The Devils in the Details

Mafia Mayhem: The Italian Connection 3

I was the illegitimate son of Geno Romano, thrust into a leadership role I never wanted. Disgraced and penniless, my family’s legacy hung by a thread. A cold, calculating mind, I navigated a treacherous world, severing ties with my father’s homophobic old guard and replacing them with a loyal crew I could trust. Reclaiming my family’s power was non-negotiable, even if it meant burning bridges along the way.

Enter Zephyr Kontos, an eccentric whirlwind hired to untangle the chaos left behind by Geno. Captivated by the young man’s brilliance and beauty, I felt an intense pull toward him, a stark contrast to my usual ruthlessness. The chemistry between us crackled with sexual tension, but I knew Zephyr's presence could paint a target on his back. When Zephyr permitted our connection to deepen, my possessiveness kicked in, compelling me to protect the young man at all costs.

Conflict brewed when my Uncle Alexios and cousin Theo challenged my authority, believing me too weak to lead. Alexios seethed at the thought of an illegitimate son in charge, while Theo’s simmering obsession with Zephyr turned dangerous. When Alexios and Theo strike, I was forced to reveal my ruthlessness, proving that I was not just a pawn of the devil—I was the devil.

Warning: Gay erotic romance. The material in this book contains explicit sexual content that is intended for mature audiences only. All characters involved are adults capable of consent, are over the age of eighteen, and are willing participants.

Copyright

The Devils in the Details (Mafia Mayhem: The Italian Connection 3)

Copyright © Aja Foxx, 2026

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Cover Design by Allenari Book Covers

All art and logo copyright © 2026 by Aja Foxx

First Electronic Edition August 2026

All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via the internet or any other means, electronic or print, without permission from the authors. Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000. Please purchase only authorized electronic or print editions and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted material. Your support of the author’s rights and livelihood is appreciated.

This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Books by Aja Foxx

About the Author

The Devils in the Details

Mafia Mayhem: The Italian Connection 3

AJA FOXX

Copyright © 2026

Chapter One

~ Aristoteles ~

The weight of three centuries pressed down from every limestone block of the Romano villa. I’d walked these halls before, but never like this—never as the man who owned them, rather than the bastard the family kept in the wings. The main corridor stretched ahead of me, wide-plank floors creaking under my boots in a rhythm that sounded like acknowledgment.

Or maybe a warning.

Leon was a half-step behind my right shoulder, where he’d been for years. I didn’t need to check to know he was there. His breathing was steady, his gaze scanning the same rooms I was scanning, but from a different angle—security first, decorations somewhere down the list.

The silence between us was comfortable. We’d built it on the docks, in the dark, in places where talking got you killed.

The ceilings in the formal rooms soared high enough that our footsteps echoed. Voices carried. My father Geno Romano had probably liked that—the way a quiet word could fill a room, make a threat sound bigger than it was. It meant every conversation was public whether you wanted it to be or not.

I didn’t like it.

Gold and burgundy tapestries lined the library walls, faded to the color of old blood. Nobody had touched them in years. Dust sat on the shelves in a fine layer that caught the light from the arched windows.

Through the glass, I could see the formal gardens—or what was left of them. Ragged hedgerows, gravel paths disappearing under weeds, late-season roses hanging on by stubbornness more than anything else. The lavender beds had gone wild, spilling over the stone borders like they’d given up on being contained.

It smelled of dust and history and something else underneath—lemon oil, wood smoke from the deep stone fireplaces, and the faint tang of neglect.

Staff appeared in doorways and at the ends of corridors as we passed. Housekeepers, groundskeepers, security men whose faces I recognized from Geno’s time.

They stood at attention, backs straight, eyes forward. Wary. Every one of them clocked and filed away. The older ones looked at me and saw a dock worker who’d gotten lucky. The younger ones looked at me and saw whatever Leon had told them to see.

I didn’t care what they saw. I cared what they did.

The study was the last room on the east wing. I stopped in the doorway. The smell hit me before anything else—that expensive, wrong cologne Geno had worn, something with too much cedar and not enough honesty.

It lingered in the fabric of the leather chair, in the curtains, in the air itself like the man had stamped his presence into the walls and the reparation payments hadn’t been enough to scrub it out.

“All of this needs to be replaced before Mother arrives.” She needed no reminders of the man that had betrayed her.

My lighter flicked open in my fist. Closed. Open. The tiny flame caught the light from the window, held it for a second, then died.

Behind me, Leon was silent. He knew better than to fill the space.

I moved on.

The glass-roofed atrium came next. The indoor pool lay still and dark, the underwater lights switched off. At night, Leon had told me, the whole room glowed blue from below, turning the water into something alive. I made a mental note to see it. Not for the beauty. For the security angle—all that glass, all those sight lines.

Pretty meant vulnerable in my world.

The basement corridor was colder. Bare stone walls, fluorescent strips overhead casting everything in that flat, institutional light that made even healthy people look sick.

The armory door stood open at the far end, racks of weapons visible inside. Beyond it, the cells. I didn’t go in. I didn’t need to. The smell of cold earth, damp limestone, and a hint of copper told me everything about what those rooms had been used for.

The fifteen-car garage was the one concession to pure function I could respect. Modern steel roll doors, concrete floor, the kind of space built for utility rather than show.

A row of vehicles sat under covers—Geno’s collection, most of it. I’d have Leon move them. Sell what we didn’t need. The family was bleeding money and sentimentality was a luxury I couldn’t afford.

We finished the circuit and came back to the main hall. The wrought-iron staircase rose overhead, dark walnut banister worn smooth from generations of hands.

Under it, the staff had assembled. Two dozen people lined up in silence, waiting for the man who’d inherited a broken family with a ruined name to tell them what came next.

I looked at their faces. I looked at Leon, standing at my shoulder like he’d been carved there. The lighter was warm in my palm. I didn’t flick it.

Not yet.

The staff didn’t fidget. They didn’t whisper. They stood in their lines under the wrought-iron staircase with the kind of stillness that only comes from genuine fear, and I respected that.

Fear was honest.

I let the silence stretch. Let them feel it. The main hall was cold, the kind of cold that seeped up from stone floors and settled in your joints if you stood still too long. Nobody shifted their weight. Nobody coughed.

Good.

When I spoke, my voice stayed low. I didn’t raise it. I never needed to. “Three rules.” The words carried in the high ceiling, found their own echo. “Absolute loyalty to this house. Absolute silence about its business. Zero contact with anyone from Geno Romano’s inner circle.”

I paused. Let it land.

“The front gate is open. Anyone unwilling to comply, walk through it. Now.”

Silence. No shuffling. No exchanged glances. No movement toward the door. Twenty-four people standing exactly where they’d been standing, eyes forward, breathing controlled.

I looked at each face. Held each gaze for the count of two. Some held steady. Some dropped. One of the older groundskeepers—a man with silver at his temples and the weathered hands of someone who’d worked soil his whole life—met my eyes without flinching. I filed him away.

Useful.

Nobody moved for the door.

Acceptance, then. Or the appearance of it.

I’d take either for now.

I nodded once. Leon stepped forward, handed a sheet of paper to the head housekeeper—a woman in her fifties with a tight bun and the wary eyes of someone who’d survived multiple regime changes. She took it without looking at it. Smart.

“New rotations,” Leon said. His voice was flat, informational. Nobody asked questions.

I turned and walked toward the study. Leon fell in beside me. The hinged panel in the study wall swung open at a touch, revealing the security office on the other side.

The contrast was jarring. One side of the wall: dark wood, brass fittings, leather-bound books, the lingering ghost of Geno’s cologne. The other side: matte screens glowing blue under low light, keyboards, the hum of servers. Two worlds pressed together, neither comfortable in the other’s skin.

Leon settled at the console. His fingers moved over the keyboard without looking. Camera feeds populated the center screen—the front gate, the perimeter wall, the garage, the lake path. Personnel files stacked on the right monitor, contact logs on the left.

I took the desk chair. Rolled my sleeves to mid-forearm. The silver watch caught the blue light. The ring on my finger—black onyx set in silver—weighed nothing and everything.

The ledgers were leather-bound, heavy, ink-spattered in places where someone had been careless or rushed. I opened the first one. Then the second. The third.

Shell companies. Dozens of them, layered through Cyprus, the Caymans, Luxembourg. Empty. Drained in the months before Geno’s death, money moved somewhere I couldn’t follow through the paper trail. Offshore accounts with seven-digit balances whittled down to five, then four, then zero. Transactions dated the week before the bombing, the week before the sanctions, the week before everything fell apart.

Fifty million dollars in reparation payments. D’Angelo, Borelli, Sabatino. Fifteen million already paid, bleeding the family’s liquid reserves dry. Thirty-five million outstanding, chained to payment schedules that gave us eighteen months before the next installment came due.

The debts didn’t wait politely. They crowded the margins of every page, interest compounding in red ink that looked almost cheerful against the yellowed paper. Shipping contracts defaulted. Protection rackets scaled back after Geno’s men got sloppy. A wine import business that should have been printing money, running at a loss because the distributor had been skimming for years and nobody had noticed.

Or nobody had cared.

My lighter clicked open. Closed. Open. The tiny flame held steady for a count of three before I snapped it shut.

The study grew colder as the night deepened. The ancient radiator under the window clanked once and fell silent. Outside, the mountain wind picked up, driving against the glass with a sound like someone testing the locks.

Leon worked through the personnel files. Every guard, every driver, every man who’d carried a weapon for Geno Romano. He cross-referenced against contact logs, against shift rotations, against the dates money had started disappearing from accounts.

His expression didn’t change. Nothing surprised him. Nothing surprised me, either. Betrayal was the oldest currency in this business, and Geno had spent it like water.

“Three,” Leon said finally. Not a question. A statement.

I nodded.

He made a note. Moved to the next file.

The stack of ledgers grew. I worked through them methodically, page by page, the numbers getting worse the deeper I went. By midnight, my coffee had gone cold and my shoulders had locked into the kind of stiffness that came from too many hours in one position. I didn’t stop. Stopping meant admitting how bad it was, and I wasn’t ready to do that yet.

The lighter clicked. Open, shut, open. The rhythm of it filled the spaces between Leon’s keystrokes, between the turning of pages, between each new revelation of how thoroughly the family I’d inherited had been hollowed out from the inside.

At some point, a servant appeared in the doorway with a fresh pot of coffee and a plate of sandwiches. She set them on the corner of the desk, touched my shoulder once—brief, warm, gone—and left without a word.

I drank the coffee, ate half a sandwich without tasting it, and went back to the numbers.

By two in the morning, the cold had worked its way into my hands. The study felt like the inside of a tomb. Leon’s screen cast the only light, blue and steady, illuminating the stack of ledgers and the growing list of problems neither of us had said out loud yet.

We didn’t need to. The numbers said enough.

The mountain had gone fully dark by the time we finished the list. No moon. Just the black bulk of the terrain against a starless sky, and the estate windows glowing amber in the distance like the place was burning from the inside out.

Three guards. Loyalty logs clean as a surgeon’s blade, every call and text and shift rotation tracing back to Alexios Romano’s circle with the kind of precision that made the betrayal almost admirable.

Almost.

I handled the first one myself. Found him at the east perimeter post, hunched in a fleece jacket with a radio crackling at his hip. Young. Maybe twenty-five. Dark hair, nervous eyes that didn’t know how to lie yet. He stood when he saw me coming, back straightening on instinct.

“Boss.” The word came out steadier than he expected.

I gave him points for that.

I didn’t waste time on speeches. “Your last shift was two hours ago. You’re relieved.”

He blinked. “I’m on until six—”

“Not anymore.” I handed him an envelope. Cash, enough for a bus ticket and three months’ rent somewhere that wasn’t here. More than he deserved. “Front gate. Don’t come back.”

The second one was in the garage, wiping down a Mercedes he had no business touching. Older. Forty, maybe. Salt-and-pepper stubble, the kind of calm that came from having made his peace with whatever happened next.

He took the envelope without opening it, nodded once, and then walked to the gate without looking back.

Smart man.

The third put up a fight. Or tried to. Big guy, former military by the way he carried himself, hands that had seen real work. He was in the guardhouse when I found him, feet up on the desk, a paperback novel open in his lap that he didn’t bother to hide. Something by Steinbeck.

I almost liked him for that.

“You’re Alexios’s man,” I said.

Not a question.

He looked at me. Really looked, the way few people did—taking in the scar, the tattoos, the cold set of my mouth. Then he smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile. “Geno would have shot me for reading on duty.”

“Geno’s dead.” I didn’t move. Didn’t need to. “Walk or I throw you through that window. Your choice.”

He walked. Slowly. Deliberately. Making sure I knew he was leaving because he wanted to, not because I’d asked. I let him have the fiction. It cost me nothing.

Two others got reassigned. Sent to the lake path, the stables—places where they could be watched without being useful. Leon made the notations. Updated the rotation sheets. The old guard’s homophobia and their nostalgia for Geno’s brutality had just become someone else’s problem.

At three in the morning, Leon sat at the security console and sent the word. Six men. My dock crew. The ones I’d built from nothing, from the fringes of the family nobody else wanted, men who’d worked alongside me in the cold and the dark when Geno’s name still meant something and mine meant less than nothing. They’d come.

They always came.

The old guard was finished. Not with ceremony. Not with fanfare. With a few keystrokes and the quiet certainty that by morning, the men who’d been loyal to Geno would be outnumbered by the men who were loyal to me.

It wasn’t pretty, but it would work.

Dawn came slow and gray over the eastern ridge. First light caught the cracked tiles of the terrace, the overgrown formal garden with its wild lavender and stubborn roses, the pale limestone walls of the villa that belonged to me now in every way that mattered.

I stood at the study window with a cup of coffee that had gone cold an hour ago. The list was on the desk behind me—immediate problems in Leon’s tight handwriting, ranked by urgency. Reparations. Debts. Security gaps. Personnel holes. A shipping contract in Genoa that needed renegotiating by the end of the month or we lost the port access entirely.

Fifty-four items.

I’d memorized them by four in the morning.

The lighter clicked in my palm. Open, shut, open. The rhythm of it matched my pulse, steady and patient.

Outside, a groundskeeper moved through the formal garden with shears, cutting back the worst of the weeds. An old man. One of the ones who’d met my eyes without dropping them.

I watched him work. Watched the way the light changed as the sun cleared the ridge, turning the gray to gold, then to the hard white clarity of full morning.

The estate woke around me—kitchen noises, the distant hum of a vacuum, a horse whickering from the stables. Life continuing. The machinery of the place grinding on regardless of who sat in the study.

It would have been easy to hate it. To look at these walls and these gardens and these people and see nothing but three centuries of a name that had never claimed me, a legacy built on blood I wasn’t supposed to share. To burn it down out of spite and walk away clean.

But that wasn’t why I’d taken the seat.

My mother had spent decades raising a son alone on almost nothing, of work-worn hands and quiet dignity and the kind of strength that didn’t need to announce itself. She deserved better. She deserved something that lasted.

The families watching—D’Angelo, Borelli, Sabatino—would take their reparations and their pound of flesh and they would wait. They would watch to see if the bastard son could rebuild what the legitimate one had broken. They would judge. They would calculate. They would decide whether I was worth the risk of an alliance or just a temporary problem solving itself.

I didn’t care what they decided.

Geno Romano had never claimed me, had never acknowledged me, had let me work his docks and bleed for his family and carry his name without ever offering the simple courtesy of looking me in the eye and saying the word son.

I didn’t need him anymore. I didn’t need his approval. I didn’t need his legacy.

I needed these grounds. This house. These walls. Not for what they were. For what they could be—something built for my mother rather than extracted from the world. Something that lasted. Something worth having.

Whatever it cost.

The lighter snapped shut. I set it on the windowsill and picked up the cold coffee. Drank it down in one long swallow, tasting nothing but the bitterness and the decision settled behind it.

Behind me, on the desk, the list waited. Fifty-four problems. One plan, barely formed, taking shape in the space between heartbeats.

I grabbed my lighter and turned from the window. The mountain estate spread below me, flawed and beautiful and mine now in all the ways that mattered.

Time to get to work.

Dawn light filtered through the arched window in pale bars, cutting across the main study desk where I’d been sitting for the better part of two hours. Open ledgers formed a half-moon around me, financial statements scattered between them like confetti after a bad party.

I’d stopped seeing numbers about an hour ago. Now I was just tracking patterns, the way blood finds the low point in a floor.

Leon stood at the side table under a single desk lamp, its glow throwing his profile into sharp relief against the darker study wall. He worked through expense reports with the methodical patience of a man disarming a bomb—each page lifted, examined, set aside.

His hands were steady. They were always steady. I’d seen those hands break a man’s jaw and then make a perfect cup of coffee five minutes later without a tremor.

The silence between us was the good kind. Productive. The kind built on years of knowing when to talk and when to let the work speak for itself.

He paused. A stained invoice caught between two fingers, coffee ring on the corner, something handwritten in the margin in ink that had bled. He held it up to the light, squinted, then set it down with more care than the document deserved.

“Boss.” His voice was flat. Informational. “This mountain of paperwork is too much. Someone needs to take it off our plates. Sort it. Keep calls and schedules straight.”

I leaned back in the chair. The leather creaked. My lighter flicked open in my palm, held the flame for a count of two, then snapped shut. Open. Shut. The rhythm of it filled the space where a response should have been.

I rubbed my forehead with my free hand. The scar there was old, raised slightly, a ridge my fingers found by habit.

“In the mafia?” The question came out lower than I’d intended, almost amused. The idea was absurd on its face. Since when did crime lords hire administrative assistants?

“Even a crime boss needs support.” Leon didn’t smile. Leon never smiled. But something in his tone suggested he’d been sitting on this argument for a while, waiting for the right moment to deploy it. “An assistant. A secretary. Someone discreet with no ties to these families.”

He had a point.

I hated that he had a point.

The paperwork was drowning us. Calls went unanswered. Schedules conflicted. The shipping contract in Genoa needed a signature by Friday or we lost the port

I’d already missed two calls from the distributor because nobody was manning the phone during the hours I was in meetings or handling terminations or doing any of the hundred other things that actually kept this family from collapsing.

I watched a dust mote drift across the open ledger in front of me. It caught the dawn light, turned gold, hung suspended for a moment, then vanished into the shadow of the page. Temporary. Weightless. Gone.

I nodded once. “Find someone reliable. Civilian if possible. No family baggage.”

Leon picked up a pen. Jotted a note on the margin of the expense report—quick, efficient, the handwriting as tight and controlled as the rest of him. Then he began sliding ledgers into neat piles, aligning their edges with the precision of someone who couldn’t stand disorder even when the world was falling apart.

I stood and crossed the room to the window again. The terraced grounds spread below me, morning mist clinging to the lower slopes, the lake a sheet of still silver in the distance.

From here, the estate looked almost peaceful, almost whole. It was the kind of view that made you forget the rot underneath until you opened the wrong ledger or talked to the wrong guard.

The weight of delegation settled across my shoulders like something physical. I wasn’t good at it. I’d built my crew on the docks by doing everything myself first, by being the first man through the door and the last one out, by carrying the load until my back broke and then carrying it anyway.

Trusting someone I hadn’t vetted personally, someone who hadn’t earned it in blood and darkness—it went against every instinct I had, but instincts were for survival. This was for building.

Different muscle group.

Behind me, Leon’s pen scratched across paper. The desk lamp threw his shadow against the wall, enlarged and steady, a dark companion to the man drafting what was probably the world’s most cautious job description. Discreet. Reliable. No family connections. Willing to work for a man who’d inherited a broken crime family with a ruined name, millions in debt, and fifty-four immediate problems.

Good luck finding that candidate.

I turned from the window. The study felt different in the full light—less tomb, more office. The lingering ghost of Geno’s cologne had faded overnight, replaced by the simpler smells of old paper and cold coffee and the faint herbal trace of whatever cleaning product the housekeeper had used on the desk.

One problem solved. Fifty-three to go.

Leon looked up. “I’ll have something by end of day.”

I nodded. Didn’t thank him. Didn’t need to.

The lighter clicked shut in my palm. I slipped it into my pocket and reached for the next ledger.

Chapter Two

~ Zephyr ~

The caramel was stuck to my knee again, which was exactly where caramels went to die in my apartment. I peeled it off, considered the ethics of eating something that had been fused to my skin for twenty minutes, and decided ethics were for people with better snack discipline.

Back in my mouth it went.

Sweet. Salty. A little bit floor.

Perfect.

The apartment didn’t judge. My apartment was the kind of place that had long ago given up on expectations. Clothes lived on the floor because the floor was closer than the closet. Empty mugs collected on every surface like territorial fungi. The overhead fan turned at a speed that suggested it was thinking about its life choices rather than actually cooling anything.

Afternoon light cut through the half-closed shutters in warm diagonal bars, illuminating the dust motes that drifted through my personal ecosystem with unhurried confidence.

I was cross-legged on the floor in front of the coffee table, which was currently functioning as a desk because my actual desk was buried under three weeks of mail and a half-dismantled router I’d been meaning to fix.

Laptop open. Bare feet. Oversized T-shirt that hit mid-thigh and read ΚΑΛΗΜΕΡΑ in block letters across the chest, which roughly translated to “good morning” and was approximately the only Greek phrase my neighbors had ever heard me say at volume, usually at three in the morning when the upstairs guy’s music was winning.

The job posting had caught my eye because it was trying so hard not to. “Financial Records Organization Specialist.” Private family office. Competitive salary, discretion required. Must be fluent in Italian and English, with additional language skills preferred. Experience with complex financial structuring and record-keeping systems. Remote work possible, but on-site preferred.

Boring. So boring it was actually interesting, which was my exact threshold for paying attention to anything.

Before I committed to anything—job, apartment, relationship, lunch order—I dug. It was reflex. Pavlovian, maybe. Someone rings the bell of my curiosity, and my fingers hit a keyboard.

Two hours later I had a working picture of Aristoteles Romano that looked nothing like the sanitized version of whoever wrote that job posting had been aiming for.

Illegitimate son of Geno Romano, which explained why his name didn’t appear in any of the official family records until about six months ago. Dock worker background. The kind of hands-on, get-your-knuckles-bloody work that the fancy Romano cousins had never been within shouting distance of.

Took over the family after Geno’s spectacular implosion, which the internet was very happy to document in excruciating detail if you knew where to look. Inherited what looked, from the outside, like a financial crater the size of a small country.

Photos were harder to find. He was security-conscious, which I respected. But there were a few—grainy, distant, mostly taken from the wrong side of a telephoto lens.

Big guy. Six-three if the doorframes in the background were standard height. Broad shoulders under a denim vest. Dark hair, darker eyes, and a jaw that looked like it had been carved out of something that didn’t want to cooperate. A scar across one cheekbone, faint but visible even in the grainy resolution. Tattoos down both forearms, visible when his sleeves were rolled.

I had to give it to the guy. He looked exactly like what happened when you left a dock worker in charge of a crime family—which, come to think of it, was probably the point.

I submitted the resume. Clean version, work history edited for coherence rather than honesty. Languages listed in order of fluency rather than alphabetical, because alphabetical was for people who didn’t understand how conversations actually worked.

References available upon request, which was technically true if you considered my hacker contacts in six countries to be references rather than co-conspirators.

Then I kept digging, because submitting a resume and walking away was for people with impulse control. I did not have impulse control. I had caramel wrappers and a photographic memory and the kind of stubborn curiosity that had gotten me into trouble on three continents.

The shell corporations took about forty minutes to find. Malta first, then Cyprus. Layers of holding companies, nested like Russian dolls with Swiss bank accounts. The kind of structure that said “I am hiding money” in twelve different languages, all of them the language of men who thought nobody was watching.

Thirty million dollars. Give or take. Moved out of Romano accounts over the last eighteen months in increments small enough to avoid tripping automated alerts, large enough to matter when you added them up.

The timing was interesting—the bulk of the money had walked away in the three months before Geno’s death. Before the bombing. Before everything went to hell.

I sat back on my heels. The caramel wrapper crinkled under my thigh. Outside, Florence was doing its late-afternoon thing—church bells, distant scooters, the hum of a city that had been beautiful for so long it had stopped trying to prove it.

I didn’t touch the money. Moving thirty million dollars without authorization was the kind of felony that came with its own zip code in federal prison.

Also, it was boring.

Anyone could move money. The interesting part was knowing it was there, knowing where it had gone, and holding that information like a playing card you hadn’t decided whether to show yet.

I saved the files. Closed the laptop. Ate another caramel because discipline was a myth invented by people with regular sleep schedules.

Morning came through the shutters in thin gold lines that cut across my face and woke me up by being annoying about it. I was still on the floor, which explained why my back felt like it had been used as a percussion instrument.

My capri pants had twisted around my legs sometime during the night. The oversized T-shirt had migrated north, exposing a strip of stomach to the cool morning air and whatever dust had settled there in the hours I’d been unconscious.

I stretched. My spine made a sound like someone cracking their knuckles, which was either reassuring or deeply concerning depending on your perspective on spinal health.

The phone rang while I was halfway through untangling myself from a blanket I didn’t remember pulling over my head. The screen said unknown number, which in my world usually meant either a bill collector or someone who wanted to sell me something I didn’t need.

I answered with the caramel I’d been chewing still firmly lodged in my right cheek. “Zephyr Kontos,” I said, or tried to say. It came out more like “Zephyr Kontosh” around the caramel.

A pause on the other end. Then a voice, flat and unhurried. “This is Leon Nikolaidis. Regarding your application to the Romano family office. Mr. Romano would like to meet you today. Three o’clock. The address will be texted to you.”

I swallowed the caramel. “Today works. I’ll be there.”

Another pause. Longer this time. I could almost hear him deciding whether I was worth the oxygen this conversation was costing him. “Wear shoes,” he said finally, and hung up.

I looked down at my bare feet. Looked at the sneakers by the door, which had last seen daylight approximately two weeks ago. Looked back at my feet.

“Shoes,” I said to the empty apartment. “Right.”

The text arrived thirty seconds later. An address in the heart of Florence, in a neighborhood where the buildings were old enough to have opinions about modern architecture.

I knew the street. I’d grown up three blocks from it, sleeping in doorways and learning which bakeries threw out day-old bread instead of locking their dumpsters.

I closed the laptop. Brushed caramel crumbs off my thigh. Checked the time. Two hours to figure out what to wear to a job interview with a man who ran a crime family and apparently employed people who considered “wear shoes” to be adequate preparatory advice.

This was either going to be spectacular or catastrophic.

I was betting on both.

* * * *

The Romano palazzo occupied a building that had probably been beautiful before the concept of “beautiful” had a name. Ochre plaster, iron-studded door, a small brass plate with no name on it because people who needed to read the nameplate weren’t the people who needed to be here.

The ground floor entrance was exactly what you’d expect from a family that had been accumulating power and art and enemies since approximately the Renaissance—understated in the way that only truly expensive things managed to be, the kind of understatement that cost more than shouting ever could.

I stood on the cobblestone street and looked up. The building looked back down with the mild indifference of something that had survived wars, plagues, and several generations of Romano family leadership without particularly caring about any of it.

The courtyard hit me the second I stepped through the door. Sun-warmed stone, the kind of heat that radiated up through the soles of your feet and said, in the unmistakable voice of several hundred years of Italian masonry, that you were standing on history and it was warmer than you expected.

I’d taken my sneakers off about halfway here because Florence in late afternoon was the temperature of a well-preheated oven and my feet had opinions about being trapped in synthetic materials when the alternative was cool air and cobblestone.

Those opinions had been correct until approximately four seconds ago, when the cobblestones decided that “warm“ was a relative term and “surface of the sun” was closer to the mark.

“Jesus Christ,” I muttered, and hopped onto a patch of shadow. My right foot had already developed the distinct sensation of being lightly grilled.

I put the sneakers back on. The man who’d called about shoes had been right, which was irritating on principle.

I tied the laces with more force than necessary, as if the shoes themselves were personally responsible for the fact that centuries-old stone retained heat like it was getting paid by the degree.

The courtyard was small, intimate in the way that only very expensive spaces managed to be—lemon tree in one corner, fig in another, stone bench and iron table positioned like someone had arranged the entire scene for a painting they were planning to title “Wealthy People Having Profound Thoughts, Probably About Wine.”

The air smelled like stone and green things and the faint drift of espresso from somewhere inside, which my stomach registered with immediate and traitorous interest.

A man appeared in the doorway to the interior. Not the kind of appearance that involved walking—more the kind where one moment there was doorway and emptiness, and the next moment there was a man, and your brain had to catch up to the fact that he’d been standing there the whole time and you just hadn’t noticed him because he was the exact color and temperament of the shadow he’d been occupying.

Leon Nikolaidis. I recognized him from the security footage I’d pulled last night, which he didn’t know I’d pulled and which I had no intention of mentioning unless the conversation got really, really boring.

