Chapter 24
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Luca
Bruno lifts two fingers from his glass across the room.
Vittoria is telling Gemma a story about her wedding, her hands moving fast, and Gemma listens with her shoulders lower than I've seen them all night. I lean in close enough to catch the smell of her. Her breath catches at the nearness. I note it and don't touch her.
"I have to step out," I say against her ear. "If you need anything, find Liam. He's by the bar and he won't leave this room."
She nods once. Then she turns back to Vittoria.
Bruno is already moving toward the back corridor. The music thins behind us.
Dante peels off the wall by the corridor and falls in behind me without a word. Good. Not just the two of us, then.
The room at the end is an office. A desk, two leather chairs.
Cesare Orsini sits in one of the chairs with a cane between his knees.
Vico stands behind his father's shoulder.
Three Orsini guards spread along the far wall, jackets cut loose over their holsters.
Four of ours are already inside — two by the door, two flanking the desk. Everyone armed.
Bruno crosses to the desk and leans against it instead of sitting. It puts him higher than Cesare and he knows it.
"Nice party," Cesare says. His voice is thin but it carries. "Good food. Beautiful bride." He turns his head and looks at me for the first time. "Your man cleans up well."
"He does," Bruno says.
"I've been sitting out there for an hour," Cesare says, "watching the flowers and the photographer and the cake, and I keep coming back to one feeling. This marriage exists so that you and I become associates. That's all it is. A ring bought for a handshake."
Bruno laughs. It's a real laugh, low and unhurried, and it changes the temperature of the room. Two of the Orsini guards shift their weight. I watch their hands. Nothing yet.
"Cesare." Bruno sets his glass down on the desk.
"You've been in this business longer than I've been alive, so I'll give you the respect of speaking plainly.
You already know what the last two years did for us.
We hold more than we've ever held. More territory, more product, more friends in more rooms. We don't need Milwaukee.
Milwaukee is convenient." He spreads his hands.
"So here's where we stand. You, your son and your men walk out of here tonight unharmed, whatever you decide.
And if you don't want a deal, then you don't have one.
I'll drink your health at the door and we'll never speak again. "
Silence. Cesare's thumb moves once over the cane's head, back and forth, a man rubbing at a thought.
Vico doesn't wait for his father.
"Convenient," he says. He steps out from behind the chair, and I mark the distance between him and Bruno.
"That's a good word. It's very convenient that she ended up with you.
Of all the families in this country, she lands in a Sartori apartment, in a Sartori bed, with a Sartori ring on her finger — right after that bastard Dominik opened his mouth and sold whose daughter she is. "
"Careful, Vico," Bruno says. His voice stays pleasant. That's the dangerous version.
"I'm being careful." Vico's jaw works. "I'm being very careful, because my father is sick and everyone in this city knows it, and suddenly his blood is wearing another family's name. So I'll ask the question he's too polite to ask. Did you know?"
Cesare hasn't moved. He watches me over his folded hands, and his eyes are the same pale, patient eyes I felt on Gemma all through the reception. Whatever I say next, the old man will weigh it against every second I stood beside her tonight.
I unbutton my jacket and let it hang open. Slow. So every gun in the room sees my hands doing it.
"You want to talk about my wife," I say, "then you'll fucking talk to me."
Vico closes half the distance between us. The smirk comes first, then the question.
"Did you know who she was when you touched her?"
I walk toward Vico until there's an arm's length between us. He's younger than me, heavier through the chest, and his right hand hangs loose near his hip. I keep my eyes on his face and let him watch mine.
"No," I say. "I didn't know a fucking thing when I met her.
She was a woman with a kid and men on her heels.
That's all." I let that sit for a second.
"But hear the rest of it. If I'd known exactly whose blood she carried, I'd have done the same goddamn thing.
I'd have kept her close and I wouldn't have given a single shit what the Orsini name thought about it. "
It's the half-truth Bruno and I built three days ago, and it comes out of my mouth clean because most of it is true.
Vico's smirk dies. His shoulders roll forward and his weight loads onto his front foot. I read the punch before he's decided to throw it. My hands stay open at my sides. Let him.
"Vico."
One word from the chair. The old man doesn't raise his voice and doesn't need to. Vico stops with his jaw grinding, breathing through his nose, and steps back behind his father's shoulder like a dog called off a fence.
Cesare looks at me for a long moment. His hands rest folded on the cane, spotted and thin.
"Good answer," he says. "Rude. But good."
I say nothing.
"Here's what I want." He shifts in the chair and the cane taps the floor once. "After tonight, I meet her again. Two more times, maybe three. Dinners, small things, nothing that frightens her. Before anyone tells her who I am, I want to examine her first."
