Chapter Seventeen
~ Zephyr ~
I had a pastry in one hand and the best cup of tea I’d had in six months in the other, which meant I was operating at approximately ninety-seven percent of my optimal functionality and the other three percent was reserved for observations about the Ligurian Sea being unfairly pretty and the fact that I was barefoot on a stone terrace that cost more than most people’s yearly salary.
The terrace stretched wide and pale under the midday light, warm stone under my turquoise-sparkled toes, the kind of stone that had been absorbing Mediterranean sun for centuries and was now generously sharing the wealth with anyone standing on it.
Below us, the coast dropped away in a series of cliffs and coves that the tourism board would have murdered for, all olive groves and cypress and the particular blue of the Ligurian Sea that looked like someone had taken the concept of water and dialed it to eleven.
Nico Sabatino sat to my right with his knees drawn up and his blond hair catching the light. He was the quiet one of the three of us, which was not saying much because I’d been talking for approximately seven minutes without pausing for breath.
Nicky Borelli had spent the last three of those minutes trying to determine whether the pastry filling was apricot or peach through a process of enthusiastic consumption that bordered on forensic.
“It’s definitely apricot,” Nicky said, licking his thumb with the focus of someone conducting a peer-reviewed study. “The tartness profile is all wrong for peach. Peach is sweeter, rounder. This is pointy.”
“I have never heard a pastry described as ‘pointy,’” I said. “I’m adding it to my vocabulary and you can’t stop me.”
“You should.” Nicky grinned. The man had the kind of grin that made you want to like him even when he was wrong, which was inconvenient because he was usually right about things that didn’t matter and wrong about things that did, and I found this combination both irritating and deeply endearing.
“Pointy pastries, round pastries, the whole geometry of baked goods. Vinnie thinks I’m insane. I consider it a professional interest.”
“Vinnie thinks everyone is insane,” Nico said mildly.
He’d been nursing the same cup of tea for ten minutes, which either meant he was a slow drinker or he was the kind of person who treated beverages as background rather than foreground, and I strongly suspected the latter.
“He just arranges us on a spectrum. I’m somewhere in the middle. Nicky is off the chart.”
“Off the chart in a good way,” Nicky clarified.
“There is no good way to be off the chart,” Nico said. “That’s the definition of off the chart. The chart has given up.”
I laughed. The sound came out warmer than I’d expected, which was its own kind of data point. I did not make friends easily. I did not make friends at all, typically. Friends were liabilities in a world where the people who knew you best were the people who could hurt you worst.
I had built my entire adult life around the principle that the only person I could reliably count on was the one I saw in the mirror, and even then the jury was occasionally out.
Statistically speaking, making friends at a mafia conclave was approximately the dumbest thing I could do with my afternoon.
And yet…
“So Luca,” I said, reaching for another pastry because the plate was there and I had opinions about pastry plates that went unaddressed.
“The man speaks in paragraphs of silence. I’ve had conversations with him where he said four words and I walked away feeling like I’d been briefed for a military operation. ”
Nico’s mouth curved. The curve was small, warm, and genuine.
“He says more in the things he doesn’t say.
” Nico’s voice was quiet. Earnest. The earnestness of someone who had spent a decade separated from the person he loved and was now making up for lost time by paying very close attention.
“It took me a while to learn the language. There’s a difference between his ‘I’m thinking’ silence and his ‘someone is about to have a very bad day’ silence.
The latter involves his left thumb. Don’t ask me why. It just does.”
“Vinnie is the opposite,” Nicky said, gesturing with a half-eaten pastry that was shedding apricot filling onto the terrace stone with the casual profligacy of a man who had never worried about cleaning bills.
“The man treats conversation as performance art. You’ve seen him.
He’ll talk about Sardinian coastline preservation for twelve minutes and what he’s actually doing is establishing that he knows more about your business than you do, and also he would like another drink, and also the person standing behind you is carrying a gun that he clocked seven seconds after walking into the room.
