.
“You gave the Romano family its legs back.”
He considered this. His head tilted slightly — the tilt that meant his brain was running the statement through several filters simultaneously, checking for sincerity, checking for exaggeration, checking for whatever angle I might be working that he hadn’t identified yet.
“I prefer to think of it as a billable accomplishment,” he said finally.
“Item line: ‘financial architecture restructuring, with prejudice.’ You can put it next to the caramels, which are also billable, and before you say anything, yes, I’ve been tracking them, and no, you cannot have the spreadsheet because it would undermine my negotiating position, and I have principles. ”
I looked at him. For a long moment. Long enough that the church bells rang somewhere in the distance, the sound carrying through stone and old wood and the narrow space between us where something warm had taken up residence and showed no signs of leaving.
Close enough to share air. Close enough to count the details I’d been cataloguing for seven days — the curve of his neck where it met his shoulder, the way his collarbone stood sharp under the thin cotton, the shade of pink that climbed his throat when he’d been working too long without a break.
I took one step back. Controlled. Measured.
The kind of step that cost me something and I paid it anyway because the alternative was standing close enough to touch him, and touching him would be the end of whatever was left of the discipline, and the discipline was the only thing keeping the family standing.
“Add it to your invoice,” I said. “Get some sleep.”
“I don’t sleep at reasonable hours.”
“I’m aware of this.”
His eyebrows went up. “How are you aware of this?”
“I pay attention.” The words landed exactly where they were supposed to. Direct and unadorned.
He held my gaze for a beat longer, then he nodded, once, and reached for his laptop.
I picked up my drink. Turned back to the window. Florence had gone from amber to deep gold, the Arno dark now, the bridges silhouetted against a sky that was doing its best impression of something worth looking at.
Behind me, I heard the sound of a laptop being closed, the soft click of the latch, the shift of fabric as Zephyr stood, shouldered the bag, adjusted the strap across his chest.
He paused at the door. I could feel it — the silence that meant he was standing there, deciding whether to say whatever was in his head, weighing the cost of words against the value of whatever they would accomplish.
“You’re welcome, by the way,” he said. Lightly. The tone of a man who had moved five hundred million dollars and was pretending it was no more significant than holding a door.
“I know,” I said.
The door opened and then closed. The sound of it was soft, final, the kind of sound that settled into a room and stayed there.
I stood at the window. The lighter clicked once in my left hand. Open. Held for a count of two. Snapped shut.
The drink was empty. I did not refill it.
Refilling it would have been the next logical step, but logic had limited jurisdiction over the part of my brain that was currently replaying turquoise sparkles on hardwood floor, bare feet, a white T-shirt sliding off one shoulder, and the specific way Zephyr had looked up at me from my desk chair like he belonged there.
He did belong there. That was the problem.
The family had its legs back. Five hundred million dollars, sitting in accounts that had been empty when I took over, returned by a man who treated international finance like a game and my study like an extension of his living room.
I should have been thinking about what that meant.
About restructuring. About which of Geno’s people had taken the money and how many of them were still breathing.
About the conclave, about Alexios, about the fifty-three other problems on the list that didn’t have turquoise toenails attached to them.
I wasn’t thinking about any of that.
I was thinking about the crack in the restraint. The shift. The way it had felt to stand close enough to count the fine lines at the corners of his eyes and not reach for him.
This was a problem. A significant one. The kind of problem that didn’t get solved with knives or threats or the cold silence that had served me for thirty-two years. The kind of problem that got worse the longer I let it sit.
I needed to be sharp. I needed to be careful. The family had legs now, which meant it could move, which meant the enemies would notice, which meant the knives would come out sooner rather than later.
I could not afford to be distracted by turquoise sparkles on hardwood floor.
The lighter clicked. Open. Shut.
I was going to have to solve this soon. Before I solved it the wrong way.
The wrong way looked like my hands on his skin. The wrong way looked like the sound he would make when I got him properly, when I pinned him to that desk and watched that fast, clever mouth go slack with something other than words for once.
The wrong way had a body count attached to it, and the body at the top of the list was mine.
I set the empty glass on the windowsill. Florence spread below me, ancient and patient, and somewhere in this building, Zephyr was doing something with a spreadsheet or a caramel or both.
The lighter clicked one more time. Held the flame. I watched it dance orange against the darkening glass, then I snapped it shut and went back to work.