Chapter Five #2
The first shot isn’t loud. It’s the sound of wood cracking in the next room.
Then a second. The chandelier hums harder and the waiter makes a sound he can’t swallow as he drops dead.
A glass breaks and the Commission man’s hand disappears under the table where he keeps his solution to problems men like him don’t have to solve alone.
Adrian’s palm presses my shoulder. “Down,” he says.
I don’t go down. I’ve never gone down when a man tells me to. The men by the door are moving with precision. Luigi stands, chair back singing against the floor. He raises his hands to show he’s unarmed.
Someone shouts my name. Not the one I gave the island. The one my mother whispered when I had a fever as a girl.
“Bella.” It’s my father.
The table becomes a storm. The first bullet that hits my glass does it at a shallow angle, which means the shooter’s lower than he should be for someone who understands this building. Amateur or arrogant. The second hits a decanter and makes a red mess of the air.
Adrian’s fingers tighten, and my bone complains.
He’s trying to hold me still. Yet, I turn and see it in his face.
Not fear for me. Calculation. The tiny smile he wears when he believes the math has changed in his favor.
The room spins on a point. In it, a truth that’s been waiting in the walls steps out and looks me square in the eye.
My fiancé signed my death before the appetizers.
The knowledge slides into place like a key. I think of the ring and the dotted line the consigliere has placed under my fingers like a leash. Becoming my fiancé, Adrian became my father’s right hand. The commission must want more power than that. They want my seat empty.
Luigi moves. He doesn’t regard me as a man regards a woman who’s ruined his day. He looks like a man who’s measured a room and decided which wall will hold. He comes around the end of the table the way water finds a seam. My father shouts a name that isn’t mine this time.
He’s warning the Morettis off.
The Commission man makes a phone call with his mouth closed. The consigliere pulls a gun that’s never fired and looks surprised by the weight of it.
Adrian speaks to Luigi like a subordinate. “Follow the order, Moretti.”
Glancing around, I search for my father. Anyone to help me. No one hears Adrian’s confession but me and Luigi.
“Isabella,” Luigi says. He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t need to. He holds out his hand like that day in the pool. “Say, yes?”
Adrian tightens his fingers to bruise. I break his grip with a twist. He’s stronger. But I’m quicker. He reaches for my waist and finds the knife I keep stitched into the lining of my dress. The blade kisses his knuckle. He lets go.
The word, yes, catches in my throat as I take Luigi’s hand.
Heat moves up my arm like faith. He doesn’t pull.
He leads. The corridor outside the door is a ribcage of old plaster and newer paint.
The Commission values exits greatly. Luigi’s chosen his well.
He puts his shoulder into the door that sticks and makes it obey.
We go left. Two shots follow, one too high, one too late. We run.
“Was it you?” I ask, breathing hard. “My brother.”
“No,” he says, not slowing. “I took the bullet that should’ve finished him. It missed. Not enough to save him.”
He doesn’t touch my back, and I don’t need him to.
I understand where he will position himself if the world necessitates it.
We hit a service hallway that smells like bleach and lemons.
My heels bite the tile. A boy in a catering jacket flattens himself to the wall and counts his prayers.
Luigi says nothing to him. He doesn’t have to.
We turn toward the stairs because men who plan the demise of women always forget that women can run.
At the landing he checks sight lines the way a man checks a lover’s mouth, quick and precise. He nods once and we take the last flight down into a vestibule where the air tastes like stone and river. A door ahead. An alarm on it that any other day would inconvenience a different kind of thief.
“Cover your ears,” he says.
I do. The siren cuts the air open. He pushes me through and the river knocks cold into my lungs.
The bank takes us like a promise. We don’t stop running until the alley under the bridge swallows us.
He leans me against old brick and sets his palm near my head and looks down at my hands to see if they’re shaking.
They are. He nods as if I’ve answered him correctly.
“Your fiancé,” he says. “He paid for this.”
I don’t pretend to be surprised. “Yes.” It’s the only thing that makes sense.
His jaw changes shape. A quiet violence moves through his face and sits down. “All right.”
All right means he moves the target. All right means the order in his ear won’t be the one his hands follow.
Sirens argue with the river. The city pushes busy against our skin, too many people living out the rest of their day. He stands in the shadow and does math I can’t see. His tie’s missing. His shirt carries a smear of someone else’s blood. He’s beautiful the way a weapon’s beautiful.
“Do you trust me?” he asks.
I understand it for what it is. A question punctuated by a bullet.
“Yes,” I say.
He exhales once, the kind of breath that lets a man decide something he won’t uncross later. He takes my hand again. We go deeper into the city, the truce dissolving behind us like sugar in black coffee, the name I carry turning from crest to target.
The heir’s chair is left behind and my place is now in a shadow next to a man I shouldn’t want. My feet find their rhythm beside his.
We don’t speak of love. We don’t speak of feuds. The river keeps our silence. Ahead, a building waits. We go through a door that I’ve never used. He knows the keycode. I don’t ask how.
He reaches, punches in the numbers, and the green light blinks fast, like my heart beating.