Up close, he was exactly what the footage had suggested: tall, broad, the kind of build that came from years of physical labor rather than a gym membership. Black hair, brown eyes, and a face that gave away absolutely nothing—not interest, not boredom, not the time of day.

His hands were large and still at his sides in a way that suggested he was comfortable with them being still, which in my experience was not a quality you found in people who hadn’t done violence and been fine with it afterward.

He looked at me. I looked at him. The lemon tree, having no stake in this particular standoff, continued being a tree.

“You’re early,” he said. His voice was exactly what it had been on the phone—flat, informational, the vocal equivalent of concrete.

“Traffic was light,” I said. “Also I hate being late. It makes me anxious, and when I’m anxious I talk, and when I talk people usually want me to stop, so here we are. Early. Mission accomplished.”

He blinked. Once. Slowly.

It was not a friendly blink.

Then he turned and walked back through the doorway without checking to see if I was following.

I followed.

The hallway smelled like beeswax and wood polish and something underneath both that I couldn’t quite place—something older, earthier, with notes of leather and cold stone and the mustiness of rooms that didn’t get enough air.

I filed it under “bad decisions” in my mental catalog and kept walking.

Leon’s pace was steady and unhurried. He didn’t look back. He didn’t need to. His shoulders were wide enough to block most of the corridor, which meant following him involved walking in the narrow strip of space his body didn’t occupy, like being the second car in a very determined tunnel.

“Nice place,” I tried. “Very... historical. You guys do the frescoes yourselves, or was that contracted out?”

Nothing. Not even a twitch.

“Right. Silent treatment. I respect that. Very enigmatic. Very ‘man of few words.’ I get it. I do. Though for the record, the man-of-few-words thing works better when you actually have words to be sparing with, otherwise it’s just—”

He stopped. Turned. Looked at me with an expression that suggested he was mentally calculating the distance to the nearest window and whether my body would fit through it.

I stopped talking.

We continued walking. The hallway was long, lined with dark oil portraits of men who all shared the same basic architecture—strong jaw, heavy-lidded eyes, the set of the mouth that said “I own things and people and the concept of mercy is negotiable depending on my mood.”

Generations of Romano men, staring down from the walls with uniform mild contempt, as if the act of being looked at by someone walking beneath them was personally offensive.

I counted security cameras at each corner. Weight-sensing pads under two of the rugs, barely visible if you weren’t looking for the slight depression in the pile. The bulge of a firearm under Leon’s jacket, riding his right hip with the comfortable familiarity of something that lived there. Every door we passed was closed.

Then we reached the office, and Leon pushed the door open, and Aristoteles Romano stood there, and my entire internal monologue did the conversational equivalent of driving off a cliff.

Six-foot-three. Two hundred and twenty-five pounds if he was an ounce, all of it the kind of muscle that came from actual work rather than cosmetic lifting. Dark hair, black eyes, and a jaw that looked like it had been carved out of something that had put up a significant fight.

A scar marked one cheekbone, pale against his skin. More scars visible at his collar and on his forearms where his sleeves were rolled to mid-forearm, a topography of violence written in raised tissue.

Tattoos ran down both arms, old work, the ink settled into the skin the way stories settle into places that have heard them too many times to forget.

He was wearing a white shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, a denim vest fitted over it with pockets that were absolutely not just for aesthetics—I clocked the knife handles immediately, one in each interior pocket, positioned for a cross-draw. Silver herringbone chain at his throat. Silver watch. Silver ring with a black onyx stone on his right hand.

He moved with the kind of quiet authority that made the air in the room rearrange itself around him without him asking. Not the swagger of a man who wanted to be noticed. The simpler, more dangerous stillness of a man who had never needed to announce himself because the world had learned, through experience, to step aside when he entered a space.

My first coherent thought was that I would very much like to sit in that man’s lap.

My second thought was that this was a catastrophically bad idea with a body count attached to it, and I should probably file it under “impulses to be examined later, preferably with alcohol and a responsible adult present, neither of which were currently available.”

I filed both thoughts. Smiled pleasantly. The smile felt approximately as stable as a house built on sand during a hurricane, but I committed to it anyway.

“Mr. Romano,” I said. “Zephyr Kontos. Thanks for meeting me.”

He looked at me. Not the way Leon had looked at me—Leon’s look had been assessment, the cold cataloging of a potential threat.

This was different.

This was the look of a man reading something written in a language he wasn’t entirely sure he believed existed, and deciding whether the effort of translation was worth his time.

He gestured to the chair across from the desk.

I sat.

The desk between us was mahogany, wide enough that reaching across it would have required commitment, and old enough that the wood had developed its own opinion about sunlight and human fingerprints.

It had seen better decades. Possibly better centuries.

Ari Romano sat on the other side of it and looked at me like I was a math problem he wasn’t sure was worth solving.

“Your resume says you speak seven languages.” His voice was low, rough, the kind of voice that didn’t need volume to land. It carried in the high-ceilinged room like something with weight.

“Eight, if you count computer code,” I said. “Which you should, because it’s the only one that pays my rent.”

“Fluently?”

“I dream in three of them. The dreams are usually about being chased by something with too many teeth, but the grammar is impeccable.”

He didn’t smile. His expression didn’t change at all, which was its own kind of impressive. Most people at least twitched at sarcasm—it was a biological response, like flinching at sudden noises.

Ari Romano sat perfectly still, one hand resting on the desk, the other holding a pen he hadn’t used yet, and watched me with those black eyes like he was running some internal calculation whose variables I wasn’t privy to.

I caught myself watching his hands. Large, rough, the kind of hands that had done actual work—knuckles scarred, a callus across the right palm that spoke to years of gripping something that fought back.

The pen between his fingers was still. Absolutely still. Not a tremor, not a fidget.

I redirected my attention to his face. His eyes were already there, waiting.

“You have a photographic memory,” he said.

Not a question.

“I have a brain that remembers things it shouldn’t and forgets things it should, which is basically the same thing with worse public relations.”

“Prove it.”

I opened my laptop. The screen lit up blue, casting his face in that glow that made everyone look like they were planning something sinister, which in his case was probably accurate.

I pulled up the two shell corporations on a split screen—Malta on the left, Cyprus on the right, the transaction histories scrolling in neat columns of dates and amounts.

“Thirty million dollars,” I said. “Give or take. Moved out of Romano accounts over the last eighteen months, mostly in the three months before your father’s death. Sitting in these two shells right now, doing absolutely nothing productive except accruing the kind of interest that makes Swiss bankers feel warm inside.”

His expression didn’t change, but something in the air between us shifted. The temperature, maybe. Or the pressure.

I typed. Three commands, a routing sequence I’d written while eating caramel at three in the morning, and the money began moving. Thirty million dollars, walking back across international borders like it had remembered an appointment, flowing into the accounts I’d identified as the original sources. The transfer took twelve seconds. The confirmation notifications began populating the screen before I’d finished closing the first window.

“Done,” I said. “Oh, and I may have bent a few regulatory rules to make that happen. Nothing fatal. Just the kind of creative interpretation that would make a compliance officer develop an ulcer and/or a drinking problem.”

He set his coffee down. The cup made a soft sound against the wood. He looked at the screen. Looked at me. Looked back at the screen.

The silence lasted long enough that I could have recited the first twenty digits of pi in three languages, which I did not do because even I have limits.

“You’re hired,” he said finally. “Probationary. Two weeks. You handle the books, the calls, the scheduling. You report directly to me. You speak to no one about family business without my authorization.” He leaned forward slightly. The movement was small, controlled, and carried the gravity of a glacier deciding to inch forward. “Betray this family, and bending regulatory rules will be the least of your concerns. Understood?”

Most people, when confronted with a statement like that delivered in a voice like his, would nod. Would look appropriately chastened. Would maybe swallow and say “yes, sir” in a tone that suggested they were reconsidering their life choices.

I reached into my laptop bag. Past the individually wrapped caramels. Past the switchblade I kept nestled against the inner lining where airport security had never once thought to look. Pulled out a folded document and set it on the desk between us.

“Non-disclosure agreement,” I said. “Pre-drafted. Standard template with Romano-specific amendments. I’ve already signed it.” I tapped my signature at the bottom. “You should have every employee sign one. Including the guys with guns.” I widened my eyes. “Especially the guys with guns.”

He looked at the document. Looked at me. The patience in his expression had acquired a quality I couldn’t quite name. He looked like a man who had expected many things from this interview and “legal advice from the applicant” had not been on the list.

“We’re the mafia,” he said. The words were delivered flat, with the weary precision of someone stating an obvious fact to a child who had missed several key lessons.

“So?”

He blinked. It was an excellent blink—slow, deliberate, the kind of blink that contained an entire internal monologue compressed into the time it took his eyelids to close and open. I made a mental note of it.

Excellent blinks were rare and worth cataloging.

“Killing a man removes one problem,” I said, typing as I talked because my hands did their best thinking when they were moving. “Dragging him through civil and criminal channels makes the problem hereditary. Debts attach to families. Judgments outlive people. Cement shoes end one conversation. A well-constructed lawsuit starts fifty.” I looked up. “Also, paperwork is boring and I’d rather not do it twice.”

He was still looking at me with that expression—the one that suggested he found this entire exchange irritating primarily because it made sense, which was arguably worse than if it had been stupid.

“Draft an ironclad NDA for all staff,” he said. “Today.”

“I’m already writing it.” I was. The document was taking shape on my screen, paragraphs assembling themselves with the efficiency of something I’d rehearsed in my head during the walk over.

“Also, every armed employee should be properly licensed. You should consider establishing a small legitimate private security company on paper. Documented training records, legal carry permits, great tax write-off. The government tax bureau loves organized crime almost as much as organized crime loves not paying taxes, and this is the kind of loophole that makes accountants develop feelings.”

He squinted at me. The squint was different from the blink—more evaluation, less surprise. “Have you worked for the mafia before?”

“No. I just read a lot of books.”

He continued squinting. I continued writing. The keys clicked under my fingers, a steady rhythm that filled the space between his silence and my occasional muttering when a clause didn’t parse the way I wanted.

The whole exchange crackled with something neither of us named. Ari watched me the way a man watches something he hasn’t decided whether to keep or release—measuring, assessing, those black eyes tracking the movement of my hands across the keyboard, the shift of my shoulders under the oversized T-shirt, the way I tucked one foot under the opposite thigh when I was concentrating.

I was acutely aware of being watched with a specificity that was doing inconvenient things to my pulse, the kind of focused attention that made my skin feel two sizes too small and entirely too warm for the temperature of the room.

I kept typing.

He kept watching.

The desk between us might as well have been electrified.

The door opened. Leon stood in the frame, his expression exactly as readable as a closed book in a language I didn’t speak. “Study’s ready,” he said to the room at large, though his eyes were on Ari.

I saved the document. Closed the laptop. Stood and slung the bag over my shoulder, the weight of it settling against my hip with the comfortable familiarity of a thing that had been with me through significantly worse decisions than this one.

“Lead the way,” I said to Leon, and followed without looking back at Ari.

I made it approximately two steps into the hallway before the smile broke through, wide and involuntary. I pressed my lips together to stop it.

Failed.

The smile won.

Behind me, through the still-open door, I could feel Ari Romano’s eyes on the back of my neck like a physical touch, and the part of my brain that handled risk assessment made a sound that was approximately the auditory equivalent of a warning label written in bright red letters and several exclamation points.

I kept walking.

The warning label could wait.

Chapter Three

~ Aristoteles ~

I sat in Geno’s chair. The coffee on the desk was fresh, which was the only improvement I’d made to the room so far, and the only one that mattered at seven in the evening when your back had been in the same position for three hours.

The study was quiet. The kind of quiet that comes after a decision has been made, but before the consequences arrive.

Leon came through the door without knocking. He never knocked. The sound of his boots on the hardwood was familiar—two steps, pause, the soft creak of the floorboard near the desk that I should have fixed already. His face was set in its usual neutral configuration, which told me nothing and everything at once.

I set my pen down. Didn’t look up from the ledger. “Thirty million dollars.”

He stopped. I heard his breathing change—the slight intake, held for half a beat longer than it should have been.

“The kid found it. Moved it. Money’s sitting in our accounts like it never left.” I flipped the ledger closed. “Verified it myself. Clean transfer, no flags, nothing any regulator is going to notice unless they’re already looking for it.”

Leon’s jaw worked once. His eyes did something complicated—surprise first, sharp and genuine. His hands stayed at his sides. Perfectly still.

Good man.

“Thirty million,” he said. Flat. The word sat in the air between us like something that weighed more than it should.

“Give or take. Mostly take.” I leaned back. The chair creaked. Geno’s chair. His ghost in the leather, his ghost in the air, his ghost in every ledger I’d spent the last twelve hours reading. “Kid looked pleased with himself. Like he’d found my wallet on the street and decided to return it with interest.”

Leon was quiet. I let the silence stretch. He was good at silences. Better than I was, which was saying something.

I watched him. He watched the desk.

“What do you think?” I asked. The question was direct. I didn’t do indirect. Waste of breath, waste of time, and time was the one thing this family couldn’t afford to lose anymore.

Leon considered it. He always considered. Even questions he already had answers for, he considered, which was why he was standing in this room and not buried somewhere on the mountain.

“Useful,” he said. The word came out careful, like he was testing its weight. “Unpredictable. Talks too much.”

“He’s a liability until proven otherwise.”

Leon nodded. “Too comfortable for a man sitting in a room full of people who could make him disappear before lunch.”

I’d noticed that too. The comfort. The way Zephyr had smiled at me like I was an interesting puzzle and not the man who’d buried three guards before breakfast.

“Agreed on all counts,” I said.

Leon waited. He knew there was more.

There was always more.

“Dock crew arrives tomorrow.” I reached for my coffee. Cold. I drank it anyway. “They need assignments before they walk through the gate. I want them integrated fast. No separate rotations, no special treatment. They’re Romano men now. They just don’t know it yet.”

Leon made a note. His handwriting was small and tight, the kind that didn’t waste space.

“Three staff names.” I pushed a folded slip of paper across the desk. “Watch them. Not obviously. The head groundskeeper, one of the kitchen women and the driver who takes Theo into the city twice a week.”

He took the paper. Didn’t look at it. Slid it into his pocket.

“Two positions need filling. Head of security for the estate and someone to handle the wine import business.” I paused. “Neither one goes to anyone who’s spent the last decade eating out of Alexios’s hand.”

Leon’s expression didn’t change, but I saw the calculation happening behind his eyes. Rewriting the organization chart in real time, slotting names into boxes, crossing out the ones that didn’t belong. That’s why I kept him. That quiet, ruthless efficiency.

“There’s more,” I said.

He looked up.

“Security firm. A legitimate private company on paper. Licensed carriers, documented training records, clean payroll. Tax write-off. Government loves organized crime that pays taxes more than organized crime that doesn’t.”

The silence that followed was different.

His head tilted slightly. The pen in his hand went still. Then he nodded. Once. “It’s a good idea.”

Of course it’s a good idea. The kid thought of it in the five minutes he sat in that chair, which is either impressive or embarrassing depending on how long I’ve been running this family without thinking of it myself.

“Look into licensing requirements. Find out which of our people can qualify. Find out which ones have records that make that conversation complicated.” I set my coffee down. “I want names by Friday.”

Leon wrote it down. No commentary. No drama. No questions about whether this was a pivot or a whim or the beginning of something larger. He just wrote it down in that tight, controlled hand and slid the notebook back into his jacket pocket.

This is why I kept him. This exact thing. The absence of noise.

I stood. My back protested—three hours in Geno’s chair had done nothing for the knots between my shoulder blades. The study felt smaller than it had when I walked in. The walls felt closer. The ghost of Geno’s cologne was still there, clinging to the curtains, the desk, the air itself.

“We move fast,” I said. “The families are watching. D’Angelo, Borelli, Sabatino. They took their reparations and they’re waiting to see if the bastard son can rebuild what the legitimate one broke.” I met Leon’s eyes. “I don’t care what they think, but I care what they see.”

He nodded. Understanding without being told. Another reason.

“The dock crew arrives at nine. Be at the gate.”

“I’ll be there.”

I watched him go. The door closed behind him with a soft click that sounded final, like something settling into place. The study was quiet again. Just me and Geno’s ghost and the thirty million dollars that had walked back home because a man with caramel on his fingers and too many words in his mouth had decided it should.

I picked up my lighter. Flicked it open. Held the flame for a count of three, watching the small orange light dance against the dark wood of the desk. Then I snapped it shut and went back to work.

A while later, my back told me it was done cooperating for the evening. I stood, rolled my shoulders until something cracked, and headed for the kitchen because the coffee in my mug had reached the temperature of regret and I needed something that didn’t taste like my own bad decisions.

The hallway was quiet.

The faint ghost of Geno’s cologne lingered near the study doorway, a stale afterthought of a man whose ghost was proving more persistent than he’d been in life.

I passed the room where I’d put the kid.

Zephyr.

The name sat in my head like something I’d picked up and couldn’t put down.

The door was open. Light spilled into the hallway—warm, yellow, the kind that came from the desk lamp he’d angled toward the wall instead of the papers he was working on. I slowed. Stopped. Didn’t mean to.

My feet made the decision before my brain caught up.

He was bent over the laptop, one foot tucked under him on the chair like he’d forgotten chairs had rules. A caramel wrapper was crumpled in his left hand. Three more sat on the desk beside a mug of tea that had gone cold—I could tell from the lack of steam, from the way he hadn’t touched it in the twenty seconds I’d been watching.

He was muttering. Low, fast, under his breath. Italian, maybe. Or Greek. Something with rhythm, something that flowed and stopped and started again when the data on his screen did something he didn’t expect.

His blond hair was doing something artful and entirely unintentional—pushed back from his forehead on one side, falling across his eyebrow on the other, like he’d run a hand through it and then forgotten that hands existed.

His fingers moved over the keys. Fast. Certain. The kind of speed that came from a brain working three steps ahead of the body housing it.

When something on the screen caught his attention, his head tilted—slightly, unconsciously. His mouth moved. Just slightly. The barest shift of his lips, shaping words that never made it past the threshold of sound.

I stood in the doorway and catalogued all of it with the same cold attention I gave to everything that mattered.

That was the problem.

The curve of his neck where it met his shoulder. The way his oversized T-shirt had ridden up to expose a strip of skin above the waistband of his capri pants.

The concentration in his face—brows drawn, lower lip caught between his teeth, the faint line between them that appeared when he was working through something stubborn.

I thought about the desk.

Not this desk. My desk. The mahogany one in the study, wide enough that a man could be spread across it if someone with large enough hands decided that was where he belonged.

I thought about the sound Zephyr would make. Not the muttering. Something else. The sound a man like that would make if I got my hands on him properly—if I pinned him to the desk and watched that fast, clever mouth go slack with something other than words for once.

The image came with the same cold clarity I applied to everything—detailed, specific, merciless. His back arched. His hips lifted. That strip of skin above his waistband under my palm, warm and yielding. The gasp that would break out of him when I bit the junction of his neck and shoulder hard enough to leave a mark that would remind him who owned it every time his shirt collar brushed against it.

I catalogued it all. The width of the desk. The angle of his hips. The way his fingers would curl against the wood, white-knuckled, his rings catching the light.

The exact shade his skin would turn when flushed—pink climbing his throat, blotching his chest, the kind of color that made a man look like he was coming apart from the inside.

Christ.

I stepped back from the doorway like it had burned me.

Zephyr Kontos. Twenty-six years old. Five-foot-five and maybe a hundred and fifteen pounds soaking wet. My employee. My brand-new, probationary, talks-too-much, found-thirty-million-dollars employee.

And I was standing in a doorway like a man who had forgotten how doors worked, thinking about the specific way his throat would look when I had my hand around it.

This was a problem.

I turned and walked down the hall. My boots sounded louder than they should have. The ghost of Geno’s cologne caught me near the study—cedar and dishonesty, the stale signature of a man whose ghost was still doing more damage than he ever had alive.

I kept walking.

The kitchen was cool and quiet. Stone countertops, cabinets that went clear to the ceiling, and copper pots hanging from a rack that had been there longer than I had.

I poured coffee into a clean mug—black, no sugar, the way I’d been drinking it since I was sixteen and the docks taught me that anything sweet was a luxury I couldn’t afford.

The mug warmed my palms. I stood there and stared at the wall and let the heat seep into my hands while my brain did the thing it always did when confronted with a problem it couldn’t solve with knives or threats or cold silence.

It made a list.

One: He was my employee. Employee-boss dynamics were a liability in any business. In this business, they were the kind of liability that got people killed or, worse, gave Alexios ammunition. My uncle had been looking for a weakness since the day I took the seat. The last thing I needed was for that weakness to be five-foot-five, blond, and currently eating caramels at his desk while reorganizing shell corporations I hadn’t known existed.

Two: Zephyr was unpredictable. Unpredictable meant dangerous. Dangerous meant I couldn’t trust him, and trust was the one currency this family couldn’t afford to lose any more of. He talked too much. He moved too fast. He’d found thirty million dollars in an afternoon and returned it like it was a library book he’d accidentally kept past the due date. Men who moved that quickly through other people’s money were either very good or very something else, and I hadn’t decided which one he was yet.

Three: The family was fractured. Alexios wanted my seat. Theo wanted whatever his father told him to want. The old guard was watching, waiting, measuring. Bringing a civilian this deep into the operation was already a risk. Bringing a civilian I wanted to bend over my desk was the kind of risk that didn’t have a category because nobody was stupid enough to create one.

Four: Zephyr was too comfortable. Men who weren’t afraid of me were either very brave or very stupid, and brave men got brave ideas, and brave ideas got people killed. I couldn’t afford to be distracted by someone who looked at me and saw a puzzle instead of a threat.

Five: He could be working for someone else. Alexios. Theo. One of the families. The ease with which he’d navigated those shell corporations suggested either extraordinary talent or extraordinary preparation, and I wasn’t in the habit of assuming the former when the latter was still on the table.

Six: He was a man. I was a man. The Romano family already thought I was weak for being gay. Weak meant vulnerable. Vulnerable meant target. The conclave was months away and every eye would be on the Romano table, measuring, calculating, looking for the crack they could widen. I couldn’t give them one.

Seven: I didn’t do this. I didn’t want things. Wanting was a luxury. Wanting was what got men like Geno killed—wanting power, wanting respect, wanting things that weren’t theirs to take. I had built my life on the absence of want. On necessity. On the cold, clear calculation of survival. Wanting Zephyr Kontos was the kind of arithmetic that came out wrong no matter how many times I ran the numbers.

The list was thorough. It was logical. It covered every angle, every risk, every reason this was a catastrophe waiting to happen. It was also, I noted with the same cold clarity I applied to everything, not going to be enough.

Because the part of me that wanted him didn’t care about the list. The part of me that had stood in that doorway and catalogued the curve of his neck and the way his fingers moved over the keys and the concentration in his face when he was working through something stubborn—that part didn’t give a damn about employee dynamics or family politics or the conclave or anything else on the list.

That part was older. Wilder. The part that had been running the docks at sixteen, that had built a crew from men nobody else wanted, that had taken a seat nobody thought I deserved and held it through sheer refusal to let go.

That part looked at Zephyr and saw something it wanted to keep, and keeping meant possession, and possession in my world looked a certain way, and that way involved my hands and his skin and the specific sound he would make when I—

I put a stop to that thought and drank the coffee. It was too hot. I drank it anyway, feeling the burn all the way down, welcome in its simplicity. Pain was honest. Coffee was honest. Wanting was complicated in ways I didn’t have the vocabulary for.

The lighter flicked open in my palm. The small flame held steady, orange against the dark kitchen, casting a warm glow that didn’t belong there. I watched it for a count of three. Then I snapped it shut and set it on the counter.

Back to work. The mountain estate didn’t run itself. The ledgers didn’t balance themselves. The families were watching, and I had a list of fifty-three problems that didn’t include the problem of a man that made me think of things I shouldn’t want.

I rinsed the mug. Set it in the sink. The kitchen was quiet. The house was quiet. Somewhere down the hall, Zephyr Kontos was muttering over spreadsheets and forgetting his tea existed, and I was standing in a kitchen staring at a wall, carrying the weight of a want I had no intention of acting on and every intention of remembering.

The list was thorough. It was logical.

It wasn’t enough.

I picked up the lighter and went back to the study. The ghost of Geno’s cologne caught me at the doorway. Cedar and dishonesty. The smell of a man who had wanted too much and gotten exactly what he deserved.

I stepped through it and closed the door behind me.

Chapter Four

~ Zephyr ~

The light that came through the shuttered windows of my temporary office had the gold hues of late morning in Florence—warm, slanting, and slightly smug about how good it looked doing its job.

I’d cracked the shutters halfway about an hour ago because the room was starting to feel like the inside of a very expensive, very stuffy coffin, and now the light cut across the polished walnut desk in neat diagonal bars, turning the stacks of financial documents into a topographical map of someone else’s bad decisions.

Gold for shell corporations. Red for ledger discrepancies. Blue for the vendor accounts I’d flagged with little sticky notes that said things like “THIS IS STEALING” and “SERIOUSLY?” in handwriting that got progressively less legible as the morning wore on.

My temporary kingdom. A high-ceilinged room with good bones and questionable wifi, a chair that had probably supported the asses of better men than me for centuries, and a cup of tea that had gone so thoroughly cold it had achieved a state of matter scientists hadn’t named yet.

I’d been at it since five. My brain did its best work in the dead quiet of early morning, when the city was still asleep and the only sounds were the occasional church bell and the soft scratch of my pen across paper.

By eleven, I’d made it through three years of Romano shell company records, two handwritten ledgers that Geno had apparently maintained with the meticulous attention of a man who thought math was optional, and approximately seven caramels.

The gold wrappers formed a small pyramid in the corner of the desk. I’d tried to keep them neat. I’d failed. They multiplied when I wasn’t looking, like hairy tribbles.

My laptop sat open beside the ledgers, screen split between a database query I’d built at four in the morning and a spreadsheet that was currently doing something complicated with color gradients to indicate financial crimes. Red for “this is definitely fraud,” orange for “this is probably fraud, but I’d like to be polite about it,” and yellow for “I have questions and someone should answer them before I get creative.”

Two vendor accounts had caught my eye around seven-thirty. Geno’s last fiscal year. The kind of irregularity that would slide right past a surface audit because the numbers were too perfect.

Real accounting is messy. Real money moves in uneven increments, leaves odd remainders, creates decimal points that nobody bothered to round because rounding takes effort and most people who handle money are lazy. Perfect numbers lie and these numbers were lying so well they deserved an Oscar.

I’d made comments in the margins in handwriting so cramped it would give a graphologist an aneurysm. Switched from Italian to English mid-sentence twice without noticing, then caught myself and switched back, then given up and written the rest in a hybrid that was mostly numbers and swear words.

Vendor Acct #4721 — quarterly rounding is too clean. Address traces to Livorno PO box, registered name doesn’t exist. Likely skimming mechanism: inflated invoices, dummy shipments, money laundered through construction supply front. Contact: check payroll for “M. Belli” — probable pseudonym.

Underneath, in smaller script: Also Geno’s handwriting is terrible and I’m judging him from beyond the grave, which I’m allowed to do because he’s dead and I’m not and that’s how this works.

The NDA had been building since dawn. I’d started with a standard template because I’m not a masochist, then dismantled it clause by clause and rebuilt it into something that would make a corporate lawyer develop a facial tic.

Section one: standard confidentiality. Boring, but necessary.

Section two: non-compete, non-solicitation. Slightly less boring.

Section three: intellectual property assignment. I’d added a clause about caramel-based inventions because I was feeling creative and the sugar had hit my bloodstream approximately forty minutes prior.

Section four: consequences.

Section four was my masterpiece. It read less like a legal clause and more like the kind of formal warning you’d give someone before dropping them into an active volcano. Civil penalties, criminal referrals, injunctive relief so comprehensive it would follow the violator into their next life.

I’d cited three obscure Italian statutes, two EU directives, and a UN convention that may or may not have been relevant, but sounded impressively global.

The wording was deliberately intimidating. I’d used phrases like “irreparable harm” and “equitable remedies” and “maximum statutory penalties” with the quiet joy of a man who understood that the best legal threats were the ones that made the recipient Google their own net worth mid-paragraph.

I read it over one last time. Nodded. Saved the document. Attached it to an email.

To: Aristoteles Romano

Subject: For your review (you’re welcome)

Body: Draft NDA attached. Legally airtight, deliberately intimidating, with special attention to section four, which may cause a grown man to cry. I’ve framed this as a feature rather than a bug. Let me know if you’d like the version where I cite international law. I save that one for special occasions.

Best,

Z

I hit send before I could overthink it.

The email vanished into the digital ether with a soft whoosh sound that my laptop made purely for psychological satisfaction. I sat back and unwrapped another caramel.

The sweet-salty flavor hit of it spread across my tongue, and I let my head fall back against the chair and stared at the coffered ceiling with its faded gold leaf and the patina that only centuries of wealthy people ignoring water damage could achieve.