It’s exhausting. I love him, but it’s exhausting. ”
I swallowed a bite of pastry and reached for my tea. The warmth of it hit my throat, bergamot and something darker underneath, and I savored it the way I savored most good things — briefly, thoroughly, with the awareness that good things were temporary and the temporary was what made them good.
“Ari runs on controlled fury and caramels he leaves on nightstands without acknowledging he left them there.” The words came out before I’d fully decided to say them, which was becoming a pattern and not one I was inclined to break.
“The lighter clicking is his thinking noise. The caramels are his apology language. Don’t tell him I told you that.
He’d deny it, and then he’d stop leaving caramels, and I have a vested interest in the caramels continuing. ”
The terrace went quiet. Not the bad kind of quiet. The kind that happened when two people who knew exactly what I’d just said exchanged a look that contained several paragraphs of subtext I was not invited to read.
Nico looked at Nicky. Nicky looked at Nico. Then they both looked at me.
“It’s a professional observation,” I said evenly.
Neither of them believed me. I could see it in their faces — the skepticism of people who had just heard something true delivered as a lie and were now deciding whether to call it.
I ate another pastry. Did not elaborate. The Ligurian Sea did the elaborating for me, all that blue stretching to the horizon like the world had decided that today, at least, beauty was not something that needed to be earned.
I should make more friends, I thought. The kind of friends who sit on terraces and eat pastries and do not ask you why you’re bleeding.
The kind who laugh at your jokes even when the jokes are bad, which mine frequently were.
The kind who look at you the way Nico was looking at Nicky right now, like the person across from them was a gift they had not expected to receive and were now determined to unwrap carefully.
Statistically inadvisable. Professionally irresponsible. I was adding it to the list of things I was going to do anyway.
The first black dot appeared against the pale sky while Nicky was mid-sentence about Vinnie’s cufflink collection. A speck. Then another. Moving fast. Too fast. Too low.
I set my tea down.
Those were drones.
The thought arrived with the flat certainty of something my brain had already processed and my body was now catching up to. I was on my feet before the sentence had fully formed, the plate of pastries rocking, tea sloshing over the rim of my cup onto stone that would not care.
Tony D’Angelo blew through the terrace doors at a dead run. His face was set, his voice carrying with the clipped authority of a man who had already made his calculations and was now implementing them.
“Safe room. Now. Everyone move.”
I did not ask questions. Questions were decorative. Movement was functional.
I grabbed Nico’s wrist with my left hand and Nicky’s with my right and pulled. Hard. The kind of pull that did not allow for discussion, for hesitation, for the half-second of confusion that got people killed in situations where half-seconds were currency.
We hit the threshold of the salon doors at a pace that would have qualified as rude under any other circumstances.
Behind us, the terrace made a sound — a low, gathering crack, like something large and structural having a very bad opinion about its afternoon — and then the world went white-hot and loud.
The explosion hit the stone terrace with the specific violence of something that had been designed to break what it touched.
Heat pushed at our backs. Debris rattled against the salon windows.
The sound was the kind that lived in your teeth afterward, a bass note that started in your sternum and worked its way outward.
We were running. My bare feet on marble, Nico was beside me with his eyes wide and his breath coming fast. Nicky was on my other side with his chestnut hair wild and his expression shifted from warm to something harder and more present.
Tony tore past us going the opposite direction. One glance — honey eyes sharp, moving with the focused speed of a man who had somewhere to be and the somewhere was not the safe room — and I processed two things in the space of a heartbeat:
The safe room was not where Tony was running.
And Tony had decided the threat required him personally, which meant the threat was bad, which meant the safe room was a secondary concern behind the more immediate problem of not being where the next explosion happened.
I made a split-second calculation. The corridor ahead branched. Left toward what was probably the safe room, right toward a section of the house I hadn’t mapped.
Third door on the right was a closet — I’d clocked it on the way in, solid oak, no windows, the kind of door that had been built when people still believed in doors as structural features rather than decorative ones.
Not a great option.
The best available option.