Examine. He says it the way a man says it about a horse he's thinking of buying. Checking the teeth. A chill crawls up the back of my neck, and I want to punch his face, so I keep it still.
She's been alive twenty-eight years. He's known where she was for two of them.
He watched her scrub tables, and he never crossed the street.
Now he's dying and he wants dinners. The question sits right behind my teeth — why the fuck do you want her close now, old man?
— but I swallow it, because a question like that in this room tonight buys nothing and costs everything.
"She has a child," I say instead. "Nina doesn't come to those meetings until I say she does."
Cesare tilts his head. "Agreed."
Bruno pushes off the desk. "Then we have a deal."
"We have a deal." Cesare plants the cane and stands, slow, and one of his men steps in to take his elbow.
He waves the man off and rises on his own.
"Four days. My property. We'll sit down and talk about the association properly — docks, terms, all of it.
Bring your lawyers if it makes you feel safe. "
"Four days," Bruno says. He offers his hand and Cesare takes it. The shake is brief and dry.
The old man turns and comes to me. He's a head shorter.
"You'll be watched," he says. "Everywhere.
My people will know when you eat, when you sleep, when you get up in the night to piss.
You won't see them and it won't matter." His eyes steady.
"If I find out that girl was forced into this marriage — that she signed under a gun she couldn't see — then you and I will have a different conversation. You won't like how it ends."
"Then watch," I say.
Cesare studies me one more second before he turns and walks out with his men folding in around him.
Vico stays. He looks at me for three seconds. Then he follows his father out.
Dante moves up beside me. "That went well," he says. "Nobody's dead."
Bruno picks up his glass and drains it. "Four days, Luca. You heard him. Every hour between now and then, you're a man in love." He sets the glass down and the click of it on the desk is louder than it should be. "Go back out there and dance with your wife."
I button my jacket and go to find her.
Gemma
Vittoria is halfway through a story about her birthday cake collapsing when her phone buzzes. She checks the screen and her whole face changes, softens.
"I have to take this. I'm sorry, I've been waiting on this call all day." She squeezes my arm before she goes. "Amanda, finally. Tell me everything—"
Then she's gone, weaving through the crowd with the phone pressed to her ear, and I'm alone in the middle of two hundred strangers.
Alone is the wrong word. There are eyes on me from every direction, which is worse than alone.
I keep my glass level and turn in a slow half circle like I'm admiring the flowers, and what I'm actually doing is looking for a corner to hide in.
That's when I spot Liam near the bar, standing so straight he could be holding the wall up instead of the other way around.
He's the most familiar face in this room. That should probably worry me, that the person I trust most at my wedding is another criminal, but I've stopped grading my life on a curve. I cross to him and plant myself at his elbow.
He glances down at me. His eyes do a quick pass over my face, then the room behind me, then back.
"Everything all right?" he says.
"No. But I don't need anything right now."
He considers that, and his shoulders come down half an inch.
"Fair enough," he says.
"Can I ask you something?" I say.
"You may."
"How often do you people do this? Weddings like this one. Marriages like—" I gesture vaguely at myself, the dress, all of it.
Liam takes a slow drink. When he lowers the glass, there's an actual smile on his face, small.
"You could not begin to imagine," he says. "In the past few years I've had to buy twenty-five new suits. Weddings and funerals. At this point my tailor sends me a Christmas card."
He delivers it like a report, and that's exactly what breaks me.
The laugh comes up out of nowhere, too loud for the room, and I clap my free hand over my mouth but it keeps going.
Weddings and funerals. Twenty-five suits.
It shouldn't be funny. It's the least funny fact I've heard all week, but I can't stop laughing.
I'm about to slip so I grab his forearm to catch myself. Solid as a fence post. He doesn't move, just lets me hang on while I wheeze.
"Sorry," I manage. "Sorry, I don't know why that—the Christmas card—"
"It's a very nice card," he says, which nearly kills me again.
Then the air changes on my other side.
Luca stands there. He isn't looking at me. He's looking at Liam, at my hand on Liam's sleeve.
I let go of Liam's arm. My laugh dies in my throat with nowhere to go.
Liam looks at Luca. Then at me. Then back at Luca, and the smile turns into a smirk, slow. He straightens his tie with one hand.
"I'll leave the happy couple alone," he says, as he sets his glass on the bar and walks off without hurrying, like a man who has just won a bet with himself.
Luca watches him go.
"He's supposed to be watching the fucking exits," he says.
"I came to him because Vittoria had a phone-call. He didn't do anything wrong. He was making me laugh."
"I heard." His eyes come down to mine at last. "The whole goddamn room heard."
I can't tell if he's angry at Liam, at me, or at the fact that I laughed at all.