I was not waiting for a response. That would be unprofessional. I was taking a well-deserved break after several hours of intensive financial forensics, during which I had uncovered what appeared to be a systematic embezzlement scheme run by someone with a better understanding of shell corporations than Geno Romano had ever possessed.

I checked my email.

Nothing.

I ate another caramel. Checked again. Nothing.

I pulled the next ledger toward me. Kept working. Kept one eye on the inbox in the corner of my screen, which remained stubbornly, infuriatingly empty.

Not that I was watching it. I was working. With vigilance. Professional vigilance. The kind of vigilance that had nothing to do with whether a six-foot-three man with black eyes and a jaw that could cut glass had read my email and was currently forming an opinion about my legal drafting skills, which were excellent, by the way, and if he had any sense he’d recognize that immediately and—The inbox remained empty.

I ate another caramel and got back to work.

He appeared in the doorway at half past eleven without knocking, which was exactly the kind of entrance I should have expected and somehow still hadn’t.

He had a phone in one hand, my NDA open on the screen, and the rest of him arranged in that configuration of six-foot-three that made doorways look like they were apologizing for their dimensions.

Rolled white sleeves to mid-forearm. Silver rings catching the late-morning light. The cedar-and-coffee scent arrived about half a second before the rest of him did, which was unfair because my nose registered it before my eyes had finished cataloguing the rest, and my brain did the thing it always did when Ari Romano entered a room, which was approximately the mental equivalent of a car alarm going off in a library.

I kept my face neutral. Professional. The expression of a man who drafted intimidating legal documents before lunch and did not spend an unreasonable amount of mental real estate wondering what those forearms would feel like against my skin.

Ari looked at the NDA on his phone. Looked at me. Looked back at the NDA. His expression did that thing where it communicated everything while showing absolutely nothing, which was impressive and also deeply irritating.

“Section four is excessive,” he said. His voice was low, rough, the kind that didn’t need volume to land. It carried across the room like something with weight.

“Section four is the point,” I said.

“It reads like a threat.”

“That’s because it is one.” I unwrapped a caramel without looking away from him. “A legal one, which is better than the alternative.”

I popped the caramel into my mouth. Held his gaze while I did it. The sweet hit of sugar spread across my tongue, and I did not break eye contact because I have principles, and one of them is that you don’t flinch when a man who could make you disappear before lunch is staring at you across a room full of financial crimes.

“If you think that’s excessive,” I said, “I’ve already drafted section five. You want to see what excessive actually looks like? I can have it on your desk in ten minutes. Comes with footnotes. I get creative with footnotes.”

His eyes were flat black. Nothing moved in them. Nothing needed to. They were the kind of eyes that could communicate an entire dissertation on consequences without the man behind them having to form a single word.

Then he did something new.

He crossed the threshold. Not the half-step he’d been occupying in doorways since I met him. Not the careful distance of a man who preferred to conduct business from the architectural equivalent of a moat.

He walked fully into the room, and the air changed around him the way it always did, and I tracked every step without moving a muscle because my body had apparently decided that stillness was the appropriate response to whatever this was.

The room felt smaller with him in it. Not crowded. Just... recalibrated. As if the walls had noticed his presence and adjusted accordingly.

He walked to the desk. Picked up one of my handwritten margin notes—the one about the vendor account and the clean rounding—and read it.

His fingers were large, rough, the knuckles scarred in a way that suggested they’d seen more disagreement than agreement over the years. The silver ring caught the light, black onyx dark against his skin.

He set the note down. “These two irregularities. The vendor accounts.”

“Geno’s last fiscal year.” I turned my laptop so he could see the screen. “Constructed well enough to pass a surface audit. Quarterly numbers rounded to even thousands, every time. No remainders. No decimals. Nothing messy.”

“Real accounting is messy,” he said. Not a question. A statement.

“Real accounting looks like someone did it while having a bad day and possibly a mild headache. Perfect numbers lie. These numbers are lying with the confidence of a man who knows nobody’s checking his work.”

He was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that wasn’t empty—it was full of something being measured, weighed, held up against whatever internal standard he used for these things.

Then he asked, “How do you know that?”

The question landed exactly where it was supposed to. Direct. Unadorned.

“Three years in Florence,” I said. “Nineteen years old, no money, a laptop, and what you might generously call a flexible relationship with financial borders.”

He didn’t ask the follow-up questions. Didn’t press. Didn’t dig into the parts of that sentence that were doing most of the heavy lifting. He just nodded, once, and moved on.

I filed that away. Private column. Useful things about Aristoteles Romano, volume one: he knew when to let a statement stand without dissecting it.

In a world where most people treated vulnerability like something to be exploited, that restraint was worth more than the thirty million dollars I’d found yesterday.

The conversation drifted sideways. Ari’s gaze landed on the pyramid of gold caramel wrappers in the corner of the desk, and one dark eyebrow lifted approximately a millimeter, which in Ari-speak was the equivalent of a full-body eye roll.

“Those are a legitimate business expense,” I said. “I do my best thinking with sugar. It’s science. Probably. I haven’t checked, but it feels true, and in my experience feeling true is about eighty percent of actual truth.”

“You expense caramels?”

“I expense the cognitive enhancement they provide. The caramels are merely the delivery mechanism.” I leaned back in the chair. “You’re welcome to audit me. I keep excellent records. Mostly in my head, but the head is very organized. It has filing cabinets. Metaphorical ones. With labels.”

“I might,” he said.

The way he said it landed somewhere that had nothing to do with accounting. Low. Rough. The kind of tone that suggested the audit he was considering would involve significantly less paperwork and considerably more proximity.

My pulse did something inconvenient. A quick, traitorous jump that started somewhere behind my sternum and radiated outward before I could stop it. I filed it under “physiological responses to be examined later, preferably with alcohol” and moved on.

“Looking forward to it,” I said, and meant it in at least three different ways, none of which I was planning to specify.

His eyes held mine for a beat longer than strictly necessary. Then he turned back to the laptop, and the moment closed itself with the quiet efficiency of a door being shut by someone who understood exactly what was on the other side.

He pulled his chair around to my side of the desk without asking, which was exactly the kind of boundary violation I should have objected to and somehow found myself accommodating without a single word of protest.

The chair scraped against the hardwood, and then he was there, his forearm six inches from mine on the desk, close enough that the cedar-and-coffee scent hit with the intensity of aromatherapy, and I was very professional about all of it.

Extremely professional. Award-winning professionalism. The kind of professionalism that comes with a gold medal and a speech about composure under pressure.

“The discrepancy is in the quarterly rounding,” I said, pointing at the screen without looking at him because looking at him would have been a tactical error at this distance. “Every invoice from this vendor rounds to an even thousand. No remainders. No cents. Nothing under a thousand, ever.”

His silver rings clinked softly against the desk when he shifted his weight. The sound was small, specific, and did nothing helpful for my concentration.

“Timeline starts eighteen months ago. Builds gradually—small amounts first, then escalates. Classic skimming mechanism. Inflated invoices, dummy shipments, money laundered through what looks like a construction supply front.” I scrolled through the transaction history. “The vendor’s contact address traces to a post office box in Livorno. Registered name doesn’t exist. I checked. Thoroughly. The kind of thoroughly that involves calling the post office at seven in the morning and pretending to be a very concerned tax auditor, which I’m not proud of, but it worked, so...”

He was quiet. Reading the screen, tracking the numbers with the kind of focus that suggested he was absorbing every digit and doing something complicated with them behind those black eyes.

“Who handles payroll verification?” he asked.

The question was sharp. Precise. It cut directly to the mechanism—if someone was running a dummy vendor, they’d need to either bypass payroll checks entirely or have someone inside authorizing the payments.

He’d gotten there in approximately twelve seconds, which was either impressive or irritating depending on whether you valued being the smartest person in the room, which I did, very much, and was currently reconsidering.

“Unknown,” I said. “That’s next on the list. I’d start with whoever signed off on vendor onboarding in the last two fiscal years, but the signature chains are...” I trailed off because he was looking at me.

Not at the screen.

At me.

Our eyes met at approximately four inches of distance. Close enough that I could see the fine lines at the corners of his eyes, the darkness of his irises that wasn’t just color, but depth, the way his lashes were just thick enough to cast faint shadows on his cheeks when the light hit them from this angle.

Neither of us moved. The room was very quiet. Somewhere in the building, a pipe clanked. A church bell rang the half-hour, distant and irrelevant.

“You’re in my light,” I said. Evenly. My voice did not do anything inconvenient, which I considered a personal victory.

“I’m not moving,” he said.

“I noticed.”

His gaze dropped. Brief. Controlled. Obvious in a way that made the control itself the tell—down to my mouth, where the caramel had left a faint shine that I was now acutely aware of, and then back up to my eyes with the deliberate patience of a man who had decided exactly how much of that impulse he was going to allow himself.

I looked back at the screen. “We should probably talk about the Livorno post office box.”

He straightened, his chair scraped back, and then he pulled it around to the opposite side of the desk, sat down, and picked up the first of the color-coded document stacks without another word.

The rest of the afternoon settled into a rhythm that surprised me. Ari read through documents with the focused attention of a man who had no interest in wasting time.

He asked questions. They were always precise, never redundant, and they arrived at intervals that suggested he was building something in his head while I talked—a structure, a pattern, a picture of what had happened that was taking shape faster than I would have credited anyone with.

I cross-referenced accounts. Flagged transactions. Built a timeline on a separate screen that gradually filled with dates, amounts, and the names of people who had apparently thought nobody would notice that construction supplies don’t cost that much, even in Italy, where bureaucracy alone should have added several zeros to every invoice.

At one point, he set down a ledger and pointed to a name I’d misspelled. “It’s Bellucci, not Belli.”

“I was testing you,” I said.

“You weren’t.”

“I am now.”

He made a sound low in his throat, barely audible, the kind of sound that lived in the neighborhood of a laugh without quite crossing the border. It was over almost before it started, but I caught it, and something warm and inconvenient settled in my chest that I chose to ignore on the grounds that I was very busy and also possibly an idiot.

By late afternoon, we had a cleaner picture. The vendor fraud was systematic, but not sophisticated. Someone had been skimming for eighteen months, building the scheme gradually, using a dummy company that existed only on paper and a post office box that answered to nobody.

The amounts added up to just under two million—not enough to crater the family, but enough to notice if you were looking, which Geno apparently hadn’t been, or hadn’t cared to.

I printed the list of names. Five of them. People who had authorized payments, signed invoices, handled the paperwork that made the money move. Ari took the list, folded it once along the center crease, and slid it into his vest pocket without comment.

He stood. Crossed to the doorway—his natural habitat, the place where he seemed most himself, half in and half out of whatever room contained him.

He paused with one hand on the frame and glanced back at me. “The NDA is approved as written,” he said. “Including section four.”

“I knew it would be.”

“You have a high opinion of yourself.”

“I have an accurate one. There’s a difference.” I leaned back in the chair. “I could explain it to you, but I charge by the hour, and you already owe me for the caramels, which as we’ve already established, are a legitimate business expense.”

He looked at me for a long moment, long enough that the church bells rang again somewhere in the distance, and the light shifted another degree toward afternoon gold.

The expression on his face moved through something complicated that started at exasperation and landed somewhere warmer and considerably more dangerous before he pulled it back behind the wall.

Then he left. The sound of his boots faded down the hallway, and the room felt suddenly empty in a way that had nothing to do with square footage and everything to do with the man who had just walked out of it.

I sat in the quiet. Looked at the caramel wrapper in my hand, crumpled between my fingers, gold foil catching the late light.

Outside, Florence went about its business—scooters, distant voices, the hum of a city that had been beautiful for centuries and had the confidence to not care who noticed.

This is going to be a problem, I thought.

Not the vendor fraud. Not the missing money. Not the list of names in Ari’s vest pocket that would probably result in some very uncomfortable conversations for someone, somewhere, very soon.

This. Him. The way the air changed when he walked into a room. The way his eyes had dropped to my mouth with that controlled, deliberate patience. The way I had wanted, with an intensity that alarmed me, for him to close the four inches between us and do something about it.

I opened a new document. Got back to work. The keys clicked under my fingers, steady and familiar, and I told myself that the warmth in my chest was just the sugar, and the rest of it was professional admiration for a competent colleague.

None of it was what it very obviously was, which was a catastrophe waiting to happen with a body count attached to it and my name somewhere in the fine print.

The work helped.

Work always helped.

I built another query, flagged three more transactions that didn’t belong, and tried very hard not to think about the sound Ari had made—that almost-laugh, low in his throat, the kind of sound I wanted to hear again, preferably closer, preferably with his hands involved.

This is going to be a problem.

I ate another caramel and kept typing.

Chapter Five

~ Aristoteles ~

The study smelled of cigarette smoke that had settled into the curtains thirty years ago and decided to stay. I could taste it on the back of my tongue every time I breathed, faint and stale and persistent—the ghost of Geno’s habits haunting a room he’d left behind.

I didn’t open the windows. The smoke didn’t bother me. What bothered me was the way my brain kept returning to Zephyr Kontos when I had six armed men waiting at the long table and a family to restructure.

Unacceptable.

Forty-eight hours. That’s how long he’d been in the house. Two days. Not enough time for a man to become a problem. Not unless the man was five-foot-five, blond, and carried himself like he’d been invited.

Which he had been. By me. A decision I was reclassifying from “operational necessity” to “catastrophic judgment error” approximately every twelve minutes.

The curve of his neck where it met his shoulder. The way his oversized T-shirt rode up when he reached for something on a high shelf in the kitchen yesterday morning. The sound he made when he was concentrating—a low mutter, half in Italian, half in whatever language his brain defaulted to when the math got complicated.

I wanted to put my hands on him. Not professionally. Not the way a boss puts hands on an employee. The way a man puts hands on something he’s decided belongs to him, and I had decided Zephyr Kontos belonged to me approximately four minutes into the interview, which was the kind of thinking that would get a man killed in my line of work.

Good thing I was the one who did the killing.

The lighter clicked open in my palm, held steady, snapped shut. Open. Shut. The rhythm of it matched my pulse, which was steadier than it had any right to be, given the circumstances.

The meeting room adjoined the study through a set of carved double doors that had probably been impressive once. Dark walnut paneling, floor-to-ceiling, the grain gone soft with age.

A single overhead light—one of the old brass fixtures Geno had never bothered to replace—threw a warm yellow glow over the long table and the six men seated around it.

My dock crew. The ones who’d worked the docks with me, unloading contraband in the dark while the harbor patrol looked the other way. Big men with rough hands and the quiet competence of people who’d learned that the loudest guy in the room was usually the first one to get shot.

They sat in the high-backed chairs with their shoulders straight and their hands visible on the table. No slouching. No leaning. The kind of posture men adopt when they understand exactly who’s in the room with them and what that person is capable of.

Leon stood at my right shoulder. His arms were loose at his sides, he was breathing even, and there was a definite bulge of his firearm riding his hip under his jacket.

I didn’t sit. Standing worked better. Standing let me look down the table at all six of them at once, and looking down was a language these men understood.

“Three positions,” I said. My voice stayed low. I didn’t need to raise it. The room was quiet enough that the sound of my lighter opening and closing carried to the far end of the table, and every man in the room had worked with me long enough to know it meant something was being calculated.

“I want two men on the Livorno port. You handle the shipping contracts, the inspections, the customs officers who need reminding that certain containers stay closed. Marco and Santino. You’ve done it before. Do it again.”

Two heads nodded. No questions. Good.

“Florence palazzo perimeter. Two men. Rotating shifts, twelve hours on, twelve off. You answer to Leon. Not to me, not to anyone else. Leon tells you where to stand, you stand there until he tells you to move.”

More nods.

“I want two of you on the villa estate outside Livorno. One of you watches the perimeter for movement. You radio it in if you see anything out of place. “You don’t engage unless Leon says otherwise.”

I glanced at everyone to make sure they were hearing me and what I wanted. “One of you is inside. You’re armed and you’re the last thing anyone sees if they get past the perimeter,” I said. “Territories are clear. Chain of command is clear. You report to Leon, Leon reports to me. Anything you see, anything you hear, anything that doesn’t smell right—Leon hears it first. I hear it second. No exceptions.”

I paused. Let it settle.

“What I expect is simple. You do the job I’ve given you. You do it without complaint, without commentary, and without drawing attention to yourselves. You are Romano men now. You carry the name. You don’t get to pick which parts of it you like.”

Another pause. Longer this time. The cigarette smoke hung in the air between us, old and patient.

“What happens when I don’t get what I expect is also simple. You find another family. Or you find another line of work. Or you don’t find anything at all. Your choice.”

Silence. The good kind. The kind that meant everyone in the room had heard the sentence and understood exactly what lived in the spaces between the words.

The meeting ran forty minutes. It should have run an hour. I cut the speeches, cut the inspiration, cut everything that didn’t need to be said because men like these didn’t need to be told why they were here. They needed to be told what to do, and they needed to believe that the man telling them would notice if they didn’t do it.

I noticed everything. That was the point.

They filed out without lingering. One by one, through the double doors, boots soft on the hardwood, the sound of them fading down the corridor toward the kitchen where coffee was waiting. No handshakes. No backslapping. No unnecessary noise.

Just six men walking away with assignments and the quiet certainty that the man who’d given them those assignments would know, within hours, whether they were doing them right.

Leon stayed. Of course he stayed. Leon was the kind of man who considered “dismissed” a suggestion rather than an order when it came to standing at my shoulder, which was why he was still there and why I’d stopped trying to change it years ago.

“You’re thinking about him,” Leon said. Not a question. A statement of fact, delivered with the flat precision of a man reading a weather report.

I didn’t answer. Didn’t need to. Leon had been reading my silences since we were unloading shipping containers in the rain at three in the morning, and he’d gotten better at it than most people got at actual conversation.

“The vendor list came back clean,” he said, switching tracks without waiting for confirmation. “Five names. Two kitchen staff, one driver, the head groundskeeper, the woman who handles the linen service. None of them have contact with Alexios that we can trace. Phone records are clean. Bank records are clean.”

“Someone talked,” I said.

“Someone always talks.”

“Find out who.”

He nodded. Made a note in that tight handwriting of his, the pen moving across the page with the efficiency of a man who considered words a luxury.

I crossed to the window. The mountain spread below the estate, green and vast and quiet in the late afternoon light.

Zephyr was out there somewhere. I could feel it—the thickness of the air when he was in a room, the way the silence changed around him, became something attentive and slightly charged, like the atmosphere before lightning.

I wanted to know what sound he’d make. Not the muttering. Something else. The sound a man makes when he has nowhere to go and the person who’s put him there is close enough that he can feel the heat.

The lighter clicked. Open. Shut. Open.

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 turned from the window. The study was empty except for Leon and the ghost of Geno’s cigarette smoke and the weight of a decision I hadn’t made yet, but could feel approaching, inevitable as weather.

Back to work. The family didn’t run itself. The ledgers didn’t balance themselves. The vendor fraud needed handling, and somewhere in Florence, a man with caramel on his fingers was doing something with my thirty million dollars that I hadn’t authorized and couldn’t bring myself to stop.

The lighter snapped shut. I slipped it into my pocket and reached for the next problem on the list. There were fifty-three of them. None of them were named Zephyr Kontos.

Not on paper, anyway.

The phone lit up on the table, a soft buzz against walnut, the screen brightening to blue-white in the dim study, cutting through the haze like something that didn’t belong there.

I looked at it. I always look at phones when they light up. In my world, phones that light up at the wrong time usually mean someone’s dead or about to be, and I prefer to know which.

This was worse.

A photograph. High resolution, clean angle—street camera or phone, didn’t matter. The image was sharp enough to count the pores on Theo Romano’s face as he walked down a Florence sidewalk, his head turned slightly toward the camera, his expression the blank pleasantness he wore when he thought no one was watching him.

Underneath, text. Zephyr’s text. I recognized the cadence before I registered the words, which was its own kind of problem.

Do you know this man? He’s been following me for the last six blocks.

I was on my feet before the last word processed. Chair scraping hardwood, the sound loud in the quiet room. My hand was already moving—a single gesture, flat-palmed, cutting sideways through the air—and Leon was already turning toward the door because that’s what happened when I gestured. No questions. No clarification. The gesture meant move, and Leon moved.

The remaining men—two from the dock crew who’d lingered near the doorway, plus the head of security who’d been standing in the hallway—were already in motion. They’d seen the gesture. They’d seen my face. They didn’t need the context.

Context was for people with time, and we were fresh out.

I picked up the phone. Typed back. Four sentences, no wasted characters. My thumb moved across the screen with the efficiency of a man writing his own name on a death certificate.

Location, now. Stay where people can see you. Do not go anywhere dark. I am coming.

I didn’t add anything warmer. Warmth was for people who weren’t currently calculating how many minutes it would take to reach central Florence, how many men I would need, and what I was going to do to my cousin when I found him standing anywhere near Zephyr Kontos.

The response came before I’d set the phone down.

Piazza del Duomo.

I filed this away with the cold precision I applied to everything that mattered. Piazza del Duomo. The cathedral square. Open, crowded, tourist-heavy even at this hour. The kind of place where a man could vanish into a crowd if he needed to, or where a man could be easily found if someone was looking.

Zephyr had chosen well. Deliberately well. The kind of well that suggested his self-preservation instincts were considerably sharper than his apparent indifference to danger would have you believe.

Reassuring.

Also irritating.

A man with good instincts had fewer excuses for walking into a mafia boss’s house and making himself impossible to ignore, and I would have preferred the excuses.

Excuses were simpler than the warm, inconvenient thing currently sitting behind my sternum that had nothing to do with security and everything to do with the fact that someone had followed him, and I hadn’t been there to prevent it.

I pocketed the phone. Pulled my denim vest straight with one hand, feeling the weight of the knives settle against my ribs where they belonged. The silver herringbone chain caught the overhead light, threw it back.

“Piazza del Duomo,” I said to the room. Not raised. Didn’t need to be. The men were already at the door, already moving, boots on hardwood, the sound of them fading toward the garage where the vehicles were kept running because in my house, vehicles were always kept running.

Leon was at my shoulder. Of course he was. His hand was already on his firearm, not drawing it, just resting there, the particular stillness of a man who understood exactly what came next and had already decided how many bullets it would require.

“Range Rover,” I said. “You drive. I need both hands free.”

He nodded. Didn’t ask why. Didn’t need to.

The study emptied in under thirty seconds. Door closing behind us, the cigarette smell left to settle back into the curtains where it belonged, the overhead light still burning because nobody had thought to turn it off and nobody was going back to check.

The hallway was cool and dark and empty. The garage door was already rolling up when we reached it. The Range Rover’s engine was running, exhaust pooling on the concrete in pale gray clouds, the headlights cutting twin beams through the gathering dark.

I didn’t look back at the house. Didn’t need to. The fifty-three problems on the list would be there waiting, patient as graves.

Right now, there was only one problem that mattered, and it was standing in a crowded square in central Florence with caramel on his fingers and my cousin behind him, and I was going to solve it the way I solved most problems.

With my hands.

The lighter clicked open as I slid into the passenger seat. Held the flame for a count of two. Snapped shut.

The Range Rover pulled out of the garage and onto the street, tires biting into cobblestone, and Florence waited for us, amber and ancient and entirely unprepared for what was coming.

The Range Rover took the road like it was personally offended by the concept of curves. Leon drove the way he did everything—with cold efficiency and absolutely no concern for whether the vehicle’s suspension would survive the experience.

I didn’t care.

Suspensions were replaceable.

What wasn’t replaceable was currently standing in a public square with my cousin’s eyes on him, and that fact occupied approximately ninety percent of my available mental bandwidth.

The remaining ten percent was running the calculation I should have run two days ago. Theo had found Zephyr. Which meant Alexios knew Zephyr existed.

Which meant someone on the staff had talked—a driver, a guard, someone who’d seen the blond civilian carrying a laptop bag through the hallways and thought that information was worth sharing with the silver-haired uncle who still believed the family seat belonged to him by right of blood and decades of mediocre decision-making.

I wasn’t surprised. Annoyed, yes. Concerned, certainly. But surprise implied I’d expected better from people, and I’d stopped doing that around the time I realized Geno’s loyalists would rather see the family burn than follow a dock worker, illegitimate or otherwise.

What I hadn’t accounted for was Theo moving this fast.

Theo. My cousin. The man who smiled at everyone and meant nothing by it, who’d spent thirty-two years using charm as a substitute for substance because charm was easier and required significantly less courage.

The Range Rover hit the city center area and the road narrowed instantly, ancient stone walls crowding in on both sides, close enough that I could have reached out the window and touched the mortar if I’d wanted to waste the arm.

We didn’t slow down.

Leon didn’t believe in slowing down for architecture, regardless of its historical significance, and the cobblestones transmitted every jolt directly through the frame and into my spine.

Tourist foot traffic scattered ahead of us. Americans in sun hats, Germans with maps, the breed of visitor who came to Florence expecting Renaissance tranquility and instead got a two-ton British SUV doing forty through a pedestrian thoroughfare with a man in the passenger seat who looked like he’d be entirely comfortable breaking several of the Ten Commandments before dinner.

The dome of the cathedral grew larger through the windshield. Brunelleschi’s masterpiece, brick and ambition and the kind of architectural confidence that made modern buildings look apologetic.

The late amber light caught it from the west, turned the white marble facing gold, and for approximately three seconds I registered the beauty of the thing before my brain returned to the more pressing matter of whether Zephyr was still standing where he’d said he’d be standing, and whether Theo was still within reach of my hands.

I didn’t examine too carefully what it meant that my first instinct upon reading Zephyr’s text had not been strategic. Not about the family. Not about timing. Not about what Theo’s surveillance implied about Alexios’s next move or which staff member had betrayed me or how many men I would need to station at the Florence villa going forward.

It had been simpler than that. Considerably less civilized.

Nobody followed Zephyr. Nobody watched him on a dark street. Nobody got that close to him without me knowing about it and deciding whether to allow it, and the answer, as a general policy, was no.

I was aware this was not a rational position for a man who had known Zephyr Kontos for forty-eight hours. Rationality had limited jurisdiction over certain categories of want.

I had crossed into Zephyr’s category somewhere around the moment he’d slid a pre-signed NDA across a desk and said “so?” to the mafia with the calm of a man who either didn’t understand what the word meant or understood it perfectly and had decided it didn’t apply to him.

Both possibilities were problematic.

Both, regrettably, made me want him more.

The Range Rover swung hard into the Piazza del Duomo’s outer edge, tires skidding on cobblestone, the engine note bouncing off stone facades and coming back louder.

Tourists scattered. A woman in a floral dress grabbed her husband’s arm and yanked him toward the relative safety of a gelato stand. A group of Japanese students pressed themselves against a souvenir cart, cameras swinging from their necks, eyes wide.

I didn’t care. Civilians were scenery. Useful scenery, in that they meant witnesses, and witnesses meant Theo wouldn’t do anything stupid in plain sight, but scenery nonetheless.

My door was open before the vehicle fully stopped. One boot on cobblestone, then the other, denim vest settling against my shoulders, the knives riding comfortable and familiar under my arms.

The evening air hit warm and carried the particular smell of Florence in late afternoon—stone dust, espresso, the faint sweetness of tourist sunscreen.

I saw him immediately.

Across the open square. Barefoot on cobblestone that had to be radiating the day’s accumulated heat directly into the soles of his feet, because Zephyr Kontos did not believe in shoes if he could possibly avoid them, and apparently a potential stalker situation hadn’t been persuasive enough to change his mind.

Laptop bag over one shoulder. Oversized T-shirt hanging past his hips. One hand holding a caramel he was in the process of unwrapping, fingers working at the gold foil.

He was watching me arrive. His head was tilted slightly, the way it did when he was processing something his brain hadn’t quite categorized yet, and the expression on his face was either relief or amusement or both.

He had the look of a man who had texted the devil and was now watching the devil show up in a Range Rover that had clearly broken several traffic laws on the way here, and who found the entire situation significantly more entertaining than anyone with functioning survival instincts should have.

The caramel went into 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 fact that my cousin had been following him and everything to do with the fact that he was standing there barefoot, eating candy, and looking at me like I was the most interesting thing he’d seen all day.

I crossed the square, boots on hot stone, the sound of them carrying in the open space. People stepped aside without being asked because thirty years of being six-foot-three had taught my body how to move through crowds without slowing down.

Zephyr didn’t move. He sat there, caramel between his teeth, laptop bag sliding down his arm to rest at his elbow, and watched me approach with those Aegean-blue eyes that missed absolutely nothing and pretended otherwise as a matter of principle.

“Hey,” he said when I reached him.

I looked at him. Really looked. Catalogued the way the late light caught his blond hair, turned it almost white at the temples. The strip of skin visible above his waistband where his T-shirt had ridden up. The caramel shining on his lower lip. No marks. No bruises. No sign that Theo had gotten within reach.

Good.

That made what came next considerably simpler.

“Theo Romano,” I said. My voice came out lower than I’d intended. Rougher. The kind of voice that made the tourist couple nearest to us decide very suddenly that the gelato stand on the far side of the square was worth the walk. “My cousin. Alexios’s son.”

Zephyr’s eyebrows went up. The caramel shifted from one cheek to the other. “Your cousin?”

“Yes.”

“He doesn’t seem very friendly.”

“He won’t seem anything at all if he’s within a mile of you by the time I’m done.” I reached for his arm. Not hard. Not yet. Just my hand closing around his bicep, feeling the warmth of his skin through the thin cotton of his sleeve.

“Come with me,” I said. Not a request. Never a request.

Zephyr looked at my hand on his arm. Then up at my face. The expression that moved across his features was complicated—curiosity, assessment, and something warmer underneath that I didn’t have a name for and wasn’t going to examine right now.

“Okay,” he said as he stood. He had either decided I wasn’t a threat or had decided that being threatened by me was significantly more interesting than the alternative.

I didn’t let go of his arm. The Range Rover waited at the edge of the square and my men were fanning out, looking for any threat.

Behind us, Florence continued its evening—church bells, distant scooters, the hum of a city that had seen worse than a six-foot-three man escorting a barefoot blond across a public square with more possession in his grip than the situation technically warranted.

I didn’t care. Technical warrant was for people with time to spare, and I was fresh out.

The lighter clicked in my pocket. Open. Shut. The sound of it matched my pulse, which was steadier than it had any right to be, given the circumstances.

Given him.

Chapter Six

~ Zephyr ~

I settled onto the worn marble step of the Duomo and unwrapped a caramel. It went into my mouth, sweet and salty. The kind of sweet and salty that made my brain register “danger” and respond with “but have you considered caramel?” which was, historically, not my most effective survival mechanism.

Below me, the piazza churned with evening foot traffic. Tourists with gelato cups, locals cutting through on their way home, the occasional carabinieri patrol moving at the unhurried pace of men who knew nobody was going to start anything with the cathedral looming overhead like a four-hundred-year-old chaperone.

And there he was. Theo Romano. My stalker of the hour.

He was retreating. Not running—that would have been too obvious, too panicked. Just walking, steady and measured, his dark head moving through the crowd with the practiced ease of a man who had been disappearing into rooms his entire life.

Good shoes. That was the first thing I’d noticed. Italian leather, hand-stitched, the kind that cost more than most people’s monthly rent and looked it. Too expensive for a casual stroll, and too clean.

The soles had barely any wear, which meant either he’d bought them yesterday or he had someone who polished them for him, and given what I knew about the Romano family, option two seemed more likely.

I’d clocked him three blocks from the palazzo. One block to register the shoes. One block to confirm he was matching my pace. One block to decide I was being followed by someone with terrible awareness, but excellent taste in footwear.

Then I’d stopped at the gelateria on Via dei Calzaiuoli because I wanted confirmation and I wanted pistachio, and those two objectives were not mutually exclusive no matter what Ari thought about my priorities.

The gelato had been excellent. The confirmation had been textbook—Theo had stopped across the street, pretended to check his phone, and then very deliberately not looked in my direction for approximately forty-five seconds while I licked pistachio off a tiny plastic spoon and mentally mapped my exit routes.

Two exits. The narrow alley behind the gelateria that opened to Via Roma. The western side of the piazza that fed into the pedestrian thoroughfare toward the Uffizi. Carabinieri patrol cycle: nine minutes, give or take, based on the two passes I’d timed while eating.

All collected, all filed, all while enjoying what was genuinely some of the best pistachio gelato I’d had in months.

Multitasking. It’s what I do.

I unwrapped a second caramel. The gold foil caught the late light, turned it warm. Theo had vanished into the crowd now, just a dark head among dozens of dark heads, and I found myself mildly disappointed. Six blocks of being followed by a Romano and the man hadn’t even had the courtesy to approach me.

Rude, honestly. If you’re going to stalk someone, commit to the bit.

The caramel was halfway to my mouth when the air changed.

I didn’t need to look up. I felt it—the shift in atmospheric pressure that happened whenever Aristoteles Romano entered a space, like the molecules themselves had gotten a memo and rearranged accordingly.

He crossed the piazza in eight strides. Not hurrying. Hurrying would have been beneath him. Leon and the two others fanned out behind him—not following,, but flanking, covering angles I hadn’t even thought to worry about.

Good men. Well-trained. The kind that made Theo’s surveillance look like amateur hour.

Ari stopped in front of me, close enough that I had to tilt my head back to see his face, which put me at a tactical disadvantage that my body registered with considerably more interest than my survival instincts thought was appropriate.

His black eyes did a fast scan. Top of my head—blond hair, probably windblown, definitely not styled for a potential abduction scenario—down my face, my throat, my shoulders, the oversized T-shirt that had ridden up to expose a strip of stomach I was now acutely aware of, my bare feet on the marble step, and finally the caramel wrapper clutched between my fingers.

His jaw was tight. The scar on his cheekbone stood pale against skin that had gone a shade darker with whatever was happening behind those eyes. His hands were at his sides, perfectly still.

I did my own scan. Faster, internal, the kind I’d been doing since the moment I met him and had gotten distressingly good at.

Read one: He was furious. Not shouting furious. Not red-faced, veins-popping furious. The colder, more controlled variety—the kind that lived behind his sternum and made his voice go quieter rather than louder, which was considerably more concerning.

Read two, filed immediately under later, examine thoroughly, possibly with alcohol: He had come himself. Not Leon. Not one of the dock crew. Himself. Six-foot-three of controlled menace, personally deployed to a public square because someone had followed the caramel guy.

That meant something. I wasn’t ready to name what, but my pulse had opinions on the matter that it was expressing with the subtlety of a marching band.

I held up the second caramel. An offering. A peace gesture. A deeply unserious attempt to de-escalate a situation that probably couldn’t be de-escalated with candy, but I was working with the tools available.

He did not take it. His eyes stayed on mine, and the refusal was so complete it didn’t even require movement.

“You were supposed to stay somewhere visible,” he said. Very quietly. The kind of quiet that made the tourists nearest to us decide, with impressive collective intuition, that the south side of the piazza had better gelato options.

I pointed upward with the hand not holding the caramel. The dome of the Duomo rose above us, Brunelleschi’s masterpiece, four centuries of being the most visible structure in Florence short of being literally on fire.

“It’s the Duomo,” I said. “Historically speaking, one of the most visible buildings in the Western hemisphere. Possibly the universe. I’m not up on extraterrestrial architecture, but I feel confident in this assessment.”

“That is not what I meant.”

“I know.” I popped the caramel into my mouth. Held his gaze while I did it, which was either brave or stupid and the line between those had always been blurry for me. “I’m being difficult on purpose. It’s a coping mechanism. Highly effective, clinically unstudied.”

He didn’t blink. Didn’t move. The statue of David had more expressive range, and David was made of marble and missing some key anatomical details.

“Also,” I said, because the silence was starting to feel like a contest and I hate losing, “Theo Romano has a tell when he’s lying. His left shoulder drops. About half an inch. Consistent, reproducible, useful information I collected while being followed for six blocks, which you’re welcome to have. Free of charge. Consider it a signing bonus.”

Ari stared at me. The kind of stare that suggested he was running several calculations simultaneously and none of them were arriving at an answer he liked.

I sucked on the caramel, sweet and salty, the flavor of a man making a series of questionable decisions and enjoying every minute of it.

He was still standing too close. Close enough that I could smell the cedar-and-coffee thing he had going on, close enough that the heat coming off him had nothing to do with the evening air and everything to do with the fact that Aristoteles Romano ran approximately ten degrees warmer than a human being had any right to, which was information my body had filed under “highly relevant” without consulting my better judgment.

“Are you finished?” he asked. The question carried the weight of a man who had many other questions lined up behind it and was selecting this one as a courtesy.

“With the caramel? Almost. With being difficult? Probably not.”

Something moved behind his eyes. Something complicated, warm, the kind of thing that lived in the neighborhood of exasperated affection without quite crossing the border.

I ate the rest of the caramel and waited for whatever came next, which, based on the look on his face, was going to be either extremely professional or not professional at all, and I was genuinely curious which one would win.

* * * *

After searching for Theo and coming up empty, Ari decided we were leaving with the same kind of motion he applied to everything—a single gesture, flat-palmed, cutting through the air like he was dismissing the entire concept of public squares—and then his hand was on my lower back, warm through the thin cotton of my T-shirt, and we were moving.

Not gripping. Not pushing. Just there, a point of contact that registered somewhere below my sternum with the specificity of a coordinates being entered into a GPS that was already recalculating several routes simultaneously, none of them professional.

Leon now had the Range Rover running at the edge of the piazza, engine idling with the patient rumble of something that cost more than my annual rent and had better suspension than my spine deserved.

The back door was open.

Ari’s hand guided me toward it with the kind of pressure that wasn’t quite steering and wasn’t quite not-steering, and then I was in, sliding across black leather that still held the day’s accumulated heat.

Ari followed, his larger frame folding itself into a space that had clearly been designed by someone who had never met a six-foot-three Italian with shoulders that could double as architectural supports.

The world outside went muffled as the door closed. Leon put the vehicle in gear without a word, and we pulled away from the Duomo with the acceleration of a man who considered traffic laws decorative rather than binding.

And then there was the thigh situation.

Four inches. That was the measurement, though I wasn’t using a tape measure because that would have been weird and also I didn’t have one, but four inches felt accurate based on the amount of my right thigh that was currently in direct, uncompromising contact with Ari’s left thigh.

The fact that my brain had registered this measurement at all was already several steps past the boundary of appropriate professional observation.

His thigh was warm. Solid. The kind of solid that came from years of actual physical labor rather than cosmetic gym time, and the difference was not subtle if you were pressed against it with the entirety of your right leg, which I was.

My pulse did something. A flush that started at my collarbones and worked its way upward with the leisurely confidence of something that knew it had clearance to proceed.

Fascinating. Clinically speaking. Nothing to do with me.

The silence between us had weight. Not the empty kind. The compressed kind—the silence of two people who were aware of exactly how many unspoken things were currently occupying the four inches of leather between their thighs, and had mutually decided, without discussion, to let those things remain unspoken for the moment.

It was a generous silence.

I appreciated its restraint.

Ari’s cedar-and-coffee scent filled the confined space of the back seat. No cologne. Just him, the warmth of his skin, something clean underneath it—soap, maybe, the kind that didn’t announce itself.

I breathed it in and did not catalogue how many times per minute I was doing so, because that would have been obsessive and I am many things, but I am not obsessive.

Three blocks into the drive, Ari spoke. He didn’t look at me. His eyes were on the windshield, on Florence sliding past the windows in amber and shadow, on anything that wasn’t the four inches of contact between us.

“How long did you know?” His voice was low. Rough. The kind that didn’t need volume to land in the close quarters of a car interior.

“Three blocks.” I shifted slightly. The thigh contact adjusted accordingly, which was physics and not a choice. “I wanted confirmation before I texted. Professional standards.”

“You stopped for gelato.”

“I stopped for confirmation. The gelato was a secondary objective. They are not mutually exclusive concepts, and for the record, the pistachio was excellent. If you’d like a review, I could—”

He closed his eyes. Just for a moment. The expression of a man asking the universe for a single unit of patience and receiving a return memo that read, in bureaucratic font, request denied.

I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling.

It didn’t work.

The smile happened anyway, small and private, directed at the window where Florence was doing its evening thing—ochre walls catching the last light, shutters being closed, the hum of a city that had been beautiful for so long it had stopped trying to prove it.

The Range Rover took a corner. Centrifugal force is real, it turns out, and it has opinions about thigh contact. I slid another half-inch toward Ari before catching myself on the door handle, and the half-inch was enough to register the difference between “touching” and “definitely touching.”

My pulse, which had been behaving with the dignity of a mildly interested bystander, suddenly developed the enthusiasm of a golden retriever spotting a tennis ball.

I looked at the window. Not at Ari. At his reflection in the glass—the profile carved against the darkening city, the strong line of his jaw, the way it shifted when he swallowed, the set of his mouth that suggested he was holding something behind his teeth that he had not yet decided whether to release.

His hand was resting on his own knee. Flat. Palm down. The silver ring caught what little light made it through the tinted windows, the black onyx dark against his skin. He was keeping the hand there.

Deliberately.

I could tell because everything Ari did was deliberate, and the stillness of that hand spoke to a man who had placed it precisely where he wanted it and was now exercising the kind of control that made lesser men look like they were having seizures by comparison.

It was, and I say this with all the objectivity I can muster while my right thigh is broadcasting sensations my nervous system has categorized as “high priority,” extremely something.

Not charming.

I was not using that word.

Charming was for men who brought flowers and told jokes and did not look like they could break someone’s jaw with the hand currently resting on their own knee.

Charming was the wrong classification system entirely. I needed a different term, one that accounted for watching a dangerous man exercise restraint while sitting close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him through two layers of fabric.

The Range Rover slowed. We were approaching the palazzo district, the narrow streets closing in, stone walls on either side close enough that I could have reached out and traced the mortar if the windows had been down, which they weren’t, because Leon believed in climate control the way some people believe in religion.

Ari hadn’t moved, his thigh against mine, warm and solid. Four inches of pressed denim and cotton and the awareness of another human body that was doing its own version of not acknowledging the four inches, which was its own kind of communication.

“Next time,” Ari said, still not looking at me, “text at the first block.”

“Noted.” I didn’t promise. Promises were for people who planned to follow instructions, and I had a historically complicated relationship with instructions, especially when they came from men whose thighs were currently conducting a very persuasive argument against rational decision-making.

He turned his head. Finally. Those black eyes found mine in the dimness of the back seat, and the look in them was warm in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature in the Range Rover and everything to do with the thing we’d been not saying for the entire drive, which was that four inches was both too much and not enough, and we both knew it.

The Range Rover pulled up to the palazzo’s iron-studded door. Leon cut the engine. The sudden absence of vibration left the silence feeling louder, the thigh contact more definite, the cedar-and-coffee scent more present than it had any right to be.

Neither of us moved immediately. There was a moment—brief, charged, the kind of moment that lived in the space between one breath and the next.

Then Ari reached for the door handle, and the moment dissolved, and my thigh was suddenly, noticeably cold where his had been, and the loss registered with an immediacy that my brain filed under “concerning” and my body filed under “highly relevant, please address immediately.”

I got out of the car. Florence evening air hit warm and carried stone dust and the faint drift of espresso from somewhere down the street.

I stood on cobblestone that still radiated the day’s heat into my bare feet and waited for whatever came next, which, based on the look on Ari’s face as he rounded the hood of the Range Rover, was going to be either extremely professional or the opposite of professional, and I was, as I had been since the moment I met him, genuinely curious which one would win.

Ari dismissed Leon and the others with a gesture so minimal it barely qualified as movement—a slight tilt of his chin, the kind that communicated an entire paragraph to men who had been reading his silent language for years.

And then it was just the two of us standing at the iron-studded door with Florence evening pressing warm against our backs and whatever was happening between us pressing considerably warmer against everything else.

Leon went. The others went. They dispersed into the palazzo’s shadows like people who understood that their presence was no longer required and also, possibly, that the look on their boss’s face suggested that hanging around to witness whatever came next would be professionally unwise.

The door swung open under Ari’s hand. We stepped through into the courtyard, and the smell hit me—stone and green things and the faint herbal trace of the lemon tree in the corner, doing its lemon tree thing.

Ari’s hand found the small of my back. Not gripping. Not steering. Just there, palm flat against the thin cotton of my T-shirt, the heat of him bleeding through the fabric.

I kept walking. I also kept talking, because silence in proximity to Ari had a density that my verbal circuitry interpreted as an emergency requiring immediate intervention.

“The lemon tree,” I said, gesturing toward the corner where it stood in its terracotta pot, leaves dark against the ochre wall. “Question. Does it actually produce lemons, or is it purely decorative? Because if it’s decorative, someone has made a deeply questionable aesthetic choice. Decorative plants are for people who have given up on meaning. A lemon tree that doesn’t lemon is basically a metaphor for existential disappointment, and I’m not sure this courtyard is ready for that kind of tragedy.”

Ari’s hand stayed where it was. The heat of it was doing something to my lower vertebrae that I was choosing not to examine too carefully.

“It produces lemons,” he said. His voice was low, rough, the kind that carried in the small courtyard without him raising it, bouncing off stone and coming back warmer.

“Good.” I nodded, appreciating its horticultural integrity. “I respect a tree that earns its space. Too many plants out here are coasting on foliage. This one’s putting in the work. You can tell by the—” I gestured vaguely at the tree. “The lemon energy. It’s palpable.”

Ari made a sound low in his throat, barely audible.

I caught it. Filed it. Added it to the growing collection of sounds Ari made that were not meant for public consumption, but that I was collecting anyway, like a particularly dedicated archivist with questionable boundaries.

We reached the interior doorway. The hallway beyond was narrow—seventeenth-century architecture had opinions about personal space that were fundamentally incompatible with twenty-first-century notions of appropriate proximity, especially when one of the people in question was six-foot-three and built like something that had been carved rather than born.

Ari’s hand was still on my back. His body was close behind mine, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him.

We stopped at my door. My working room—the one with the good light and the questionable wifi and the desk where I’d spent the morning annotating Geno’s financial crimes with the focused attention of a man who considered embezzlement a form of conversational icebreaker.

Ari’s hand didn’t move.

My nervous system had grown used to the warmth, which was concerning from a professional standpoint and considerably less concerning from every other standpoint I was currently operating from.

I turned to face him.

Ari was close. Too close for the kind of conversation we were theoretically having, which was absolutely not about the way his black eyes found mine in the dimness and held them.

“I’m fine,” I said. Evenly. Pleasant. The voice of a man who had been followed for six blocks, handled it competently, collected useful intelligence, and was now standing in a narrow hallway with his boss’s hand on his lower back and his pulse doing something that would not look good on a performance review.

“In case you were wondering. No lasting trauma. Expensive shoes, shoulder tell, all handled. Professional-grade stalking response. You can add it to my resume under ‘special skills.’”

His jaw shifted. Something moved behind those eyes—assessment, calculation, the look of a man who was running several equations simultaneously and arriving at an answer he hadn’t expected.

“I wasn’t wondering,” he said. “I could see that.”

“Then why do you still look like that?”

“Like what.”

“Like you’re deciding something.” I held his gaze.

The hallway felt smaller than it had thirty seconds ago, the air between us thicker, the heat from his hand on my back radiating outward in a way that suggested my nervous system had abandoned professional boundaries entirely and was now operating on a different set of protocols.

A pause.

“I am,” he said.

My heart did something athletic. The kind of thing that would have qualified for Olympic consideration if cardiac gymnastics were a sport, which they should be, and I would win a medal, and the medal would be shaped like a caramel and engraved with the words “this was avoidable.”

I kept my face pleasant and my voice dry “I hope the decision involves dinner, because I skipped it. On account of the whole stalker thing. Which, for the record, was not my fault, though I acknowledge that my response involved gelato, which some might consider inferior from a security standpoint, but I stand by it. The pistachio was worth the risk.”

Ari looked at me 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.

Something shifted behind those black eyes. Something that started as assessment and landed somewhere warmer, something that looked like a man arriving at a conclusion he had been circling for longer than either of us was willing to admit.

“Dinner is fine,” he said.

Then he stepped back. His hand left my lower back, and the absence of it registered with an immediacy that my body interpreted as a tactical error requiring immediate correction.

The heat lingered where his palm had been. I could feel it through the cotton of my shirt, a ghost of contact that my nervous system was refusing to relinquish, like it had decided that patch of skin was now under different management.

I turned into my room, closed the door behind me, and leaned against it for approximately three seconds while my expression did something I would not have wanted witnessed by anyone with functioning eyesight.

When my three seconds of sheer panic were up, I pushed off and crossed to the desk where my laptop sat and opened it up to the document I’d been working on.

I didn’t sit. Standing felt better. Standing let me stare at the screen without pretending that I was actually reading anything on it, which I wasn’t. My brain could not currently process due to bandwidth allocation issues elsewhere.

I thought about that hand, the heat of it through the cotton of my shirt, the way it had stayed there, deliberate, the kind of touch that knew exactly what it was doing and had chosen to do it anyway.

I thought about the fact that he had come himself. Not Leon. Himself. Six-foot-three of controlled menace, personally deployed to a public square because someone had followed the caramel guy.

The implications of that lived in a neighborhood my brain was still mapping, and the real estate values were rising by the minute.

I thought about the way Ari had looked at my mouth in the hallway. Just for a second. Down and then away, like he’d caught himself, like he was correcting a calculation that had arrived at an answer he wasn’t ready to implement.

I’d seen it.

I see everything.

It’s what I do.

I opened a new document. My fingers hovered over the keys, and the words that wanted to come out were not the kind that belonged in a financial audit or an NDA or any document that would ever see the light of a printer.

I reached into my laptop bag. Found the last caramel. Unwrapped it with the focused attention of a man who was using sugar as a structural support for a nervous system that had been operating at capacity since approximately the moment I had met Ari and my brain had registered him as a problem I was going to enjoy having.

The caramel went into my mouth, sweet and salty. The flavor of a man making a series of questionable decisions and committing to every one of them.

I started typing. Numbers. Accounts. The vendor fraud from this morning, the transaction history, the clean rounding that had tipped me off. Professional things. Things that belonged in a document.

Things that had nothing to do with the heat of a hand on a lower back or the sound of a not-quite-laugh in a courtyard or the way a pair of black eyes had looked at my mouth and then looked away like the looking itself was the transgression.

I typed. The keys clicked under my fingers, steady and familiar, and somewhere in the building—down the hall, through a door, in a study that smelled of cigarette smoke and bad decisions—Ari was also not thinking about me.

I was almost certain of it.

Then the certainty unraveled, thread by thread, until I wasn’t certain at all, and the warmth behind my sternum had nothing to do with the caramel and everything to do with wanting something that was standing on the other side of several very good reasons why wanting it was a catastrophically bad idea.

I kept typing. The document filled. Numbers. Accounts. The clean, clinical architecture of financial forensics, built to withstand scrutiny.

Somewhere in the margins, in the spaces between digits, in the pauses between keystrokes, something warmer lived. Something that had nothing to do with ledgers and everything to do with a hand on a lower back and a decision that hadn’t been announced yet.

I ate the last of the caramel and kept working, and the warmth stayed where it was, patient as the lemon tree in the courtyard, putting in the work, earning its space.

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.

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.

Chapter Eight

~ Zephyr ~

The study was quiet. I had my feet up on the desk. Bare feet, toes painted turquoise, catching the late afternoon light that came through the shuttered windows in warm diagonal bars.

Papers were spread across the dark wood in a pattern that made sense to me and would look like abstract art to anyone else. My laptop sat open to a spreadsheet that was currently doing something to indicate which Romano shell companies were real and which existed only in the fever dreams of whoever had been running Geno’s books.

I was three caramels deep and my brain was doing that thing where it moved at twice its normal speed while making questionable decisions about humor.

Then the door opened without a knock.

I looked up.

Theo Romano stood in the doorway like the room had been expecting him. He was wearing a tailored suit, charcoal, Italian cut, the kind that cost more than most people’s cars and made no secret about it.

He had an expensive watch on his wrist and his hair was with the kind of precision that suggested someone had spent actual minutes on it rather than the fifteen seconds I gave mine before surrendering to the laws of physics.

He smiled. The smile was good. Professional-grade. The kind of smile that had opened doors his entire life and expected this one to be no different.

“Zephyr.” My name in his mouth sounded polished, like he’d rehearsed it. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

I took a caramel out of the wrapper I’d been holding and popped it into my mouth. I held his gaze while I did it because I have principles, and one of them is that you don’t break eye contact when a man who dresses like he’s auditioning for a magazine spread walks into your workspace uninvited.

“The door has a mechanism,” I said. “It involves making contact with your knuckles against the wood. Revolutionary concept. Still catching on in certain circles.”

His smile didn’t falter. If anything, it got warmer, which was impressive and also deeply irritating. “My apologies. Force of habit. The palazzo has always felt like... family space.”

Well, that explained how he’d gotten in here.

Family space.

I needed to send Ari an email about that.

“The palazzo feels like a building. Buildings have doors. Doors have mechanisms.” I gestured with the empty wrapper. “We can workshop this. I have a whiteboard somewhere.”

He crossed the room, not fast, not slow, just the pace of a man who had never needed to hurry because rooms had always waited for him. He pulled the chair from the corner—my chair, the one I’d been using for reference materials—and sat down across from me like we were having a cozy conversation.

“I’ve been watching your work,” he said as e leaned forward. Elbows on knees. The posture of a man delivering something important with the casual confidence of someone who expected it to be received as such. “What you did with the accounts. The five hundred million. Impressive doesn’t cover it.”

“Thank you.” I didn’t elaborate. Elaboration was for people who wanted the conversation to continue, and I was still deciding whether I fell into that category.

I also had to wonder how he knew anything about what I was doing. I could see him maybe knowing about the returned money, but I doubt Ari would have told him how it was done.

Made me wonder if he had eyes inside the place I worked.

“Ari’s lucky to have found you.” He held my gaze. The dark eyes were doing something complicated—warm on the surface, calculating underneath. “But I wonder if he’s the right fit for your talents.”

Ah.

There it was.

I unwrapped another caramel. Slow. Deliberate. The gold foil caught the light, and I made sure he watched every second of it because timing is a weapon and I was fully armed.

“Are you offering me a job?” I asked. Pleasant. Professional. The tone of a man who was enjoying the show. “Because if so, I should tell you that my current employer has a particular set of responses to poaching that involve knives and a notable lack of due process. Just so we’re clear on the risk-reward profile.”

Theo’s smile shifted. Something warmer entered it, something that lived in the neighborhood of indulgence without quite arriving there. “Not a job, Zephyr. Something better than a job.”

He paused. The kind of pause that was supposed to build anticipation, and would have worked on someone who hadn’t spent the last decade reading rooms for a living.

“I’m offering you a life.” His voice dropped lower, more intimate. “No more scrambling. No more contracts. You’d have everything—a place in the family, resources, protection. My protection.”

He reached across the desk. His hand settled next to mine, not touching, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off his skin. His fingers were smooth. Manicured. He had the hands of a man who had never unloaded a shipping container at three in the morning and had the calluses to prove it.

“Think about it,” he said. “What you could do with that kind of stability. What we could do together.”

I looked at his hand. Then at his face. Then at the caramel wrapper between my fingers, which was considerably more interesting than either of those things.

“Let me make sure I understand.” I kept my voice even. “You’re proposing that I become your... what, exactly? Personal finance wizard? Live-in accountant? The kept man of a Romano cousin with a nice watch and boundary issues?”

His smile didn’t move, but something behind it did. A fractional cooling. The kind of shift that happened when a man who was used to doors opening found one that had just closed.

“I’m proposing a partnership,” he said. The warmth in his voice had developed a thin edge. “One that benefits both of us considerably more than whatever arrangement you have with Ari.”

“I have a job with Ari. It comes with a desk, a paycheck, and the distinct advantage of not being a metaphor.” I leaned back. “Also, he knocks. It’s a small thing, but it matters. Manners. You should look into them. They’re having a moment.”

Theo’s jaw shifted. Once. Barely perceptible. The kind of movement that happened when a man’s composure developed its first hairline fracture.

“You’re making a mistake,” he said. The warmth was draining now, replaced by something cooler, more measured. “Ari doesn’t see what you are. What you could be. He sees a tool. I see a partner.”

“What I am,” I said, “is employed. What I could be is significantly less interested in this conversation than I already am, which I did not think was mathematically possible, but here we are, pushing the boundaries of human disinterest.”

The fracture widened.

Theo stood, fast, the chair scraped against hardwood, a sound that cut through the quiet of the study like something that didn’t belong there. His hand moved—not toward me, across the desk, fingers closing around my forearm with a grip that was considerably stronger than his manicured hands had any right to be.

His fingers dug in. Hard. The kind of hard that left marks, that registered pain before my brain had fully processed what was happening. His other hand came up, grabbed a fistful of my collar, and the fabric tore at the neck with a sound that was small and specific and entirely unacceptable.

I did not freeze.

This is worth noting because freezing is what most people do. The body locks. The brain short-circuits. The world narrows to the point of contact and everything else goes white.

I Did Not Freeze!

My hand found the Julius Caesar bust on the desk—ornamental, marble, the kind of decorative object that had been sitting there gathering dust since approximately the Renaissance—and I drove it into the side of Theo’s head with both hands and enough force that the sound it made was deeply, profoundly satisfying.

Thunk. Solid. Dense. The acoustic signature of marble meeting skull with the enthusiastic violence of something that had been waiting four hundred years for exactly this moment.

Theo’s grip loosened. His body swayed. His eyes did something complicated—surprise first, sharp and genuine, then something that landed close to disbelief before his brain caught up with what had just happened to it.

I did not wait to assess the damage.

I snatched my laptop bag from the floor and shoved my laptop into it. I was moving before my body had fully committed to the decision, as if my survival instincts had just overridden every other system in the building.

Not toward the exit. Toward Ari’s office.

Every instinct I had was pointing the same direction, like a compass that had found north and was now screaming about it at a volume my nervous system could not ignore. Down the corridor. Boots would have been faster, but boots were upstairs and upstairs was the wrong direction, so bare feet it was, the slap of skin on hardwood loud in the narrow hallway.

I hit Ari’s door at speed. No knock. No courtesy. My shoulder connected with the wood and the door swung open hard enough that it cracked the wall behind it with a sound that announced my arrival with considerably more drama than I had intended.

Ari was behind the desk. Leon was at his shoulder. Both of them looked up with the coordinated attention of men who had been trained to perceive door violations as potential threats and were currently categorizing me accordingly.

I did not slow down.

I rounded the desk without breaking stride. Dropped to my knees. Folded myself into the space underneath it—knees to chin, laptop bag clutched to my chest, the wood above me close enough that I could feel the grain against my hair.

I held one finger to my lips.

Leon stared at me. Ari stared at me. The study was very quiet except for the sound of my heart, which was currently doing something that would have qualified for Olympic consideration if tachycardia were a sport.

From under the desk, I had an excellent view of Ari’s boots. Polished leather. Scuffed at the toes. The kind of boots that had seen more miles than most vehicles and had the stories to prove it.

The boots did not move.

Neither did I.

We stayed like that, the three of us, in a silence that had weight and temperature and the density of a room where something was about to happen, and everyone in it knew exactly what that something was.

The door opened approximately thirty seconds later.

Theo walked in like a man who had not, approximately forty-five seconds ago, had a Roman emperor applied to the side of his head with sufficient force to rearrange his afternoon plans.

His voice came first, easy and warm. “Ari. Perfect timing. I was hoping to catch you.”

From under the desk, my field of vision was limited to boots, lower legs, and the view of a room from knee-height down. Theo’s shoes were pristine Italian leather, the kind that had never met a puddle they couldn’t avoid. Ari’s boots were scuffed at the toes, the leather worn soft in the places where a man’s weight settled when he stood still for too long.

The lighter clicked.

I knew that sound. The fast rhythmic click—open, shut, open, shut—the tempo that preceded someone’s very bad day. Ari’s hand was doing that thing where the lighter moved without his conscious input, the way a pianist’s fingers found the keys when the muscle memory was older than the thought behind it.

Open. Shut. Open. Shut.

“Your neck,” Ari said. Quiet. The kind of quiet that made the air in the room feel thinner.

A pause. Theo’s shoes shifted slightly. The expensive leather squeaked against hardwood, a small sound that carried in the quiet. “What about it?”

“You have a scratch. Four inches. Above the collar.”

Another pause. Longer this time. I could picture Theo’s hand moving to his neck, fingers finding the mark he hadn’t noticed because adrenaline is a hell of a drug and marble against skull tends to prioritize certain sensory inputs over others.

“It’s nothing,” Theo said. His voice had developed a faint edge, the particular edge of a man who had just realized he was standing on thinner ice than he’d calculated. “I caught it on a doorframe. The palazzo’s hallways weren’t built for modern proportions.”

“The palazzo,” Ari said. The lighter kept clicking. Open, shut, open. “You keep using that word.”

“It’s a family property.”

“It’s my property.”

The silence that followed had weight. The kind of weight that pressed against the underside of the desk where I was sitting with my knees to my chin and my laptop bag clutched to my chest like it contained state secrets, which, given what was on the hard drive, it technically did.

“Everything in this family belongs to me.” Ari’s voice stayed low, measured. “The palazzo. The estate outside Livorno. Every account. Every asset. Every room you have ever stood in and assumed was partly yours.”

Theo’s shoes shifted again. The leather squeaked. A nervous tell. I filed it under “useful information about people who grab my arms” and made a mental note to never be in a room with him again without a larger paperweight.

“You have a right to the quarterly dividends,” Ari continued. “Nothing else. Not the books. Not the staff. Not the man working at the desk in the east study.”

My heart did something. A quick, traitorous jump that started somewhere behind my sternum and radiated outward before I could stop it. The man working at the desk. Me. I was a desk man now. I had achieved desk status.

This was either a promotion or a demotion and I was too busy not breathing to decide which.

“If you cannot demonstrate basic respect for that arrangement,” Ari said, “you can lose the dividends too.”

Theo’s voice climbed. I heard it happen—the upward lilt of a man whose composure was developing structural issues. “You can’t just—that’s not how this works. I’m blood. I’m Romano blood. My father built—”

“Your father managed what Geno broke.” Ari’s voice dropped lower. Quieter. The kind of quiet that made Theo’s climbing volume sound desperate by comparison. “I rebuilt it. With my hands. With men I chose. Not with blood. With loyalty.”

The contrast was something you could feel even from under a desk. Theo’s expensive suit, the manicured hands I could see gripping the edge of something—the desk, maybe, or his own composure—and the scratch on his neck he still hadn’t fully registered.

Ari’s rolled sleeves, the denim vest with its hidden knife pockets just visible at the edge of my limited sightline, the absolute stillness of a man who had already made a decision and was simply filling in the paperwork.

The lighter clicked. Open, shut, open.

“I want you out of the palazzo,” Ari said. “Tonight. Leon will arrange transport. You can collect your things from the estate tomorrow, under supervision.”

“This is—” Theo started. Stopped. Started again, his voice tighter now, the polished charm cracking around the edges. “My mother will hear about this.”

“I’m counting on it.”

Theo stormed out. I heard it—boots on hardwood, the door opening, expensive leather taking corners too fast because the man wearing it was currently operating several standard deviations outside his comfort zone.

The door closed. Not slammed. Closed with the controlled precision of someone who understood that slamming doors was for people who had run out of better options, and Theo Romano, whatever his faults, had not yet reached that milestone.

Ari’s voice, lower now, directed at Leon. “Put someone on him. Change the locks. Here and at the estate. His access is revoked until further notice. I want it done tonight.”

Leon’s boots moved. Toward the door. The sound of them was efficient, unhurried, the sound of a man who had just received an order he had no questions about. The door opened. Closed. The latch caught with a soft click that sounded final.

More silence.

Then Ari’s hand appeared under the desk. Large. Rough. The knuckles scarred in a way that suggested they’d seen more disagreement than agreement over the years. The silver ring caught what little light made it under the desk, black onyx dark against his skin.

I looked at the hand. The hand did not move. It waited, palm up, fingers slightly curled.

I took it.

His fingers closed around mine, and then he lifted. One motion. Smooth. The kind of smooth that came from abnormal strength applied with abnormal control, and my entire body registered how easy it was—the weightlessness of being moved by someone for whom my hundred and fifteen pounds represented a arithmetic problem he had already solved.

I landed in his lap.

Not perched. Not arranged. Landed, like something that had been retrieved and deposited. His thighs were warm under mine. Solid. The denim of his jeans rough against the bare skin of my legs where the capri pants had ridden up.

One of his arms settled around my waist—not gripping, resting, the weight of a limb that had decided where it belonged and was now implementing that decision without commentary.

His other hand went to work.

Fast. Thorough. The same scan he used on everything that mattered—eyes moving over my face, my throat, down to my arms where Theo’s fingers had left red marks that were already darkening into something that would bruise by morning.

His fingertips traced the edge of the torn collar, the fabric ripped at the neck where Theo had grabbed it, and something in his expression went very cold.

Not the controlled cool I was used to. Something colder. Something that lived in the neighborhood of rage without quite arriving there, the kind of cold that preceded action rather than replacing it.

His jaw was tight. The scar on his cheekbone stood pale against skin that had gone a shade darker with whatever was happening behind those eyes. His thumb brushed the edge of the bruise forming on my forearm—once, lightly, the touch of a man cataloguing damage with the precision of someone who would remember every mark.

“Theo will never touch you again,” he said.

Quiet. Flat. Not a promise. A statement of fact from someone who arranged facts for a living, who looked at the world and saw a series of problems that could be solved with the correct application of force, and who had just decided that a problem had reached the end of its allowable lifespan.

I believed him.

This is worth noting because I don’t believe most people. I have a professionally calibrated distrust of human statements, especially the ones that sound like promises, and yet when Aristoteles Romano looked at the bruises on my arms and said those five words in that rough tone, my brain registered them as infrastructure rather than sentiment.

Solid. Load-bearing. The kind of thing you could build on.

His hand was still on my waist. His thumb moved in small, absent circles against the thin cotton of my T-shirt.

Under the desk, my bare feet dangled. Turquoise sparkles catching what little light made it into the shadow beneath Ari’s chair. The torn collar hung open at my throat, exposing more skin than it was designed to, and the red marks on my arms were doing their thing—throbbing gently, reminding me that they existed, that Theo’s fingers had been there, that the marble bust had been an appropriate response by any civilized standard.

Ari’s chest was warm against my side. I could feel his heartbeat through the thin cotton of his shirt—steady, slower than mine. Apparently, his cardiovascular system had not received the memo that we were currently sitting in his lap with my bruises and his rage and the lighter clicking quietly on the desk beside us.

Open. Shut. Open.

The sound was different now. Slower. More deliberate.

I stayed where I was. His lap was warm. His arm around my waist was heavy in the way that things that belong there are heavy, and I did not examine that comparison too closely because examination would require vocabulary I did not currently possess.

Also because my adrenal system was in the process of crashing and the warmth was considerably more appealing than the alternative.

The lighter clicked one more time. Held. Snapped shut. Then his hand found the back of my head, and everything got simpler.

“He offered me a life,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected, which was either professional composure or delayed shock and I was too tired to decide which. “His exact phrase. ‘I’m offering you a life.’ Capital L, implied. Very dramatic. I think he’s been work-shopping it.”

Ari’s hand was still on the back of my head. His thumb moved in small, absent circles against my scalp.

“Kept man proposition. Full package. Resources, protection, his protection, the whole portfolio.” I kept my tone dry. Clinical. “I declined. Politely. With references to door mechanisms and the general concept of knocking, which he found... unpersuasive.”

The lighter clicked. Once. Open, held, shut. Ari’s other arm was still around my waist, his hand resting on my hip.

“He grabbed my arms. Fingers. Here.” I gestured to the marks, which were darkening nicely. “Then the collar. Fabric tore. You can see the... yeah.”

I touched the torn edge of my shirt. The cotton hung open at the throat, exposing more collarbone than the manufacturer had intended, and the tear was clean—a straight rip along the seam where Theo’s grip had found the weakest point and applied enthusiastic leverage.

“I used the Caesar bust. Marble. Ornamental. Very effective as an impromptu cranial adjustment tool. Would recommend. Five stars. The sound it made was...” I paused. Searched for the right word. “Therapeutic.”

Ari’s jaw was tight. I could feel it against my temple—the tension of muscle under skin, the way his breathing had changed, slower now, more controlled, the kind of control that cost him something and he was paying it anyway.

“I never got to my switchblade,” I added. “It’s in the laptop bag. If I had, we’d be having a different conversation in a different location. Probably involving a tarp. And paperwork. So. Silver linings.”

His arm tightened around my waist. Once. Brief. The pressure of a man who had just processed several sentences simultaneously and did not like the arithmetic on any of them.

“The bust was Julius Caesar,” I said. “I consider the symbolism appropriate. Man overreaches. Man gets stabbed. Classical narrative structure. Very satisfying closure.”

Ari did not laugh. His chest moved—once, a half-breath that might have been the structural cousin of a laugh in a different timeline—but his face, what I could see of it from my angle, stayed set in that controlled cold that I was starting to recognize.

Then his hand pressed my head to his shoulder. Not guiding. Not suggesting. Pressing, as if this was the correct response and he was now implementing that decision without negotiation.

I let him.

This is worth noting because I don’t let most people. Letting is complicated. Letting requires trust, and trust is a currency I spend carefully, in small denominations, with extensive documentation.

Yet when Ari’s hand found the back of my head and pressed me against the solid warmth of his shoulder, my body made the decision before my brain caught up, and the decision was yes.

The adrenaline crashed.

I felt it happen—the suddenness of a system that had been running at triple capacity deciding, all at once, that it was done. My muscles went. Not collapse, exactly. Surrender. The kind of surrender that happens when something has been holding itself together through sheer force of will and the force has finally, mercifully, found its limit.

Ari was warm. Solid. His shoulder under my cheek carried the scent of cedar and coffee and something underneath it that was just him, just skin, the clean base note of a man who did not wear cologne because he did not need to.

My bare feet dangled. Turquoise sparkles catching the low light from the desk lamp, toes pointed toward the floor because my legs were not long enough to reach it from the height of Ari’s lap.

My torn collar hung open. The red marks on my arms throbbed gently, a dull percussion keeping time with my heartbeat, which was gradually slowing to something that resembled a normal human rhythm rather than the interpretive dance it had been performing for the last twenty minutes.

The door opened. Soft. A single knock that had happened approximately half a second before the door itself moved, which was Leon’s courtesy—the knock as notification rather than request.

A blanket appeared. Heavy. Wool, maybe, or something thick enough to mimic it, the kind of blanket that had weight and presence and the smell of something that had been stored in cedar and forgotten about until someone needed it.

Leon set it on the edge of the desk. Did not look at me. Did not look at Ari. Looked at the space approximately six inches to the left of both of us, which was his version of professional discretion and also considerably more tact than the situation deserved.

The door closed. The latch caught.

Ari reached for the blanket. One-handed. His other arm stayed around my waist, and the coordination of a man retrieving an object without disrupting the person in his lap was something my nervous system filed under “highly relevant data” without consulting my better judgment.

He shook the blanket open and then the weight of it settled around my shoulders—heavy, warm, the kind of warmth that seeped into muscles that had been holding tension for longer than they were designed to.

His hands tucked the edges. Around my back, under my knees where the bare skin of my legs was doing its thing—radiating cold, because bare feet on hardwood for twenty minutes in a climate-controlled palazzo adds up to a thermal deficit that no amount of adrenaline can fully offset.

His fingers brushed my ankles as he arranged the blanket, and the contact registered somewhere below my sternum.

My eyes closed.

I did not decide to close them. They closed on their own, like something that had reached the end of its operational budget and was now implementing power-saving measures.

The darkness behind my eyelids was warm and textured and considerably more appealing than the alternative, which was keeping them open and continuing to process a world that had, in the span of forty-five minutes, introduced several new variables that my brain was not currently equipped to handle.

My face was in the curve of Ari’s neck. His skin was warm against my forehead. His pulse was steady under my cheek, and I could feel it—a man who was sitting very still and thinking very hard about things he had not yet said out loud.

My hand found the edge of his shirt and my fingers closed around it without my conscious input. The grip was tight. White-knuckled. The grip of a man who was asleep and did not know he was doing it, except I was not asleep, I was awake, I was very awake, and my hand had nevertheless decided that Ari’s shirt was structurally significant and required securing.

He did not move my hand.

His voice came low. Not the tone he used for rooms. Not the tone he used for Leon. Something lower, rougher. “I tried to stay away.” The words landed against the top of my head, his breath warm through my hair. “Seven days. I tried to keep my distance. To let you work. To let the family stand on its own.”

His hand moved on my back. Slow circles between my shoulder blades, the pressure of fingers working through fabric, through blanket, through the layers between his palm and my skin.

“It is no longer possible.”

Five words. Quiet. Complete. The kind of statement that did not require elaboration because the elaboration lived in the arm around my waist and the hand on my back and the steady heartbeat under my cheek that had not changed its tempo despite whatever was happening behind those five words.

I did not respond.

I could have. I had words. I had several thousand words, arranged in various configurations, some of them professional, some of them considerably less so, and all of them currently residing in a part of my brain that had been temporarily decommissioned by the combined effects of adrenaline crash, a thermal blanket, and the warmth of Ari’s neck against my forehead.

So I said nothing. My hand kept its grip on his shirt. My breathing slowed to something that approximated sleep.

The lighter clicked. Once. Open, held, the small orange flame dancing against the darkness behind my eyelids, and then it snapped shut and the sound was final, like a period at the end of a sentence that had been building for longer than either of us was willing to admit.

I fell asleep like that. His lap warm under mine. The blanket heavy around my shoulders. My face in the curve of his neck and his hand making slow circles on my back and my fingers twisted in the hem of his shirt with a grip that did not loosen.

Not when my breathing evened out, not when the world went soft at the edges. Not when the last thing I registered was the cedar-and-coffee scent of him and the five words he had said into my hair that I would examine tomorrow, with coffee, when my brain was working again and the bruises had stopped throbbing and the steadiness of his lap made something other than perfect, catastrophic sense.

Chapter Nine

~ Aristoteles ~

Zephyr’s weight was warm against my chest, his breathing even and deep, the kind of deep that came from genuine sleep rather than pretending to be asleep.

The blanket Leon had delivered was heavy wool, military-grade and I wrapped it around Zephyr carefully.

Leon paused at the threshold. I could feel it—the extended beat of a question he hadn’t asked and wasn’t going to.

“No,” I said to the empty air above the closed door. My voice came out flat, the tone I reserved for statements that were not up for discussion. “It’s not a good idea.”

The hallway went quiet as Leon left. Boots on hardwood, fading, and then the sound was gone and it was just me and Zephyr in the study with the amber lamp and the papers scattered across the desk and the quiet hum of the palazzo settling into night.

Zephyr didn’t stir. His face was turned into the curve of my neck, one hand curled under his own chin, fingers loose in a way that only happened when the body had surrendered completely. The turquoise sparkles on his toes caught the low light, small defiant points of color against the dark wood of my chair.

I reached for the phone with my free hand. My arm was already asleep where Zephyr’s weight had cut off circulation, but that was a problem for later, and later had a long queue of problems that started with Theo Romano still breathing and worked its way down from there.

The family lawyer picked up on the second ring. Always the second ring. The man had built his career on availability and the specific terror of what happened when Aristoteles Romano’s calls went to voicemail.

“Security paperwork,” I said. No greeting. Greetings were for people with time, and I was currently holding one hundred and fifteen pounds of sleeping blond and had approximately six weeks before the conclave became a problem I couldn’t solve with phone calls. “It moves faster, or I move the firm. Your choice.”

A pause. The kind of pause lawyers used to make you think they were considering options when they were actually calculating billable hours.

“I understand the timeline concerns,” the lawyer said. His voice had the polished smoothness of someone who charged by the syllable. “However, the regulatory review for firearms licensing in the context of the—”

“Six weeks.” I cut him off. The lighter clicked open in my left hand, held steady, the small orange flame dancing against the dim study. “Full credentials. Every name on my list walks through that door with a badge or the guest list burns. I don’t care how many signatures it takes.”

Another pause. Longer this time, weighted with the gravity of a man who understood exactly what “the guest list burns” meant when it came from my mouth.

“It will be done.”

“Good.”

I ended the call and set the phone on the desk.

The lighter snapped shut.

Zephyr hadn’t moved. His breath was warm against my collarbone, steady. His eyelashes cast faint shadows on his cheeks, dark against skin that had gone pale with the aftermath of adrenaline.

The torn collar of his shirt hung open, exposing the sharp line of his collarbone and a strip of skin that my eyes found and my brain registered and filed under “later, examine thoroughly, possibly with both hands.”

The bruises on his arms were darkening. Theo’s fingerprints, five points each, already purple at the edges. I catalogued them with the cold precision of a man who kept ledgers, who remembered every mark, who understood that certain debts accrued interest faster than others.

My phone lit up. The second call. A contact in Rome, a name that didn’t appear in any Romano file because the man had been useful precisely once, four years ago, and useful men who stayed useful did so by keeping their names out of files.

I answered. Held the phone close, voice low, the tone I used when the person on my lap was asleep and the person on the line needed to understand that volume was a courtesy I was currently extending.

“Conclave security,” I said. “I want eyes on it two weeks out, not one. Your people, not mine. I’ll cover the difference.”

A pause. The sound of keys clicking, the rhythm of someone taking notes while pretending they weren’t.

“That’s a significant departure from standard protocol,” the contact said. His voice was gravel and cigarettes, the voice of a man who had been doing this long enough to know when a request was unusual and smart enough not to ask why.

“Standard protocol got five people killed at the Naples summit. I’m not interested in repeating history.”

The lighter clicked open. The flame danced orange against the dark study, throwing long shadows across the desk where Zephyr’s laptop bag sat open, papers spilling out, the chaos of a mind that moved too fast to bother with organization.

“Consider it handled,” the contact said.

“Good.”

I ended the call and set the phone down again.

The lighter snapped shut.

Zephyr shifted once, small, his body adjusting against mine. His hand tightened on the fabric of my shirt, fingers curling into the denim vest, and then relaxed again, sinking back into the deep rhythm of sleep.

I watched his face. The unguarded stillness of it was something I hadn’t seen before. Awake, Zephyr was all motion—hands, words, the rapid percussion of a brain that processed information faster than most people could speak it.

Asleep, he was something else entirely. Quiet. Still. The peace of a body that had been running on borrowed energy for longer than it was designed to and had finally, mercifully, found a place to stop.

His lower lip was slightly parted. The caramel shine was gone, replaced by the soft dryness of sleep, and something warm moved behind my sternum that had nothing to do with the weight on my lap and everything to do with the fact that this man had run toward me when Theo had put hands on him.

He had folded himself under my desk like it was the most logical shelter in the world, and he was now sleeping against my chest with the absolute trust of someone who had not stopped to question whether that trust was warranted or not.

It wasn’t. That was the problem. Trust was a currency I had never earned and had no business spending, and yet here it was, warm against my collarbone, breathing slow and even, its turquoise-sparkled toes dangling over the edge of my thigh.

My phone lit up a third time. The Genoa contact. A man whose name I would never say out loud in a room with witnesses because the favor he owed me was the kind that got people killed if the wrong ears heard about it.

I answered, my voice lower now. “Talk.”

“The perimeter you asked about.” The man’s voice was quiet, measured, the voice of someone who understood that phones were not private and certain words carried more risk than others. “It’s clean. No movement. No visitors. The subject has been home for three days straight, which is unusual, but the pattern is consistent. Whatever he’s planning, he’s planning it from inside.”

I absorbed this. The lighter clicked open, held, the flame steady in the still air of the study.

“Keep watching,” I said. “Daily reports. Anything changes, I hear about it before the change finishes happening.”

“Understood.”

The call ended.

Three calls, forty minutes. It wasn’t lost on me that I was a man running a crime family from a chair with a sleeping civilian in his lap and my list of problems was growing longer by the hour.

The conclave was six weeks out. The security paperwork needed to move. Theo was still walking around with his skull intact, which was a generosity already under review, and somewhere in the dark corners of Florence, the old guard was watching, waiting, calculating whether the illegitimate dock worker with the blond on his lap was something they could outlast or something they needed to remove.

Zephyr’s weight had settled against my chest—his right shoulder tucked under my arm, his left hand curled against his own collarbone, his face turned so that his forehead rested against the side of my neck.

The blanket Leon had brought covered him from shoulders to ankles, wool heavy and warm, and the only parts of him visible were the top of his head, one hand, and the turquoise sparkles on his toes.

I shifted. My arm was fully asleep now, pins and needles radiating from shoulder to fingertips, but the discomfort was academic compared to the more pressing question of how to move a sleeping man without waking him.

The answer, as it turned out, was carefully.

I stood. One motion, controlled, the kind of controlled that came from years of moving heavy objects in the dark without making noise. Zephyr’s weight transferred from my lap to my arms without disruption, his body adjusting with the boneless compliance of deep sleep.

He made a sound. Not a word. A murmur, low and fuzzy, the noise of a brain registering movement without fully waking up. His hand found my shoulder, fingers curling into the fabric of my vest, and then he settled against my chest with the absolute trust of something that had decided the destination was irrelevant as long as the vehicle was me.

He weighed nothing. One hundred and fifteen pounds, most of it bone and attitude, and the lightness of him registered somewhere below my sternum with the uncomfortable precision of a fact I had been avoiding for seven days.

The hallway was dark. The palazzo hummed around us—old pipes settling, the distant click of a thermostat adjusting, the particular soundtrack of a building that had been standing for four centuries and had developed opinions about nighttime.

My boots were soft on the hardwood, each step measured, like the tempo of a man carrying something fragile through a dark house.

I did not consider the study with its built-in window seat where Zephyr had taken naps for the past week. The option presented itself—down the hall, third door, the room with the good light and the questionable wifi.

I considered it for approximately one second.

Then I dismissed it. I had already made a decision and saw no reason to pretend otherwise.

My bedroom was on the second floor at the end of the corridor. Large, sparsely furnished. The bed was made. I had people for that. The sheets were clean. I had people for that too.

I set Zephyr down with the same care I’d used to lift him. One hand under his shoulders, one under his knees, the blanket still wrapped around him like a cocoon, and then he was on the mattress, his weight sinking into the duvet.

His body arranged itself into the configuration of someone who had found a horizontal surface and was now committed to it. He didn’t wake. His breathing stayed even, deep, the rhythm undisturbed by the transition from arms to mattress.

The blanket had come loose at one corner, exposing the strip of skin above his waistband where his T-shirt had ridden up, and I pulled the duvet over him with all of the attention of a man who was cataloguing details he had no business cataloguing.

I stood there. Longer than necessary. The amber light from the hallway caught the edge of the bed, threw it gold against the dark room, and Zephyr’s face was peaceful in a way I hadn’t seen before—unguarded and soft around the edges.

My hand found the back of his head. Once, briefly, fingers threading through blond hair that was softer than it had any right to be, and then I withdrew.

I stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind me with the quiet understanding that certain thresholds, once crossed, did not offer return tickets.

The butler was waiting at the end of the corridor. He had been waiting, I suspected, since approximately the moment Leon’s boots had faded down the hallway.

“A tailor,” I said. “Tomorrow morning. Eight o’clock. Measurements for a suit. Conclave specifications.”

The butler nodded. Once. He had been taking orders from Romano men for longer than I had been alive and had developed the ability to absorb instructions without visibly processing them.

“Any preferences for the fabric, sir?”

“No.” I paused. Considered the room full of family heads, the way certain eyes would find Zephyr and dismiss him on sight because dismissal was easier than respect. “Something that makes them look twice. Nothing flashy. Nothing that says he’s trying. He’s not trying. He’s better than they are, and the suit should be the last thing they notice.”

The butler’s expression did not change. His eyes, however, did something complicated—a fractional widening, as if he had just heard something he hadn’t expected and was now filing it under a category he hadn’t known existed.

“It will be done, sir.”

He left. The corridor went quiet. I stood there for a moment, alone in the dark hallway with the weight of a decision I had made forty minutes ago and was now implementing with the cold efficiency of a man who did not believe in half measures.

The shower was hot. I stood under the water and let it run longer than necessary, the steam filling the bathroom, the heat working into muscles that had been holding tension since approximately the moment Zephyr’s text had arrived from the Piazza del Duomo.

When I got out, I dried off and then changed into a pair of black silk lounge pants. No shirt. The palazzo was warm, the night was quiet, and the layout of my bedroom had just undergone a significant revision that made clothing feel optional in ways I was not currently examining.

The bed was warm where Zephyr’s body had been. I slid in beside him, the mattress dipping under my weight, the duvet settling around us both.

Zephyr shifted. Immediately. Not awake—his breathing didn’t change, his eyes didn’t open—but his body turned toward the heat like a plant tracking sunlight.

His shoulder pressed against my ribs, his hand found the edge of the silk pants and curled around the fabric with the unconscious certainty of something that had decided where it belonged and was now implementing that decision.

I pulled him in. One arm around his shoulders, my hand finding the back of his head, fingers threading through blond hair that was still damp at the temples from whatever residual adrenaline had been working its way out of his system.

My other hand lay flat on the mattress, palm down, my silver ring catching what little light made it through the curtains.

He settled against my chest. His weight was warm, and the sound of his breathing was steady against my sternum, slow and even.

I stared at the ceiling. As the dark pressed down, familiar and patient, I ran the ledger in my head.

Theo. Still walking. Still breathing. Still wearing expensive shoes and carrying the entitlement of a man who had never been told no and was now discovering that the word existed.

That generosity was under review. Thorough review. The kind of review that involved knives and a notable absence of witnesses.

The conclave. Six weeks. The security paperwork, the guest list, the arithmetic of a family that had fallen and was now walking back into a room full of people who had watched it happen and were waiting to see if I’d fall too.

Full credentials or burn the list. I meant it. They would learn that I meant things, or they would learn what happened when I didn’t.

The five hundred million. Sitting in accounts that had been empty seven days ago, returned by a man who had found it in the dark and handed it back like it was nothing, like the genius required to track stolen money across international borders was a party trick rather than the thing that had just saved the Romano family from extinction.

And the fact that mattered, the fact that lived somewhere below my sternum and refused to be categorized: when Theo put hands on him, Zephyr’s first instinct had been to run. Toward me. Not away. Toward.

He had rounded my desk and folded himself underneath it like it was the most logical shelter in the world, and the trust embedded in that gesture was something I had no framework for, no vocabulary, no precedent in thirty-two years of a life that had taught me, repeatedly and with emphasis, that trust was a weapon other people used and I did not extend.

Yet here he was. Warm against my chest. Breathing slow. Trusting me with the absoluteness of someone who had not stopped to calculate the risk, and the fact that he hadn’t calculated it was, objectively, the most alarming thing about him.

I needed to convince him this was where he belonged. The conclusion arrived cold and certain, the way all my conclusions arrived—not as questions, but as statements.

Zephyr would argue. Of course he would argue. Zephyr argued with doorframes and gelato vendors and the concept of reasonable footwear, and the idea that he would simply nod and accept that he belonged in my bed in my house with my family’s future balanced on the architecture of his brain was laughable in its optimism.

Good.

I had never wanted anything that came easily. Easy things were forgettable. The things that stayed, the things that mattered, were the ones that cost you something, that made you work for every inch, that forced you to become someone capable of holding them.

Zephyr shifted against my chest. His hand tightened on the silk of my pants, fingers curling into the fabric with the unconscious certainty of someone who was now securing his position, and the warmth of him pressed against my ribs with the solidity of a fact I could no longer pretend was theoretical.

I closed my eyes. The dark settled around us, warm and patient, and the ledger ran itself in the background—Theo, the conclave, the five hundred million, the trust pressed against my sternum—and beneath it all, quieter, the single certainty that had been building since approximately the moment a five-foot-five blond had slid a pre-signed NDA across a desk and looked at me like I was the most interesting problem he’d encountered all week.

Zephyr didn’t know yet, but he wasn’t going home.

He was already there.

Chapter Ten

~ Zephyr ~

I woke up to weight and warmth and the distinct, catastrophic realization that I was still at Ari’s mansion. And Ai’s arms locked around me like he was worried I might try to levitate.

I lay still. Cataloguing. The way his forearm crossed my ribs, heavy and warm and completely immovable. The heat of his chest against my back. His breathing slow and deep, the kind that came from genuine sleep, the kind that made his ribcage expand against my spine with the steady rhythm.

I shifted. Not much. Just a fractional adjustment, testing the boundaries of what my body was allowed to do within the jurisdiction of Ari’s arms.

They tightened. Instantly. No hesitation, no waking—just the automatic, unconscious pressure of a man whose body had apparently made a series of decisions that his conscious mind had not yet been briefed on.

I stared at the stripes of light on the wall. Pale gold pressing through the wooden shutters in thin bars, striping the bed, catching the silver herringbone chain on the nightstand.

Beside it: my switchblade. One wrapped caramel, gold foil gleaming like it had been placed there by someone who understood the assignment.

“This is a terrible idea,” I informed the ceiling, quietly, because my internal monologue had opinions and those opinions required expression, regardless of whether anyone was listening.

The ceiling did not respond. It had seen worse.

I stayed anyway.

Then Ari moved.

Not a gradual waking. A single, decisive motion—his weight shifting, his arm tightening around my waist, and then I was on my back, and he was over me, and the universe had just narrowed its focus to a single, catastrophic point of contact.

Two hundred and twenty-five pounds. All of it muscle, all of it arranged with the deliberate, unhurried confidence of a man who knew exactly how much space he occupied and was in no hurry to vacate it.

I opened my mouth. Something protest-shaped was assembling itself behind my teeth, something about boundaries and professional standards and the general concept of not waking up in your boss’s bed regardless of how many caramels had been involved.

It evaporated. Completely. The way dew does when the sun hits it, which was ironic because the sun was hitting the shutters and I was currently evaporating for entirely different reasons.

Then Ari kissed me.

Like he’d been thinking about it since the interview. Which he had. I knew this with the absolute certainty of someone who had spent ten days cataloguing every look, every shift, every time those black eyes had dropped to my mouth and then away like the looking itself was a transgression.

I kissed him back.

Like I’d been thinking about it since the interview. Which I absolutely had and would deny under oath in any court that had jurisdiction over the matter, which fortunately was none, because the only court currently in session was the one happening between my ribs and it was delivering a unanimous verdict that sounded suspiciously like the word yes.

His mouth was warm. His beard scraped my chin in a way that registered somewhere below my sternum with the enthusiasm of something that had been waiting for permission and had just received it in triplicate.

One of his hands found the back of my head, fingers threading through my hair, and the pressure of it was specific—not guiding, not suggesting, anchoring, like he was worried I might try to leave and had decided to remove that option from the menu.

I made a sound. Low, involuntary, the kind of sound that my throat produced without consulting my brain, and Ari’s response was immediate—his grip tightened, his mouth opened against mine, and whatever was happening between us crossed a threshold that had no reverse gear.

Then his hands were everywhere.

He undressed us with the efficiency of a man who treated obstacles as problems to be solved rather than inconveniences to be negotiated. My T-shirt went first, pulled over my head with a single motion that left me bare from the waist up. My stretch pants quickly followed.

Then it was chest against naked chest, skin against skin, the heat of him pressing me into the mattress with the weight of something that was not going to be moved anytime soon.

I reached for his pants. My fingers fumbled. Coordination issues. Entirely the fault of the man currently mapping the line of my collarbone with his mouth, because collarbones are structural components, not sensory organs, and yet the way his lips traced the ridge of bone sent a signal to my nervous system that bypassed every filter I had installed.

Ari’s hand caught my wrist. Gentle. Firm. The kind of grip that said I see what you’re doing and I appreciate the enthusiasm, but I’m running this operation and you will sit tight until I say otherwise.

I sat tight.

He slid his lounge pants off and kicked them away, and then gave me his full attention. He worked his way down my chest, his mouth finding my nipple.

The sound I made was not dignified. It was, however, enthusiastic, and Ari’s response was to suck harder, his tongue flat against my sensitive skin, his teeth grazing just enough to register.

His hand slid lower. Down my stomach, over my hip, and then his fingers wrapped around my cock and my brain did that thing where it temporarily suspended all higher functions.

“You’re—” I started, and then his thumb rubbed over the head, spreading the wetness there, and the sentence abandoned ship entirely.

He stroked me. Slow. Thorough. The kind of thorough that suggested he had been thinking about this exact motion for considerably longer than was professionally appropriate, and the realization of that fact did something to my chest that had nothing to do with his hand and everything to do with the way his eyes watched my face.

Black. Dark. Giving away everything now—all the heat, all the obsession, all the things he had been keeping behind a wall for weeks, and that wall was gone and what was left was warm and direct and entirely focused on the way my lower lip trembled when he tightened his grip.

“Fuck,” I said, because language was a construct and constructs were failing.

Ari’s mouth curved against my skin.

Then he was moving, reaching for the nightstand. The drawer opened, closed, and he came back with a bottle of lube and a condom, and my heart started a tempo like it wanted to climb out of my chest.

He coated his fingers. Warm. Slick. His hand pressed between my legs, and the first touch of his finger against my ass made my hips jerk off the mattress.

“Easy,” Ari said. His voice was rough. Lower than I’d ever heard it, like he was holding himself together with the discipline of someone who had decided that thoroughness was more important than speed.

His finger pushed inside. Slow. Careful. The stretch registered—not pain, pressure, the fullness of being opened by someone who was paying attention to every reaction.

“Good?” he asked.

“Good,” I managed. “More. Please. Now would be—yes, that, exactly that, fuck.”

A second finger joined the first. The stretch deepened. Ari’s free hand held my hip, keeping me still when my body tried to move, and the control of it was something my nervous system filed under “highly relevant data” without consulting my better judgment.

He worked me open with the patience of a man who had all the time in the world and was determined to use it. His fingers crooked, found the spot that made my vision go white, and the sound that came out of me was not human.

“Ready?” he asked, and his voice had dropped, becoming rough, barely controlled.

“Ready,” I said. “Yes. Now. Please. If you don’t—Ari, I swear to god—”

He rolled the condom on. Slicked himself. Positioned himself between my legs, and the blunt pressure of his cock against my ass was its own kind of arithmetic—the equation of something large and insistent meeting something that was currently recalculating its entire understanding of capacity.

He pushed. Slow. So slow it was almost cruel. My hips tried to move, tried to rush it, and Ari’s hand clamped down on my waist, holding me still with the absolute authority of a man who had decided that this was happening at his pace or not at all.

“Wait,” he said.

I waited. Breathing hard. The stretch was intense—not pain, exactly, but the fullness of being taken by something that did not fit easily and was fitting anyway.

Then he was in. Fully. His hips pressed against my ass, and the feeling of him—thick, hot, stretching me open in a way that registered everywhere at once—made my back arch off the mattress.

“Move,” I said. “Please move. Ari, please—”

He moved.

One stroke, deep and slow, and my cock jerked against my stomach, leaking. Ari’s hand wrapped around it, stroking in time with his thrusts, and the coordination of it was something my nervous system had not been designed to process.

His pace built. Not gentle. Not rough. Precise—the kind of precision that came from a man who treated my body like something he had studied and was now applying that study with the focused attention of someone who wanted to get it right.

His hands were everywhere. One on my hip, holding me exactly where he wanted me. One on my cock, stroking with a rhythm that matched his thrusts. His mouth found my neck, my shoulder, the sensitive spot below my ear that made my entire body go tight when he bit it.

“Look at me,” he said, and I did, and his eyes were black and warm and entirely focused on my face, watching every reaction like he was collecting data he intended to keep.

I came embarrassingly fast.

My cock pulsed in his hand, stripes of white hitting my stomach, my chest, and the orgasm rolled through me with the violence of something that had been building since approximately the moment I walked into a study and saw a six-foot-three dock worker with a scar and a lighter and the coldest eyes I’d ever seen.

Ari watched it happen. His thrusts didn’t stop—slower now, deeper, the kind of deep that pressed against every sensitive place inside me and kept pressing—and the look on his face was satisfaction, pure and warm and entirely undisguised.

Like he’d won something.

He had.

His rhythm faltered. His hand left my cock, braced against the mattress beside my head, and his forehead dropped to my shoulder. His breathing went ragged.

One final thrust, deep, holding, and I felt him come—the pulse of him inside me, the way his body went tight against mine, the low sound he made against my skin that was not a word, but might have been my name if names had been the point.

Ari did not pull out. He did not move. His weight settled over me, heavy and warm, one hand still pressed flat to the mattress beside my head, the other on my hip like he was not planning to let go.

He did not let go.

I lay there. Breathing. Cataloguing. The stretch of him still inside me, the warm mess on my stomach, the heaviness of a body that had just been thoroughly rearranged.

Ari’s face was in the curve of my neck. His breathing slowed. His arm across my ribs, his hand on my hip, and the weight of him was something my body had already decided was correct, which was its own kind of problem.

I reached up. My fingers found the scar on his cheekbone, traced the line of it—pale against his skin, raised slightly under my touch—and Ari’s eyes opened.

Black. Warm. Looking at me with an expression I had no category for, because Aristoteles Romano did not do expressions the way normal people did expressions, and what was happening on his face right now was several standard deviations outside the operational parameters I had established for him.

He kissed me. Once. Soft.

Then his arm tightened around my ribs, and he settled against me like he was planning to stay exactly where he was for the foreseeable future, and my brain, which had opinions about everything, had no opinion about this whatsoever, which was either concerning or perfect and I was too tired to decide which.

I closed my eyes. The gold stripes moved across the bed as the sun climbed, and somewhere in the palazzo, the day was starting, and somewhere in this bed, something had started that had no reverse gear and no off-ramp and I was, against all available evidence, completely fine with that.

* * * *

My brain came back online at approximately sixty percent capacity, which was enough to notice that Ari was looking at me. Not the way he usually looked at me. Not the operational watchfulness, the cold assessment, the focus of a man who was categorizing threats and assets and calculating the distance between them.

This was something else. Direct. Warm. The kind of look that would have been alarming on anyone else’s face and was, on his, exactly what I wanted pointed at me, which was its own kind of problem.

The palazzo was quiet. Early sounds of the city filtering through the shutters—distant church bells, the rumble of a delivery cart on cobblestone, and the hum of Florence waking up.

Ari’s arm was still across my ribs. His hand resting on my side, warm through the thin sheet that had somehow ended up covering approximately thirty percent of my body, which was thirty percent more than it had been covering five minutes ago.

“I moved your things,” Ari said. Flat. Operational. The same tone he used for security briefings and contract disputes and statements of fact that were not subject to discussion.

I blinked. “What?”

“Leon picked them up last night. Paid off your lease. Everything’s here. Room down the hall.”

I stared at him. The words arranged themselves into a sentence, the sentence arranged itself into a concept, and the concept landed in my frontal lobe with the approximate force of a freight train hitting a kindergarten.

“You moved me in.” Not a question. Couldn’t be a question, because questions implied the possibility of a negative response, and what Ari had just described was several exits past a negative responses.

“Yes,” he said.

I frowned at him. “That’s insane.”

“I agree.”

He said it without any indication that he found this a problem. No apology. No qualification. Just the flat certainty of a man who had made a decision, implemented it while I was asleep, and was now waiting for my reaction.

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Looked at the ceiling. Looked back at Ari.

Six-foot-three of scarred, unreasonable man. Black eyes watching me with the absolute stillness of someone who had already decided that I belonged here and was now waiting for me to catch up to the conclusion he had reached.

I had arguments. Excellent arguments. Professionally constructed, airtight arguments, the kind of case I could build in under three minutes because building cases was what I did for a living and I was very good at it.

I thought about my apartment.

The mildew smell in the bathroom that no amount of cleaning had ever fully defeated. The neighbor’s cooking—something with garlic, always garlic, at hours when garlic had no business being active. The way the walls had started to feel like they were getting closer, millimeter by millimeter, the longer I stayed there.

Nothing good. Nothing warm. Nothing that had ever made me feel like the space I occupied was something someone had designed with me in mind.

I thought about this bed. This room. This man whose arm was across my ribs and whose hand was warm against my side and whose expression, right now, was doing something to my chest that my professional vocabulary did not have a category for.

“You’re adding a relocation fee to my invoice,” I finally said.

“Fine.”

“It will be substantial.”

“I assumed.”

“I’m also keeping the switchblade on the nightstand.”

A pause. Ari’s thumb moved against my ribs, once, a small circle that registered somewhere below my sternum. “I would expect nothing less.”

I reached for the caramel on the nightstand. Gold foil, slightly crumpled, the crumple of something that had been handled by large, careful hands and placed exactly where it was supposed to be.

I unwrapped it. Slow. The foil caught the light, warm gold against the pale stripes coming through the shutters.

I broke it in half. Held one piece out to Ari.

He took it.

This surprised me more than anything else that had happened this morning, and that was saying something, because the list of surprising things that had happened this morning included waking up in Ari’s bed, having spectacular sex with Ari’s cock inside me, and being informed that I no longer had an apartment because Ari Romano had decided, unilaterally, that I lived here now.

He put the caramel in his mouth. His jaw worked once, the muscles shifting under skin.

We lay there sharing the caramel in silence. The early light moved across the bed, the stripes shifting as the sun climbed, and Ari’s hand pressed slightly warmer against my side.

I ate my half. Sweet. Salty. Like a series of catastrophic decisions and committing to every one of them.

Ari’s breathing was steady against my shoulder, and the weight of him was something my body had already decided was correct, which was either the most alarming thing that had ever happened to me or the only thing that had ever made complete sense, and the line between those was getting thinner by the second.

I looked at him. Really looked. The scar on his cheekbone, pale in the morning light. The line of his jaw, set with the certainty of a man who did not apologize for the space he occupied. The black eyes that were watching me with a warmth that had no business being as direct as it was.

I was done for.

Completely. Irrevocably. The kind of done for that came with no reverse gear and no off-ramp and the distinct, terrible realization that I did not, in fact, want either of those things.

I didn’t say it. Didn’t need to. The caramel was doing the talking, and the arm across my ribs was doing the talking, and the way Ari was looking at me was doing several paragraphs of talking without requiring a single word from either of us.

His thumb moved against my side again. Another circle. Slower this time, like he was writing something on my skin that he expected me to read later, when my brain was working at full capacity and I had the vocabulary to process it.

I closed my eyes. The gold light pressed warm against my eyelids, and somewhere in the palazzo, the day was properly starting.

Something had started that I was not going to do anything about, because doing something about it would require moving, and moving was currently several levels down on the list of priorities, and the list of priorities was currently dominated by a single item that looked suspiciously like stay right here.

I stayed right here.

Chapter Eleven

~ Aristoteles ~

The coffee on my desk had gone cold. I hadn’t touched it in forty minutes, which was its own kind of waste, but the view from the study window was doing something useful with the early light and I needed useful more than I needed caffeine.

A month. Four weeks. Thirty-one days, if you were counting, and I wasn’t, but the compound knew. The wide-plank floors knew, creaking under bare feet that hadn’t been here a month ago.

I’d watched him work. From doorways, mostly. Coffee in hand, jaw loose in a way my face wasn’t designed for, the looseness of a man watching someone else solve a problem he’d been carrying for years.

The library table. That was Zephyr’s territory now. Leather-bound spines and faded tapestries and a five-foot-five blond with his laptop open and dossiers fanned out in a pattern that made sense to him and would look like abstract art to anyone else.

Caramel wrappers accumulated at the edge of the keyboard — gold foil, crumpled, the debris of a mind that moved too fast to bother with waste disposal.

The glow of his screen in the dark library was its own kind of light. Blue-white, steady, casting his face in the shadows of someone who was reading numbers and seeing the story they told.

His fingers moved fast over the keys, the rhythm bursts and pauses, and every time he found something he leaned forward, his bare feet curling against the rungs of the chair, and the sound he made was low and satisfied, the sound of a man who considered other people’s secrets genuinely entertaining.

He cross-referenced employee contact logs against financial records with the focus of someone dismantling a clock and enjoying every spring that came loose.

Emails fired off in rapid succession, each one precise, each one landing in someone’s inbox with the weight of a man who had the receipts and wasn’t afraid to use them.

The results sat on my desk now.

Five termination letters, signatures at the bottom, the finality of paperwork that meant someone’s life was about to change direction whether they wanted it to or not.

Two names had been quietly removed from the payroll with no paperwork to follow, which was its own kind of finality and required no explanation between us.

Four envelopes with raises, slid under doors in the east wing where the people who actually did the work lived, and the look on their faces the next morning had been something my brain filed under “useful data”.

The compound ran differently now. Tighter. Quieter. The hum of a machine that had been carrying dead weight for years and had just discovered what it sounded like without it.

I turned from the window. The cold coffee sat accusingly on the desk, and I left it there because some battles weren’t worth fighting and coffee that had given up on being hot fell squarely into that category.

Then there was the other thing the month produced.

The bookshelf in the study. The one I’d specifically told him not to lean on because the thing was two hundred years old and made of wood that had opinions about weight distribution.

Zephyr had leaned on it anyway, one shoulder against the spines, his bare feet crossed at the ankles, and the look on his face had been the blend of defiance and warmth that cost me something every time I saw it.

“Structural integrity,” he’d said, tapping the shelf with one finger. “Questionable. The wood’s warped. You can feel it give. I’m doing you a favor by identifying this before it becomes a liability. You’re welcome.”

“It’s two hundred years old.”

“Exactly. It’s had a good run. Time to retire with dignity before someone puts a real book on it and the whole thing goes down like the Hindenburg.”

I’d crossed the room. His back against the bookshelf, my hands on his hips, and the wood had creaked once, decisively, which was the bookshelf’s opinion on the matter and not one I was particularly interested in hearing.

His mouth had been warm. His hands had found the denim vest, fingers working the buttons with the focused attention of someone treating my clothing as an obstacle course he intended to win, and the sound the bookshelf made when my weight pressed him against it was something the antique furniture of Tuscany had not been designed to accommodate.

Zephyr had no complaints. He logged them anyway, for leverage.

“I’m adding it to the invoice,” he’d said afterward, shirt rumpled, hair doing that thing where it looked both deliberately messed and entirely accidental. “Item line: ‘structural compromise of historical furniture, with enthusiasm.’ The rate is negotiable, but the principle is firm.”

“Your principle is theft.”

“My principle is thorough documentation. Theft implies I’m taking something that doesn’t belong to me, and last I checked, your vest buttons are right where you left them. Mostly.”

The hallway at two in the morning. That was another one. Zephyr materializing in the kitchen wearing nothing but my white shirt, the hem hanging past his thighs, bare legs and turquoise-sparkled toes against the cold tile, hunting for caramels with the single-minded determination of someone who treated sugar as a non-negotiable midnight requirement.

I’d been coming down the corridor. Boots soft on hardwood, the compound quiet, the kind of quiet that happened when everyone who wasn’t essential had gone to bed and the people who were essential were doing things that didn’t involve sleep.

He’d looked up. Those blue eyes finding mine in the dim kitchen light, shirt hanging off one shoulder, and the expression on his face had been the blend of caught and unrepentant that made my chest do something complicated.

“Don’t start,” he’d said. “I have a system. The caramels live in the third drawer. They’ve always lived in the third drawer. Someone moved them. I consider this sabotage, and I will be conducting a full investigation once I’ve addressed the more pressing issue of my blood sugar being at critically irresponsible levels.”

I’d made an executive decision. One hand on his waist, the other on the counter behind him, and the sound the shirt made when I pushed it up his thighs was something my nervous system had apparently decided warranted its own dedicated processing unit.

His back against the kitchen island. My mouth on his throat. His fingers in my hair, pulling, and the way he groaned my name when I dropped to my knees on the cold tile was not something I was going to forget, regardless of how many caramels had been involved.

The past month lived in these moments. The creak of floorboards under bare feet. The glow of a screen in a dark library. The weight of my hand on his hip when I pulled him against me in corridors where anyone could have walked past and didn’t, because the compound had learned, very quickly, that certain doorways were best approached with caution after dark.

I picked up the cold coffee. Drank it anyway because waste was waste and I’d been raised by a woman who considered throwing things away a moral failing rather than a practical choice.

The sound came through the window before I saw it. Tires on cobblestone, the crunch of gravel under weight, and my body registered it before my brain had fully processed.

I set the cup down. Cold coffee, warm memories, and the sound of a car on the drive that meant the morning was over and the day had just begun.

The car was dark. Understated. The kind of vehicle that cost more than it looked like it cost, which was Theodore Romano’s approach to most things — appearance as armor rather than announcement. No entourage. Just a driver who stayed behind the wheel and a seventy-five-year-old man with a rosewood cane making slow, deliberate progress across the cobblestone drive.

Theodore moved the way he spoke — measured, unhurried, each step placed with the certainty of a man who had never needed to hurry because rooms had always waited for him.

I watched from the study window until he cleared the courtyard. Then I moved to the library, because that was where he would expect to find me, and Theodore Romano was a man who appreciated expectations being met.

The library smelled the way it always smelled — old paper, lemon oil, the faint trace of wood smoke from the deep stone fireplace that hadn’t been lit in weeks.

Leather-bound spines lined the walls, faded gold lettering catching what little light made it through the heavy curtains. The tapestries had gone soft with age, burgundies and golds muted to something that looked richer than it was, like memory viewed through the wrong end of a telescope.

Through the open door, the worn banister of the grand staircase was visible — dark walnut, smooth from generations of hands, the patina of something that had been touched by Romano men for longer than I had been alive.

Zephyr was already there. Bare feet on the wide-plank floor, turquoise sparkles catching the low light, his laptop bag slung over one shoulder like he’d been mid-migration when the car arrived and had decided the library was as good a destination as any.

He had the tea tray set up on the low table — porcelain, thin, the kind that had survived three generations of family drama without acquiring a single chip, which was its own kind of miracle.

My grandfather paused in the doorway. His dark eyes moved across the room once, inventorying, the look of a man reading a space he once knew well and noting the changes.

The mustache — trim, old-world, the kind of facial hair that had been fashionable when he was young and had simply outlasted fashion — didn’t move, but something behind his eyes did, a fractional shift that might have been approval.

Zephyr looked up. Offered tea with the complete ease of someone who had decided this was a normal social exchange and was now implementing that decision without consulting anyone’s sense of propriety.

“Tea,” he said. “Also caramel. The good kind. Not the kind they sell at gas stations, which I mention only because gas station caramels are a crime against humanity and I have strong feelings on the subject.”

Theodore accepted the teacup. Thin porcelain between weathered fingers, steam rising in a thin curl that caught the light from the window. He accepted the caramel too — gold foil, offered from Zephyr’s pocket with the casual generosity of someone who treated sugar as a universal language.

He unwrapped it deliberately. Slow fingers, careful. The foil came away, and he held the caramel between thumb and forefinger, studying it the way another man might study a document.

Then he looked at Zephyr. Really looked. Eyes moving from the chipped turquoise polish on toenails to the bare feet to the laptop bag to the white T-shirt that had slid off one shoulder in the way it always did, like gravity had a personal investment in the collarbone situation and was exercising its rights accordingly.

“I had heard,” Theodore said, his voice dry as the paper on the shelves, “that Ari had acquired an interesting assistant.”

“Indispensable,” Zephyr said. He didn’t smile. He didn’t need to. The word landed with the weight of something that had been tested and found accurate, and the casual certainty of it cost me something every time I heard it.

Theodore’s mustache moved. A fractional shift, the closest thing to amusement his face was designed to produce, and he put the caramel in his mouth with the same deliberate care he’d applied to the unwrapping.

“I can see why Ari keeps you,” he said.

“Everyone eventually does.” Zephyr picked up his own tea, blew across the surface once, and took a sip that managed to convey both courtesy and the distinct impression that he was humoring the entire exchange out of personal generosity rather than obligation.

I watched from my chair. Said nothing. The leather creaked under my weight.

Theodore set his teacup down on the saucer. The porcelain made a soft click, precise, the sound of a man who had finished with preliminaries and was now moving to the point.

He folded his hands on his knee, the rosewood cane leaning against the arm of his chair, and the room got quieter in the way rooms do when Theodore Romano decides it’s time to speak.

“Alexios has been cultivating old Romano loyalists for months.” His voice was low, clipped, the cadence of a man who did not repeat himself and expected the room to keep up. “Running quiet pressure through business channels. His patience is running out.”

I didn’t ask how he knew. Didn’t ask about the soft edges in his loyalty, the places where blood might pull harder than pragmatism. My grandfather had chosen his side the day I took the seat, and questioning the choice now would have been an insult to both of us.

“He has always wanted the head seat.” Theodore’s dark eyes held mine across the library, steady, giving nothing away. “He was never capable of taking it cleanly, so he will take it by force if he decides the moment is right.”

The conclave. Two weeks out. The Romano family’s first real shot at reestablishing standing since Geno’s disaster had gutted us and left us bleeding on the floor of the alliance.

Attendance-only status ended if I walked in with leverage and walked out with a deal. Alexios knew it. Everyone knew it.

“He will move before or during.” Theodore didn’t elaborate. Didn’t need to. The arithmetic was clear — a family divided cannot stand at a table of families united, and Alexios had spent the last year making sure the division ran deep enough to matter.

I nodded once. “Thank you.”

Theodore stood. The cane came up, found the floor, and the tap of wood on hardwood carried through the library. On his way to the door, he paused. Looked at Zephyr. Held out a hand.

Zephyr reached into his pocket. Produced another caramel. Gold foil, slightly crumpled, and he placed it in Theodore’s palm with the quiet ceremony of someone exchanging contraband at a border crossing.

Theodore took it, but didn’t unwrap it. He put it in his jacket pocket with the care of a man accepting a token, and then he was gone, the tap of the cane fading down the corridor, and the library felt both emptier and more solid than it had before he arrived.

Zephyr watched the empty doorway. Steam rose from his teacup, thin and white against the dark wood of the table.

“I like him,” he said quietly.

I looked at him. Those blue eyes held mine with the calm of a man who had just decided that a seventy-five-year-old crime patriarch with a rosewood cane and a dry mustache was someone worth approving of, and the casual certainty of the assessment was either the most alarming thing about him or the only thing that made complete sense.

“That is either a good sign,” I said, “or a problem.”

Zephyr picked up his laptop bag. Sling it over his shoulder with the ease of someone who treated expensive equipment the way most people treated grocery bags.

“Probably both.” He headed for the door, bare feet quiet on the wide-plank floor, and paused at the threshold. “I’m adding the caramels to the invoice, by the way. Diplomatic expenditure. Itemized. The rate is premium because old men with canes are a specialty market and I don’t come cheap.”

Then he was gone, and the library settled back into its silence — old paper, lemon oil, and the weight of a warning that had just landed on the desk with the finality of something that required immediate handling.

Theodore’s car cleared the gate. I heard it — engine noise fading, gravel under tires. I was already moving. Boots on hardwood, corridor to study, phone in my hand before I hit the chair. The screen lit blue-white against the dark wood of the desk, and I found Leon’s number.

He answered on the second ring. Always the second ring. Leon Nikolaidis treated phone etiquette the way most men treated firearm safety — as something that kept you alive rather than something that made you polite.

“Men on Alexios,” I said. No greeting. “Full surveillance. Movements, contacts, communications. Every name he meets with in the next fourteen days. I want to know before he knows I know.”

A pause. The silence that meant Leon was writing this down, not because he needed to, but because writing things down was how his brain processed instructions into action.

“Names by morning,” he said. His voice was flat, even, the tone of a man who had just received an order he had no questions about. He didn’t ask why. Didn’t ask about sources or reliability or the arithmetic that had led to this deployment of resources.

That was one of his best qualities. Leon asked questions when the questions mattered, and he had been doing this long enough to know when they didn’t.

“Good.” I ended the call. Set the phone on the desk. The screen dimmed, went dark, and the study settled into the silence that happened when something had been set in motion and the room was waiting for the consequences to arrive.

Two weeks. The window sat in front of me like something physical — fourteen days between now and the conclave, between a family that was still bleeding from Geno’s wounds and a family that might, with the right leverage, walk back into the room where decisions got made.

The conclave was our shot. The only shot. Attendance-only status ended if I walked in with something the other families needed and walked out with something that put the Romano name back on the map. A deal. Territory. Access to the shipping lanes that Geno had burned when he decided that bombing a rival family was a smarter move than negotiation.

I could not afford a rebellion at my back while I was doing it. Alexios knew that. Theodore knew that. Every old-guard loyalist who had watched an illegitimate dock worker take the seat they believed belonged to legitimate blood knew it, and they had been waiting, patient as graves, for the moment when the arithmetic tipped in their favor.

I would not have one. A rebellion required oxygen to burn, and I had spent the last month systematically removing the oxygen from every room Alexios might try to light a match in.

The door opened. Soft. A single sound, hinges well-oiled, and I didn’t need to look to know who it was. Zephyr stood in the doorway. Laptop under one arm, the strap of the bag cutting across his chest, his free hand holding a caramel he had apparently located in whatever drawer they had been hiding in.

Bare feet on my hardwood floor, turquoise sparkles catching the low light from the desk lamp, and the expression on his face was the blend of watchful and present that meant he had heard enough to form an opinion and was choosing, deliberately, not to share it yet.

He didn’t ask who I called. Didn’t need to. The call had been brief and audible from the corridor, and Zephyr had the insane talent of absorbing information he wasn’t supposed to hear and treating it as something that had been offered rather than something he had taken.

He leaned against the doorframe. Ate the caramel. His eyes moved across my face once.

I glanced at him, once, brief, and Zephyr held it without flinching, without shifting, without doing anything except standing in my doorway with a laptop under his arm and a caramel in his mouth and the absolute certainty of someone who had decided that this was where he lived now and the rest was details.

Nothing was said.

I picked up the phone again. Hit Leon’s number. He answered on the second ring. “Make sure of it,” I said.

Leon’s expression, through the phone, was the configuration of a man who had already intended to. I could hear it in the silence — the fractional pause, the shift of weight, the unspoken confirmation that the instruction had been redundant because Leon Nikolaidis did not do things halfway and had not started today.

“It’s handled,” he said.

I ended the call and set the phone down.

Zephyr was still in the doorway. The caramel was gone, and his lower lip held the faint shine that happened when sugar met skin and decided to stay, and the look on his face was the blend of sharp and warm that made my chest do something complicated every time I saw it.

I didn’t tell him to leave. I didn’t need to. The doorway was his as much as the library table was his as much as the bed down the hall was his, and the fact that I had stopped pretending otherwise was either the most alarming development of the past month or the only one that made complete sense.

He pushed off the doorframe. Crossed the study. Set his laptop on the desk beside mine, the two screens glowing blue-white against the dark wood.

I looked at him. Really looked. Those blue eyes held mine across the desk, steady, giving nothing away and somehow giving everything at once, and the warmth behind my sternum had nothing to do with the conclave or Alexios or the fourteen days sitting on the desk and everything to do with the fact that Zephyr had run toward me when the world got dangerous and had not, despite several excellent opportunities, run away.

“Two weeks,” I said.

He nodded once. “We’ll handle it.” Not a question. A statement of operational fact, delivered with the quiet certainty of someone who treated impossible timelines the way most people treated breakfast — as something that happened every day and required no commentary.

I believed him. This was worth noting because I did not believe most people.

I reached for the lighter on the desk. Clicked it open. Held the flame, orange against the dim study, and watched it dance for a count of three before snapping it shut.

The sound was final.

Two weeks. Fourteen days. A rebellion at my back and a conclave in front of me and a man eating caramels at my desk who had apparently decided that belonging here was not a question but an answer.

I could work with that.

Chapter Twelve

~ Aristoteles ~

I walked into the library and the library was gone. What stood in its place belonged to Zephyr Kontos now, or more accurately, to whatever part of Zephyr’s brain had decided that paper and ink and red marker were the proper response to a man with a rosewood cane and a warning.

The whiteboard was the problem. Or the centerpiece. Hard to tell the difference when something took up that much visual real estate and demanded you look at it the way a highway accident demands you slow down and gawk.

It stood where the reading table used to be, six feet tall and completely illegible unless you understood the dialect of organized chaos that Zephyr considered a filing system.

Red marker. Blue. Green. The original white surface had been reduced to small, apologetic islands between continents of ink. Arrows everywhere—tying names to dollar amounts to circled initials, crossing, overlapping, sometimes doubling back on themselves like a drunk trying to find his keys.

Zephyr’s knuckles were smudged with ink. Black and blue, mostly, the kind of marks that happen when you’ve been writing for hours and your hand forgets it’s supposed to stay clean.

He held a dry-erase marker in his right hand and used it as a pointer, tapping sections of the board with the focused aggression of someone who had built a cathedral out of other people’s bad decisions and was now giving the guided tour.

The floor crackled underfoot. Caramel wrappers. Gold foil, dozens of them, scattered across the wide-plank hardwood like the aftermath of a sugar-based crime spree.

Every desk space groaned beneath stacked binders, each one tabbed in Zephyr’s neat, precise handwriting. The kind of handwriting that suggested he could have been a surgeon if he hadn’t decided that other people’s bank accounts were more interesting than other people’s livers.

I took the leather chair. The one with the good sightlines to the board and the worse sightlines to the window, which was the correct tactical choice and also the one that put Zephyr directly in my field of vision, which was its own kind of problem.

I sat forward. Forearms on my knees. The lighter clicked open in my left hand, held for a count, snapped shut. Open. Shut. It was methodical, quiet, a piece of metal making noise because the noise helped me think.

Leon took the chair beside me. He did not sit forward. He did not lean back. He occupied the chair the way a boulder occupies a hillside—completely, immovably.

The only sound was Zephyr’s voice and the lighter.

Zephyr tapped the board. Upper left quadrant, a cluster of names circled in red. “Bribery chain. Three intermediaries, same accountant. The financial equivalent of signing your name in glitter at a crime scene and then asking why everyone’s looking at you.”

His marker traced the connections. Name to name to name, arrows thickening where the money changed hands, dollar amounts written in his tight script beside each transfer. The numbers were large. Not impressive large. Stupid large.

“Same withdrawal patterns across all three. Same timing. Same accountant who, by the way, has a vacation home in Sardinia that his reported income couldn’t cover if he lived in a tent and ate rice exclusively.”

Zephyr’s tone was dry. Clinical. The voice of a man reading someone else’s autopsy and finding the cause of death both obvious and deeply entertaining. “I’ve flagged the transactions. Dates, amounts, account numbers. It’s in the blue binder. Tab three. The one that says ‘Evidence of Profound Stupidity’ in my handwriting, which you can read because unlike some people, I was taught penmanship by someone who cared.”

I said nothing. The lighter clicked. Open. Shut.

He moved right. A different section of the board, this one in blue marker, numbers arranged in columns that got longer as they went down.

“Embezzlement. Four years of small withdrawals. Never more than fifty thousand at a time. The kind of theft that flies under radar because it’s boring, and boredom is the best camouflage money can buy.” His marker tapped each column. “Fifty here. Forty there. Thirty-five. Always under thresholds that trigger alerts. Always from different accounts. Always cleaned through the same three shell companies before it hits the final destination.”

He paused. Looked at me. Those blue eyes held mine across the library with the calm of a man who had just dismantled a financial architecture that someone had spent four years building and was now waiting for me to appreciate the craftsmanship.

“Total,” he said, and his voice dropped half a register, the tone of someone delivering the punchline, “is eleven point seven million. Over four years. From accounts that, on paper, belong to the Romano family. Which means someone has been stealing from you in increments so small you’d need a microscope to see them, and they’ve been doing it since before you took the seat.”

The lighter stopped. Held open. The small orange flame danced against the dim library light, and I watched it for a count of three before snapping it shut.

Eleven point seven million dollars. Not the kind of number that broke a family. The kind that bled it, slowly, the way a shallow cut bleeds if you don’t notice it in time.

Zephyr wasn’t done. He moved to the center of the board, where the marker work was densest, the ink layered so thick in places that it had started to develop topography.

“Alexios’s faction.” His marker drew three vertical lines, dividing the board into columns. “Old-guard conviction.” Tap. The left column filled with names, maybe a dozen, each one written in red. “Men who believe you’re illegitimate on principle. Direct blood matters, legitimate blood. You’re not legitimate blood. Simple math.”

He moved to the middle column. “Payoffs.” More names, fewer, written in blue. “Men who believe you’re illegitimate and also appreciate having their mortgages paid. Slightly more complicated math, but the common denominator is still ‘Ari shouldn’t be here.’”

Then the right column. “Fear.” Just three names. Written in green, circled, underlined twice. Zephyr tapped this column. Once. Then again, harder, the marker hitting the board with a sound that carried in the quiet library.

“These three,” he said. His voice had changed. The dry humor was still there, but underneath it was something colder, closer to contempt. “They’re not loyal to Alexios. They’re terrified of him. Which makes them more dangerous than the true believers because terror doesn’t have a conscience. Terror does what it’s told and asks for the next instruction.”

He looked at me. Really looked. Those blue eyes held mine with the intensity of a man who had just drawn a map to the explosives and was waiting to see if I understood what he was showing me.

“The conviction guys will argue. The payoffs will negotiate. The fear?” His marker tapped the green column one more time. “They’ll pull the trigger because pulling the trigger is easier than living with whatever Alexios told them would happen if they didn’t.”

Silence. The good kind. The heavy kind. The kind that carried the weight of something that had been true for a long time and had just been named out loud.

Zephyr capped the marker. Set it on the lip of the whiteboard tray. His fingers were stained with ink, the knuckles dark where the dry-erase had transferred from board to skin during hours of work I hadn’t asked for and he had done anyway.

“Alexios really should’ve hired a better accountant,” he said. The dryness was back, full strength, the blend of sarcasm and genuine disappointment that meant he considered financial incompetence a personal insult. “Two, minimum. One to do the work, one to check it. Basic operational hygiene. The man runs a crime family like someone who’s never actually committed a crime, which is either hilarious or terrifying depending on how close you’re standing to the fallout.”

I didn’t interrupt. Couldn’t. The information sat in the room like something physical—eleven point seven million dollars, three columns of names, and a whiteboard so thick with marker that the original surface was a historical footnote.

And beneath it, the warmer, more complicated fact that Zephyr had spent a week building this because someone had threatened what was his and he had decided that the appropriate response was comprehensive, color-coded annihilation.

The lighter went still in my hand. Open, held, the flame steady against the dim library light, and then I snapped it shut and the sound was final.

Zephyr saved the kicker for last. Of course he did. The man had a sense of dramatic timing that bordered on pathological, and I had stopped being surprised by it approximately seven days into knowing him, which was about six days too late for my cardiovascular health.

He picked up a green marker. Uncapped it with his teeth. The plastic made a small, decisive sound, and then he drew a single arrow from the fear column to the bottom right corner of the board, where he’d written one word in capital letters and circled it twice.

CONCLAVE.

The marker snapped shut. The sound was sharp in the quiet library, the finality of a man who had just delivered the last piece of a puzzle and was now waiting for the room to understand what the picture looked like.

“The conclave is a week off.” His voice was even. Measured. The dry humor had dialed back, replaced by something colder, something that lived in the neighborhood of professional certainty. “Alexios isn’t just gunning for you. He’s planning a move to drag every allied family into his fallout. The fear column—those three names—they’re not just afraid of him. They’re positioned. Two in security, one in protocol. Enough to create an incident that looks like external aggression rather than internal sabotage.”

He set the marker down. Crossed his arms. The ink on his knuckles had dried to something that looked almost deliberate, like war paint applied by someone who considered financial forensics a contact sport.

“The intelligence side is done.” He gestured at the binders, the whiteboard, the caramel wrappers that formed a golden perimeter around his workspace. “Everything’s printed, organized by category, and on your desk. I’m the information guy, not the consequences guy. I’d like that distinction to remain clear.”

A pause. Brief. The kind of pause that happened when Zephyr’s brain was running a statement through several filters simultaneously, checking for sincerity, checking for impact, checking for whatever angle he might be working that he hadn’t identified yet.

Then he added, “Alexios really should’ve hired a better accountant.”

The lighter went still in my hand. Open, held, the flame steady against the dim library light, and for a long moment the only sound was the soft hiss of butane and the distant creak of the palazzo settling into afternoon.

“It’s thorough,” I said.

Zephyr’s eyebrows went up. The arch that meant he’d caught something he hadn’t expected to catch and was now turning it over to see what lived underneath.

“Comprehensive,” he corrected. “Thorough is for dusting. This is structural. I prefer precision in my adjectives. It’s a professional quirk. You can add it to the list of things you’re tolerating about me. It’s under ’T’ for ‘terminally picky.’”

I looked at Leon. Leon’s expression had not changed. His face was its usual configuration of absolute neutrality, but I recognized it as the outward expression of someone who was genuinely impressed and had decided that showing it would constitute a security breach.

His silence counted as impressed. I’d known Leon long enough to read his stillness, and the stillness he was offering right now was the kind that happened when something had exceeded his expectations and he was now recalculating several previously held assumptions.

I stood.

The room changed when I stood. It always did. Six-foot-three of scarred dock worker with a denim vest full of knives tended to rearrange the air in a space whether he meant to or not, and I had stopped apologizing for it around the same time I stopped apologizing for breathing.

I crossed to the whiteboard. Studied it. The colors, the arrows, the eleven point seven million written in Zephyr’s tight script beside a column of dates that stretched back four years. The fear column with its three circled names. The single green arrow pointing to CONCLAVE like the board was shouting at me in a language I had no choice but to understand.

Then I turned to Zephyr.

“I’ll need you at the conclave.” My voice was low. Flat. The tone I used for statements that were not subject to discussion. “Not behind me. At my shoulder.”

Zephyr’s head tilted. The specific tilt that meant his brain was running the statement through several filters simultaneously, and the filters were producing conflicting results that required manual resolution.

“At your shoulder.” Not a question. A verification, delivered with the dry precision of someone making sure he’d heard correctly before he decided whether to be offended. “As in, visible. Present. The man who reads spreadsheets for a living, standing next to the man who makes other men check for exits. That shoulder.”

“Yes.”

He considered this. His eyes moved across my face once, inventorying, the look of a man reading a room he had decided belonged to him and noting a significant revision to the floor plan.

“I’m calling that a promotion.” His tone was light, because treating serious things lightly was how Zephyr survived and he had no plans to change the system now. “Effective immediately. With commensurate adjustments to my already substantial fee structure, which I will be happy to discuss once I’ve had a caramel to process the emotional implications of being upgraded from ‘man in the library’ to ‘man at the devil’s shoulder.’ A lateral move, some might argue, but I prefer to think of it as vertical with a favorable wind.”

“It’s not a promotion.” I held his gaze. Those blue eyes met mine without flinching, without shifting. “It’s a necessity.”

“Necessity comes with hazard pay.” His voice had developed a warm edge, the blend of sarcasm and genuine concern that meant he was fully aware of what I was asking and had already decided that the appropriate response was to make me say it out loud. “Conclaves involve other families. Other families involve other people with guns. I have one switchblade and a professionally calibrated distrust of authority figures. The math is not favorable.”

“Invoice it.”

He nodded once. Decisive. “It will be a hefty line item. Possibly its own category. ‘Proximity to imminent violence’ has a premium rate. I’ll need to consult my actuarial tables, which are mostly theoretical, but emotionally validating.”

“I assumed as much.”

Leon’s eyes moved to the ceiling. Just once. A brief, deliberate upward glance that held for approximately two seconds before returning to neutral. His version of an eye-roll, compressed into a gesture so subtle that most people would miss it entirely.

I savored it. The ceiling-glance. Leon’s silence. The way Zephyr stood amid his binders and his wrappers and his color-coded annihilation of Alexios Romano’s financial architecture, looking at me with the blend of sharp and warm that made my chest do something complicated every time I saw it.

The lighter clicked. Open. Held. The small orange flame danced against the dim library light, and I watched it for a count of three before snapping it shut.

A week. The conclave sat in front of me like something physical—seven days between now and a room full of family heads who had watched the Romanos self-destruct, and beside me, a five-foot-five blond with turquoise-sparkled toes and a brain that moved faster than most people could speak.

I could work with that.

Leon left the way he always left—boots quiet on hardwood, the door closing behind him with the finality of a man who understood that certain conversations required his absence more than his presence.

I lingered.

The library felt different without Leon’s stillness in it. Warmer, somehow, though the temperature hadn’t changed. The whiteboard dominated the room the way it had dominated the last hour, colors and arrows and eleven point seven million dollars of someone else’s bad decisions rendered in marker on a surface that had probably cost more than most people’s monthly rent.

My eyes moved from the board to Zephyr.

He stood amid the wreckage of his own productivity—binders stacked on every horizontal surface, caramel wrappers forming a golden perimeter around his bare feet, the turquoise sparkles on his toenails catching what little light made it through the heavy curtains.

His T-shirt had slid off one shoulder again, the way it always did.

Ink on his knuckles. Dark smudges where the marker had transferred from board to skin during hours of work I hadn’t asked for and he had done anyway.

“You didn’t have to do this.” My voice came out lower than I’d intended.

Rougher.

Zephyr looked at me, his blue eyes held mine across the library.

“I know.” He picked up a caramel wrapper from the desk, examined it with the focused attention of someone treating garbage as evidence, and set it back down. “Someone had to. The wrappers prove sustained intellectual effort, by the way. Not gluttony. There’s a distinction. One is professional dedication. The other is a character flaw I refuse to acknowledge despite overwhelming anecdotal evidence.”

I crossed to the desk. Picked up a wrapper, gold foil, crumpled. I turned it over. The back was blank. No message, no coordinates, just the faint impression of where someone’s thumb had pressed too hard while unwrapping.

I set it back down.

“Get some sleep.”

Zephyr shrugged. He had heard the instruction, processed it, and filed it under “things other people care about that I have no plans to implement.”

“I’ll sleep after the conclave.” His tone was light, but I knew Zephyr was deflecting something serious. “Sleep is a renewable resource. I’m rationing. It’s an efficiency measure. You can file a complaint with the relevant department, which is me, and I will take it under advisement with the seriousness it deserves, which is none.”

“Sleep doesn’t work that way.”

“It works exactly the way I tell it to work.” He crossed his arms. The ink on his knuckles had dried to something that looked almost deliberate, like war paint applied by someone who considered defiance a recreational sport.

“I have a system,” he continued. “The system has protocols. One of those protocols is ‘sleep when the work is done,’ and the work, as you can see from the comprehensive color-coded annihilation on that board, is not done. It’s merely entered a new phase, which I’m calling ‘operational deployment,’ and operational deployment does not accommodate napping. Napping is for people who have the luxury of not being surrounded by men who want to kill them.”

I stepped closer.

Close enough that the unbique scent of him hit with the intensity of near-field aromatherapy. 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.

Close enough that the air between us got thinner, the way it always did when I decided that personal space was a concept I was no longer interested in honoring.

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.

“It’s not a complaint.” My voice dropped. Lower. The tone I used when the person in front of me was Zephyr Kontos and the distance between us was measured in inches rather than feet. “It’s a request.”

He held my gaze. 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.

“I’ll consider it,” he said.

“I’ll take it.”

The smile he gave me was small, warm.

“That’s optimistic.” The dryness was back, full strength, the blend of sarcasm and affection that meant he had decided that being difficult was more fun than being compliant.

My mouth almost curved.

Almost. The muscles moved, a fractional shift, and then I controlled it, because control was what I did and smiling at Zephyr in a library full of caramel wrappers was several exits past control and heading rapidly toward something I wasn’t ready to name.

I left him there. Amid the binders and the wrappers and the color-coded annihilation of Alexios Romano’s financial architecture, standing in the wreckage of his own productivity with ink on his knuckles and turquoise sparkles on his toes and the absolute certainty of someone who had decided that belonging here was not a question, but an answer.

The door closed behind me with a soft click that sounded final.

In the corridor, the palazzo hummed around me—old pipes settling, the distant click of a thermostat adjusting, the soundtrack of a building that had been standing for four centuries.

I did not go back to the study. Did not pick up the phone. Did not do any of the things a man in my position should have been doing with seven days until a conclave and a rebellion brewing at his back.

I stood in the corridor. Listened to the quiet. The silence that happened when Zephyr was working behind a closed door and the only sound was the rapid percussion of keys and the occasional, muffled sound of a man who had just found something interesting and was now enjoying the hell out of it.

The lighter clicked in my hand. Open. Held. The small orange flame danced against the dark corridor, and I watched it for a count of three before snapping it shut.

The conclave sat in front of me like something physical, and beside me, a five-foot-five blond with a conspiracy wall and a brain that moved faster than most people could speak and the absolute conviction that sleep was something that happened to other people.

I could work with that.

I’d have to.

Chapter Thirteen

~ Aristoteles ~

I sat at my desk with the lighter flicking between my fingers—open, shut, open—the rhythm steady under the tight cone of the desk lamp. The flame caught and died, caught and died, orange against the dark wood of the study, and I didn’t think about the calls. Thinking was a luxury. Execution was the job.

Zephyr’s laptop was already angled on the desk to my right, screen tilted just so, the camera positioned to capture the whiteboard behind him. His work. The color-coded web of Alexios’s financial architecture rendered in marker on six feet of plastic, and the fact that I was about to broadcast it to three crime bosses who had no reason to trust me was either suicidal or the only move that made sense.

A bowl of caramels sat at my elbow. Gold foil gleaming in the lamplight, stacked in a loose pyramid. Zephyr had placed it there without comment, which meant he understood what these calls would cost me. Sugar as armor. Pragmatic risk management. No further thought required.

I dialed Tony D’Angelo first.

The number rang twice. A short, heavy silence, and then Tony’s voice came through with the flatness of a man who had been expecting bad news and wasn’t disappointed to receive it.

“Romano.”

No warmth. No greeting. Just my name in his mouth like something he was tasting to see if it had gone bad. I appreciated the efficiency. Most men wasted air on formalities. D’Angelo treated conversation the way I treated obstacles—as something to be cleared rather than negotiated.

“Secured line,” I said. “Five minutes. Bring one aide. Intelligence you need before the conclave.”

A pause. The sound of someone making a calculation and deciding the math worked in his favor.

“Two minutes.” His voice didn’t change. The flatness stayed, steady as bedrock. “I’ve got a perimeter breach that needs my attention more than whatever Romano problem you’re sitting on.”

“Four minutes.” I didn’t negotiate. “Or you walk into the conclave with a blind spot. Your call.”

Another pause. Longer this time, weighted with the gravity of a man who understood exactly what “blind spot” meant in our vocabulary.

“Three.” The line went dead.

I set the phone down. Picked it up again. Luca Sabatino was next.

He answered on the first ring. Always the first ring. The man treated phones like firearms—something you kept close and answered immediately because the alternative was learning to regret it.

“Romano.”

Same greeting. No warmth. The cadence of a man who had built his life on directness and saw no reason to abandon it for something as decorative as courtesy.

“Secured line,” I said. “Five minutes. One aide. Intelligence on Alexios.”

I didn’t say “Romano.” Didn’t need to. The name hung between us like something already spoken, the gravity of a surname that had become synonymous with certain categories of problem.

“You’ve got evidence.” Not a question. The tone of a man who had been expecting this call for longer than either of us was willing to admit.

“Enough.”

“I’m in.” The line went dead.

Sabatino had taken thirteen seconds. I filed that under “useful data” and moved to the third call. I wouldn’t normally call Vinnie Borelli because he was based in New York, but he was the underboss of the Borelli family in New York and in Italy. Besides, dealing with him was easier than dealing with his grandfather.

Borelli answered on the second ring. Vinnie’s voice came through with the polished authority of a man who treated conversation as a performance and had rehearsed this role enough times to make it sound effortless.

“Aristoteles.” My full name in his mouth, the formality of someone who used language as a class marker and enjoyed the distinction. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“No pleasure.” I kept my voice flat. Borelli appreciated directness beneath the polish, and I had neither the time nor the inclination to perform the social dance his ego required. “Secured line. Five minutes. One aide. Intelligence on a faction moving against the conclave.”

The pause was shorter than the others. Borelli’s political instincts were sharp, honed by decades of navigating rooms where the wrong word could end a career or a life, and he processed the implications faster than most men I knew.

“Give me ninety seconds.” The line went dead.

I set the phone down. The lighter clicked open, held for a count of three, snapped shut. Three calls, less than two minutes of conversation total, and three of the most dangerous men in Italian organized crime had agreed to drop whatever they were doing and join a secured line because I said they needed to.

Not bad for a dock worker with a scar and a lighter and a family name that had been synonymous with disaster six months ago.

I reviewed my notes one last time. Single page. Bullet points in my handwriting, the tight block capitals of a man who treated penmanship as a utility rather than an art.

Bribery chain. Embezzlement trail. Faction maps. Timing relative to the conclave. Nothing embellished. Nothing wasted. The arithmetic of a problem reduced to its components, and the components laid out in an order that would make sense to men who thought the way I did.

I didn’t look at Zephyr.

He was already unwrapping a caramel, the gold foil catching the lamplight as his fingers worked the wrapper loose with the focused precision of someone treating sugar as a ritual.

His laptop hummed beside mine, the screen bright with whatever presentation he had loaded, and the casual efficiency of it was either alarming or perfect, depending on how close you were standing to the fallout.

He tapped a key. Another. The soft percussion of a man who treated imminent video calls with three crime bosses the way most people treated Tuesday morning—as something that happened regularly and required no emotional preparation.

“Testing audio.” His voice was dry. Clinical. The tone of someone running a systems check because systems checks were what professionals did, and Zephyr, whatever else he was, had never been anything less than professional when the work required it.

“Audio’s fine.” I didn’t look up from my notes. Didn’t need to. Zephyr’s competence was a fact I had stopped questioning approximately seven days into knowing him, and the sound of his fingers on the keyboard carried the confidence of a man who had built something he was proud of and was now waiting for the room to appreciate it.

Leon stood by the wall. Arms crossed. Boots planted. The stillness of a man who had been doing this long enough to know when his presence was necessary and when it was decorative, and who had decided, without being told, that this fell squarely into the necessary category.

His eyes moved from the whiteboard to Zephyr to me, a single slow inventory of the room, and whatever he found there satisfied him. His expression didn’t change. Leon’s expressions rarely changed. But the set of his shoulders relaxed by approximately two millimeters, which was his version of a standing ovation.

Silent approval.

I’d take it.

The laptop chimed. Once. A soft electronic note that meant the first connection was establishing, and the room changed around us—the air got thinner, the light felt sharper, and the weight of what was about to happen settled across my shoulders with the familiar pressure of something I had been carrying for longer than I cared to admit.

I closed the lighter. Set it on the desk. Adjusted the angle of the screen by a fraction of an inch because fractions mattered when the men on the other end of the line had built empires on noticing details that other people missed.

Zephyr popped a caramel into his mouth. Chewed once. His eyes found mine across the desk, held for a beat that felt longer than it was, and the expression on his face was the blend of sharp and warm that made my chest do something complicated every time I saw it.

“Showtime,” he said.

The screen lit up. Three faces, arranged in a grid, each with a single aide standing behind a shoulder, and the room on my end went very quiet in the way rooms do when something that has been building for weeks finally arrives and everyone in it understands that there is no going back.

I leaned forward.

“Gentlemen,” I said. “We have a problem.”

Tony D’Angelo was on the left, dark hair, honey eyes, the watchful stillness of a man who had inherited power he never asked for and was still learning what to do with it.

Luca Sabatino in the center, broad-shouldered and bearded, the calm of someone who had seen everything and forgotten nothing.

Vinnie Borelli on the right, silver-streaked and polished, the kind of authority that came from decades of being the smartest man in every room he entered.

Each had one aide behind him. Arms crossed, faces blank, the human furniture that powerful men kept at their shoulders to remind everyone in the room that they were not alone.

I didn’t waste time on pleasantries. Pleasantries were for men who had something to prove, and I had stopped proving things the day I took the Romano seat with nothing but my hands and the cold certainty that the family deserved better than what Geno had left it.

“My security.” I gestured to Leon without looking at him. The motion was brief, efficient, the kind of introduction that treated a man’s presence as a statement of fact rather than a social courtesy. “Leon Nikolaidis. Underboss. He speaks when I’m dead, which hasn’t happened yet, so you can file that under theoretical.”

Leon didn’t move. His stillness was its own kind of introduction, and the men on the screen absorbed it the way they absorbed everything—with the careful attention of predators reading another predator’s body language.

“And this.” I turned slightly. Zephyr was already leaning into frame, his laptop angled to capture the whiteboard behind him. “Zephyr Kontos. Financial architect and incidental chaos agent. He found what I’m about to show you, which means he knows more about your books than you do, and if that bothers you, I suggest you take it up with whoever handles your cybersecurity, because they’re not earning their retainer.”

Zephyr’s mouth curved. He’d probably draft a revised title later and invoice me for the creative consultation.

I laid it out flat. No embellishment. No drama. Just the problem reduced to its components, delivered in the tone of a man reading a weather report for a storm that had already made landfall.

Bribery chain. Three intermediaries, same accountant, withdrawal patterns that a child could have spotted with a calculator and ten minutes of attention.

Embezzlement. Four years of small thefts, never above threshold, cleaned through shells that someone had apparently named after Italian desserts, which was either hilarious or insulting depending on how personally you took your financial security.

Faction maps. Conviction, payoffs, fear. Three columns of names, each with its own motivation, each with its own leverage point, and the green arrow pointing to CONCLAVE like the board was shouting in a language everyone in the room suddenly understood.

Timing. One week. Alexios moving before or during, with resources I had quantified and men I had named, and the fact that none of the three faces on my screen had seen it coming was either a testament to Alexios’s patience or an indictment of their intelligence networks, and I didn’t particularly care which.

“Questions?” I asked when I finished. Not because I expected any, but because protocol required the offer, and I had learned, through bitter experience, that skipping protocol in rooms full of powerful men was a shortcut to conversations I didn’t have time for.

There were no questions. Just silence, heavy and still, the three men processing information that had just rearranged their understanding of the board.

I nodded to Zephyr.

He popped the whiteboard into view with a single keystroke. The colors hit the screen—red, blue, green, the marker work so dense in places that it had developed topography—and the three aides leaned forward in perfect synchronization, like puppets responding to the same string.

Zephyr walked them through it. Dry. Amused. The tone of a man reading someone else’s autopsy and finding the cause of death both obvious and deeply entertaining.

“Eleven point seven million dollars,” he said, tapping the embezzlement column. “Over four years. From accounts that, on paper, belong to the Romano family, which means either someone’s running a very elaborate practical joke or Alexios Romano has the financial discretion of a college freshman with his first credit card. I’m leaning toward the latter, but I’m open to alternative theories if anyone has a better explanation for why a man with his resources would use the same shell company naming convention as someone ordering gelato.”

D’Angelo’s expression didn’t change. Sabatino’s jaw tightened by approximately two millimeters. Borelli’s eyes narrowed, calculating, the look of a man running numbers in his head and not liking the sum.

None of them had seen it coming. I filed that under “useful data” and let the silence stretch.

Then Borelli spoke.

“How much to hire him?” His voice was smooth, polished, the tone of a man who treated talent acquisition as a recreational sport and had just spotted something he wanted. He was looking at Zephyr, not at me, which was either a calculated insult or a genuine compliment, and I didn’t particularly care which.

Zephyr laughed. The sound was bright, sudden, cutting through the tension in the room like something that didn’t belong there and had arrived anyway because it felt like it.

He tapped my shoulder. Once. Casual. The kind of touch that showed ownership, and every eye on the screen swung to me with the synchronized attention of men who had just heard something interesting and were now waiting to see how I would handle it.

“Sorry.” Zephyr’s smile was warm, unrepentant, the blend of affection and defiance that made my chest do something complicated every time I saw it. “He pays for caramels and the job comes with bed benefits. The package is pretty comprehensive. I’d need a compelling counteroffer, and frankly, I’m not seeing one on the table.”

Silence. Heavy. The kind of silence that carried the weight of three crime bosses processing the fact that Aristoteles Romano, the man they had watched take a shattered family and rebuild it with nothing but cold determination and abnormal physical violence, was apparently sharing a bed with a five-foot-five blond who treated secured intelligence briefings like open mic night.

I held their gazes. One by one. D’Angelo first, then Sabatino, then Borelli. I didn’t flinch. Didn’t shift. Didn’t do anything except look back at them with the absolute stillness of a man who had already made his decisions and saw no reason to apologize for any of them.

Zephyr unwrapped another caramel. The gold foil crinkled, loud in the quiet room, and he popped it into his mouth with the casual ease of someone ordering coffee at a counter. His jaw worked once, the muscles shifting under skin, and the sound of him chewing was approximately the last thing three crime bosses had expected to hear on a secured line about factional betrayal.

Borelli pivoted. Fast. Smooth. The kind of pivot that came from decades of navigating awkward moments and emerging with his dignity intact.

“Your assistant’s toenails,” he said. His tone was measured, curious, the tone of a man changing the subject with the precision of a surgeon. “The color. Turquoise, yes? My husband would appreciate the reference. He’s been experimenting with shades.”

I stared at the screen. Nail polish. On a secured mafia intelligence line. Five feet from a whiteboard detailing eleven point seven million in embezzlement and a faction plot to destabilize the conclave.

Zephyr didn’t miss a beat.

“I’ll send you the link.” He was already tapping his phone, thumb moving across the screen with the focused attention of someone treating nail polish recommendations as a legitimate diplomatic exchange. “It’s a small independent brand out of Naples. The staying power is exceptional. I’ve tested it against hardwood, tile, and one regrettable incident involving a swimming pool that I’m not at liberty to discuss without legal representation present.”

Sabatino’s mouth almost moved. Almost. The fact that Luca Sabatino, a man whose stillness was legendary, had almost smiled at a nail polish recommendation was an alarming development.

They agreed to run investigations. Each family would verify the intelligence against their own networks, cross-reference the names, and reconvene at the conclave with whatever they found. Clean. Efficient.

I appreciated that.

I told them I’d send updates if anything changed. They didn’t ask for details. Didn’t need to. The arithmetic was clear—Alexios was moving, we had the numbers, and the only question was whether we could coordinate a response before he pulled the trigger.

The calls disconnected. One by one. D’Angelo first, then Sabatino, then Borelli, each screen going dark with the soft electronic sigh of a connection severing, and then it was just the three of us in the study with the whiteboard and the caramels and the quiet that happened when something significant had just concluded and no one was quite ready to name it.

Zephyr was already tapping out a link on his phone. His fingers moved fast, the rhythm bursts and pauses of a man composing a message with the focused attention of someone who considered nail polish recommendations a legitimate use of post-intelligence-briefing bandwidth.

Leon looked at me. His expression hadn’t changed. His arms were still crossed, his boots were still planted, and the set of his shoulders carried the stillness of a man who had just watched his boss introduce his boyfriend to three crime families and emerge with all his limbs attached.

“Call went well,” he said.

I picked up the lighter. Clicked it open. Held the flame, orange against the dim study, and watched it dance for a count of three before snapping it shut.

“They didn’t order a hit on you,” Leon added. His tone was flat, even, the cadence of a man stating a fact he found mildly surprising.

“Yet.”

I closed the laptop. The screen went dark, and the study settled back into its normal quiet—old wood, warm air, and the weight of what had just happened sitting on the desk like a ticking time bomb.

One week to the conclave and Alexios had no idea what was coming—the intelligence, the coordination, the fact that three families were now running his financial architecture through their own networks with the focused attention of men who had just discovered a threat they hadn’t known existed.

I preferred it that way. Surprise was a weapon, and I had never been sentimental about using the tools available to me.

Zephyr’s phone chimed. A soft electronic note, and he looked down at the screen, his mouth curving in that way that meant someone had just responded to his nail polish link with more enthusiasm than he had expected.

I didn’t ask. Didn’t need to. The fact that Vincenzo Borelli, one of the most calculated political operators in Italian organized crime, was now discussing turquoise nail polish with my financial architect was an alarming development.

I reached for a caramel. Unwrapped it slowly. The gold foil caught the lamplight, warm against my fingers, and the sweetness hit my tongue with the intensity of something I hadn’t known I wanted until it was already there.

Zephyr looked up. Those blue eyes found mine across the desk, held for a beat that felt longer than it was, and the expression on his face was the blend of sharp and warm that made my chest do something complicated every time I saw it.

“One week,” he said.

I nodded once. Decisive. The nod of a man who had already done the arithmetic and was now waiting for the problem to catch up to his solution.

“We’ll handle it,” I said.

Not a question. A statement of operational fact.

Zephyr believed me. I could see it in his eyes—the warmth that happened when trust arrived without negotiation, without calculation, without any of the filters that usually stood between Zephyr Kontos and the world.

He believed me, and the fact that he believed me was either the most concerning development of the past month or the only one that had ever made complete sense.

Probably both.

I reached for the lighter. Clicked it open. Held the flame, orange against the dim study, and watched it dance for a count of three before snapping it shut.

The sound was final.

One week. Alexios had no idea. The alliance was moving. And somewhere in the dark corners of Florence, a rebellion was brewing that was about to discover that the man they thought they understood had stopped being predictable.

I could work with that.

I’d have to.

Chapter Fourteen

~ Zephyr ~

I stopped in the doorway of the study, bare feet on the wide-plank floor, turquoise sparkles catching the low light from the desk lamp, and my brain did what it always did when Ari was involved: ran at full speed, generated several thousand words of commentary, and offered exactly none of it to the room.

He hadn’t heard me. Or he had heard me and decided I wasn’t interesting enough to acknowledge, which was fair, because I’d spent most of the afternoon explaining why his cousin was a financial idiot with the emotional maturity of a bag of rocks, and I wouldn’t want to talk to me either.

His vest was off, white shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, sleeves rolled to the elbow, forearms exposed under the amber lamp. The forearms deserved their own zoning category. Thick, scarred, the kind of forearms that made architecture seem like an afterthought.

The lighter sat still in his palm. Not clicking. Just there, metal catching the low light, held the way some men held prayer beads or worry stones or whatever the fuck normal people used to keep their hands busy when the world was about to change.

Tomorrow was the conclave. It would be a room full of men who had watched the Romanos bleed and done nothing, and Ari standing in the middle of it with a family name that still smelled like smoke and a five-foot-five blond who treated financial forensics like a contact sport.

I leaned against the doorframe. Longer than was professionally defensible. The kind of lean that said I’m watching you and I have opinions about it and also, quietly, I have been watching you for weeks and the watching has become its own kind of problem.

The dark pressed against the glass behind him, the grounds beyond the courtyard lost to shadow, and the contrast did things to the lines of his back that my professional vocabulary did not have a category for.

I crossed the room.

Not quickly. Not slowly. I knew exactly what I was doing and was doing it anyway because the alternative was worse, and I had never been good at worse. The floorboards creaked under my bare feet.

The turquoise sparkles caught the low light, small defiant points of color against the dark floor, and somewhere in the back of my brain, a very small voice said you are making a decision and a much larger voice said shut up, I know.

I stopped close. Close enough that the cedar-and-coffee scent of him hit with the intensity of aromatherapy. Close enough that I had to tilt my chin up to hold his eye contact, which was its own kind of problem because Ari’s eye contact was not something you held casually.

It was something you survived.

He turned from the window. Slowly. The kind of slow that suggested he had been aware of me the entire time and had simply chosen not to acknowledge it until he was ready, which was exactly the kind of control that made my chest do something complicated every time I witnessed it.

His eyes found mine. Black. Dark. Giving nothing away and somehow giving everything at once.

“I’m going to kiss you now.” My voice came out even. Steadier than it had any right to be, given that my cardiovascular system was currently doing something that resembled an interpretive dance. “You’re welcome to object, but you should know I have excellent reflexes and will simply try again.”

He looked at me. One long, still moment. The lighter sat motionless in his palm. No opening or closing.

His hand came up. Slow. Deliberate. His palm settled along my jaw, thumb warm against my cheek, the calluses rough against my skin in a way that registered somewhere below my sternum.

He kissed me first.

Not the way I’d expected. Not aggressive, not demanding—controlled, careful. His mouth was warm. His beard scraped my chin, the roughness of it sending a signal to my nervous system that bypassed every filter I had installed.

My internal monologue went silent.

Completely. Irrevocably. The silence of a mind that had been running at full speed since approximately age sixteen and had just discovered that the off switch existed and Aristoteles Romano’s mouth was the mechanism.

No commentary. No analysis. No snarky one-liners about forearms or lighter mechanics or the fact that I was standing in a study at midnight with a crime boss’s thumb on my cheek and my professional boundaries in a ditch somewhere.

Just warmth. His mouth against mine, the steady pressure of a man who treated kissing the way he treated everything—with the focused attention of someone who had decided that thoroughness was more important than speed.

Then his hand slid from my jaw to the back of my neck. His fingers threaded through my hair, grip firm, anchoring, like he was worried I might try to leave and had decided to remove that option from the menu.

His other hand found my hip. Pulled me in. Two hundred and twenty-five pounds of focused intent, and my body registered the shift in gravity with the enthusiasm of something that had been waiting for this input and was now compiling a very detailed report.

I grabbed the front of his shirt, the fabric warm from his skin, and my fingers closed around it with the grip of a man whose options had narrowed to hold on or hit the floor, and I had strong opinions about floors.

The kiss did not stay controlled.

His mouth opened against mine. Warm. Insistent. His tongue found mine, and the sound I made was low, involuntary, the noise of a man whose internal monologue had been replaced by something considerably more primal.

The desk lamp threw its small circle of light across the study. Old paper. Cedar. The smell of books that had been sitting on shelves longer than I had been alive, and beneath it, the cleaner, warmer scent of Ari’s skin, the base note of a man who did not wear cologne because he did not need to.

His hand was on the back of my neck. His other hand held tight on my hip, fingers pressing through the thin fabric of my shirt with the specific pressure of someone who had decided that the distance between us was unacceptable and was now correcting it.

I held his shirt. White-knuckled.

Ari’s beard scraped my jaw. His mouth found the corner of my lips, then my lower lip, and the attention he paid to that specific area was something my nervous system filed under “highly relevant data”.

I was so done for.

Completely. Irrevocably. The kind of done for that came with no reverse gear and no off-ramp and the distinct, terrible realization that I did not, in fact, want either of those things.

His thumb moved against my hip. A small circle, warm through the fabric, and the gesture was so deliberate, so specific, that my breath caught in a way that had nothing to do with the kiss and everything to do with the fact that Ari touched the way he did everything—like he meant it.

The study around us. The lamp’s circle of light. The smell of old paper and cedar and the quiet hum of a building that had been standing for four centuries and had just witnessed something it hadn’t been designed to accommodate.

I held his shirt as he started moving us.

He held me.

And somewhere in the dark beyond the window, tomorrow waited, patient and inevitable, and for the first time in longer than I could remember, I did not care.

We made it approximately twelve feet before Ari decided that the hallway wall was a structural feature worth testing.

One moment I was walking, the next I was against plaster with two hundred and twenty-five pounds of focused intent pinning me in place, and my brain did a quick recalculation of several previously held assumptions about physics and personal space.

His mouth found mine. Harder now. The controlled carefulness from the study had evaporated, replaced by something warmer and considerably less patient.

His hand was still on the back of my neck, fingers tight in my hair, and his other arm braced against the wall beside my head, the muscle in his forearm flexing. His leg was between my thighs, holding me up.

The plaster was cold against my back. Ari was not cold. Ari was the exact opposite of cold, his chest pressed against mine through the thin fabric of my shirt, his heartbeat steady against my sternum in a rhythm that suggested his cardiovascular system was considerably more composed than mine, which was frankly offensive given the circumstances.

I discovered, with the clarity of a man who was being thoroughly kissed against a hallway wall, that this was everything I had suspected it would be and also approximately three standard deviations more intense than my risk assessment had allowed for.

File that permanently. Category: worth it.

His beard scraped my jaw. His mouth moved to my throat, and the sound I made was not dignified, but it was enthusiastic, and Ari’s response was to bite—not hard, but the kind of bite that was totally possessive.

We made it to the staircase. Four centuries of dark walnut, smooth from generations of hands, the banister worn to a patina that caught the low light from the sconces on the wall.

I paused at the bottom step and looked up. The staircase stretched above us, quiet and patient, and the arithmetic of climbing it while being thoroughly distracted by Ari presented a logistical challenge that my coordination center was not currently equipped to handle.

“Architectural inconvenience,” I said. My voice came out rougher than I’d intended, which was Ari’s fault entirely. “Four centuries of Italian craftsmanship and nobody thought to install an elevator. Shameful oversight. I’m adding it to the invoice.”

Ari’s hand found the small of my back. Warm through the fabric, fingers pressing with the specific pressure of someone who had decided that commentary was a secondary concern.

“Stop talking.” His voice was low, rough, something barely controlled.

“Make me.”

He did.

His mouth covered mine. One hand on my jaw, tilting my head back, and the kiss was thorough in a way that suggested Ari treated challenges the way he treated everything—as problems to be solved rather than inconveniences to be negotiated.

By the time we reached the top step, my shirt was half untucked in a configuration that suggested either a strong wind or several minutes of focused attention from large, careful hands.

I was not entirely steady on my feet. This was also Ari’s fault. I planned to invoice him for the coordination deficit. The rate would be premium.

The bedroom was dark. Low light from the hallway spilling through the open door, throwing long shadows across the wide-plank floor and the bed that dominated the far wall. The sheets were clean.

I had people for that, Ari had said once, and the memory arrived with a warmth that had nothing to do with the temperature and everything to do with the man currently steering me through the doorway with one hand on the small of my back.

Ari closed the door. The latch caught, soft, final, and the room got quieter in the way rooms do when the rest of the world has been deliberately excluded.

He turned to me. Those black eyes found mine in the low light, held, and the expression on his face was something I had no category for—heat, yes, but beneath it something warmer, something fixed, the look of a man who had been waiting for this and was now determined to do it properly.

His hands found the hem of my shirt, pushed it up over my shoulders, and the fabric came away. The shirt landed somewhere behind us. I didn’t track where.

Logistics, again, academic.

He looked at me. Really looked. His eyes moved from my face down my chest, my stomach, the line of my hips where my trousers sat low on my waist, and the attention was so deliberate, so specific, that my skin warmed under it like something being measured by an instrument calibrated for exactly this purpose.

“You’re staring.” My voice came out steadier than it had any right to, given that I was standing in Ari’s bedroom in nothing, but my stretch pants and the distinct awareness that his eyes on my skin was a sensation I wanted repeated at regular intervals.

“I’m aware.” His voice was low. Rough. The rough that I was rapidly becoming fond of.

“Most people find it polite to pretend.”

“I’m not most people.”

“No.” I held his gaze. Those black eyes warm in the low light, giving away everything now—all the heat, all the focus, all the things he had been keeping behind glass for weeks. “You’re not.”

His mouth found my collarbone. Warm. Insistent. His beard scraped the sensitive skin where my neck met my shoulder, and whatever clever remark I had lined up evaporated the way dew does when the sun hits it, which was ironic because the sun was nowhere near this bedroom and I was evaporating for entirely different reasons.

His thumbs found my nipples. Traced them, slow circles, the calluses rough against the sensitive skin, and the sound I made was low and involuntary.

Ari’s mouth moved down my chest. His tongue flat against my skin, tracing the line of my sternum, and my hands found his shoulders because standing was becoming a theoretical concept rather than a practical reality.

His fingers were at my waistband, pushing my pants down my hips. The fabric pooled at my ankles. I stepped out of it—one foot, then the other, the movement requiring more coordination than my nervous system was currently allocating to lower-body functions—and then I was bare, standing in Ari’s bedroom in nothing but the low light and the heat of his eyes on my skin.

He paused. His eyes moved from my face down my body, and the expression on his face was satisfaction, pure and warm and entirely undisguised.

“I hope the view is worth the wait.” I said it evenly, because composure was a habit and habits died hard, even when the man looking at you like you were something he had been wanting for longer than was professionally appropriate was standing three feet away with his clothes still on, which was its own kind of problem.

“It’s better.” Two words. Quiet. Complete. The kind of statement that did not require elaboration because the elaboration lived in the way his eyes held mine and the warmth behind my sternum had nothing to do with the temperature and everything to do with the fact that Ari looked at me like I was worth looking at.

I am going to die.

I reached for his shirt collar. His mouth found mine, warm and insistent, and I kissed him with the focus of a man who had decided that talking was overrated and kissing was underutilized.

We ended up on the bed. Ari’s weight settling over me, his chest against mine, and my hands found the broad planes of his shoulders, the scars that mapped his skin like topography I wanted to memorize.

His shirt was gone—somewhere—and the feeling of his skin under my palms was something my nervous system filed under “permanent storage” without consulting my better judgment.

His mouth found my neck. My jaw. The soft place below my ear that made my entire body go tight when he bit it, and the sound that came out of me was not human and I did not care.

Then his hand moved down my stomach. His fingers wrapped around my cock, warm and firm, and whatever dry remark I had lined up did not survive the contact. My hips jerked off the mattress.

He stroked me. Slow. Thorough. His thumb rubbing over the head of my cock, spreading the wetness there, and the coordination of it was something my nervous system had not been designed to process.

His eyes watched my face. Black. Dark. Giving away everything—the heat, the focus, the satisfaction of a man who was doing something he had been thinking about and was now enjoying the hell out of it.

My head tipped back. My hips lifted. My cock pulsed in his hand, leaking, and I clocked, with the fraction of my brain still operational, that Ari was doing this on purpose. The slow pace, the watching, the deliberate thoroughness—this was calculated, and the calculation was working exactly as intended.

He reached for the nightstand. The drawer opened, closed, and he came back with lube and a condom. He coated his fingers, and then his hand pressed between my legs, and the first touch of his finger against my ass made my thighs tense with the awareness of something about to happen that my body had been waiting for and my brain was still catching up to.

“Easy.” His voice was rough. Lower than I’d ever heard it, the tone of a man holding himself together with the discipline of someone who had decided that thoroughness was more important than speed.

His finger pushed inside. Slow. Careful. The stretch registered—not pain, pressure, the fullness of being opened by someone who was paying attention to every reaction.

A second finger joined the first. The stretch deepened. Ari’s free hand held my hip, keeping me still when my body tried to move. His fingers crooked, found the spot that made my vision go white, and the sound that came out of me was not dignified, but it was enthusiastic, and Ari’s response was to do it again, slower, watching my face with the focused attention of someone collecting data he intended to keep.

“You’ve made your point.” I said it through my teeth, because composure was a habit and habits died hard, even when the man currently working two fingers inside me with the precision of someone disarming a bomb was looking at my face like it was the most interesting thing he’d seen all week.

“I haven’t.” His voice was low. Rough. A rough sound that I was rapidly becoming addicted to.

“I’m going to revise the invoice.”

“Fine.”

He added a third finger. Crooked it. The stretch was intense—not pain, exactly, but the fullness of being taken by something that did not fit easily and was fitting anyway—and my back arched off the mattress with the enthusiasm of something that had been waiting for this input and was now compiling a very detailed report.

I said something that was not a word in any of the eight languages I spoke. It might have been his name. It might have been a plea. It might have been the noise of a man whose composure had shattered.

Ari watched it happen. His fingers worked inside me, slow and thorough, and the expression on his face was satisfaction, pure and warm and entirely undisguised, like he’d won something.

He had.

He pulled me off the bed. I had approximately one second to register that my feet were no longer touching the mattress before my back hit the wall and my legs went around his waist by pure instinct, the reflex of a body that had decided horizontal surfaces were overrated and vertical ones were the future.

My shoulders were against the plaster, my thighs locked around his hips. The specific physics of a man who was very strong and very motivated, holding me up with his hands under my ass and the wall taking the rest of the weight, and my brain did a quick recalculation of several previously held assumptions about gravity and personal capability.

“This is showing off.” My voice came out breathless, which was Ari’s fault entirely, and I planned to invoice him for the respiratory compromise.

Premium rate. Itemized.

“It’s not.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“Keeping you exactly where I want you.”

I had no comeback for that. None. Zero. The silence of a man who had been verbally disarmed by six words delivered in Ari’s lowest tone.

I did not try to find one because trying would have required brain function and my brain was currently allocating resources to more pressing concerns, such as the fact that Ari’s cock was pressing against my ass and the condom was nowhere to be seen.

It appeared. One-handed. Ari rolled it on with the efficiency of a man who treated logistics as a secondary concern, and I filed this under impressive and also not the moment to comment.

He pushed inside. Slow. Relentless. The blunt pressure of his cock against my ass was its own kind of arithmetic. My head dropped back against the wall.

The plaster was cold against my shoulders, Ari was warm everywhere else, and the contrast registered somewhere below my sternum.

I breathed through it. The stretch. The fullness. The fact that Ari’s forehead was pressed to my temple, his breath warm against my skin, his hands gripping my hips and thighs hard enough to leave marks, and the marks were going to be spectacular and I was completely fine with that.

“You can move.” My voice came out rough, rougher than I’d intended, which was Ari’s fault entirely.

“I know.” His voice against my temple. Low. Certain.

He didn’t move. He waited. His cock buried inside me, stretching me open, his hands holding me against the wall.

I made a sound. Closer to a plea than anything I had ever made in my life, the noise of a man whose composure had reached its operational limit.

Ari moved.

One thrust, deep and hard, and my thighs tightened around his waist with the enthusiasm of something that had been waiting for this input and was now compiling a very detailed report.

Then another. And another. Each one deliberate, each one hard.

His mouth found my throat. My jaw. My mouth between thrusts, kissing me with the focus of a man who had decided that multitasking was underrated and he was very good at it.

My hands gripped his shoulders. The muscle there shifted under my palms with each thrust. Sounds came out of me. Not words. Sounds.

My cock was trapped between us. The friction was relentless, Ari’s stomach rubbing against me with each thrust, and the dual sensation of being fucked and being stroked by the same motion was something my nervous system had problems calibrating.

“Ari.” His name in my mouth. Not a question. Not a plea. A statement of fact, delivered with the quiet certainty of someone who had decided that naming was owning and he was mine to name.

His grip tightened. His pace shifted—harder, more urgent, the rhythm faltering from deliberate to something warmer and considerably less controlled.

I felt it—the crack in the armor, the place where Ari’s famous composure met its limit and decided that limit was flexible.

There. There he is.

I pulled him closer by the back of his neck. My mouth found his ear, and I said something against it that I will not be thinking about later, something raw and honest.

Ari groaned. Low. Rough. He drove into me, hard, deep, holding, and the feeling of him—thick, hot, stretching me open in a way that registered everywhere at once—made my cock jerk between us.

I came undone against the wall.

Ari’s name in my mouth. My whole body was shaking, my cock pulsing between us, stripes of white hitting his stomach, my chest, and the orgasm rolled through me with the violence of something that had been building since I first laid eyes on the man.

Ari followed seconds later.

Buried deep. His hands gripping my hips with bruising force, his face pressed to my shoulder, and the sound he made was quiet. Wrecked. Entirely unlike anything I had heard from him before.

We stayed like that. My back was against the plaster, Ari was still holding me up, both of us breathing hard. His forehead rested on my shoulder. His breath was warm against my skin. His cock was still inside me, pulsing gently, and the fullness of it registered somewhere with the warmth of something that had decided where it belonged and was now implementing that decision.

“The plaster is cold.” I said it into the silence. My voice came out rough, which was Ari’s fault entirely.

He carried me to the bed. One motion, controlled, the kind of controlled that came from years of moving heavy objects in the dark without making noise. My weight was transferred from wall to arms to mattress without disruption.

“I could have walked.” I said it to the ceiling. The ceiling did not respond.

It had seen worse.

“I know.”

“I’m going to add a wall-sex surcharge to the invoice.”

“I assumed.”

“It will be significant.”

“Fine.” His voice dropped. Lower. Warmer. His arm settled across my ribs, heavy and possessive, the weight of a man who had made a decision and was not revisiting it.

I lay still under his arm. The darkness pressed down around us, warm and patient, and my brain, which had opinions about everything, had no opinion about this whatsoever, which was either concerning or perfect and I was too tired to decide which.

Tomorrow was the conclave. A room full of men waiting for Ari to fail, waiting for the illegitimate dock worker with the scar and the lighter to prove that Geno’s disaster was genetic rather than circumstantial.

The fact that I had said Ari’s name against a wall and meant it, meant all of it, the honesty of a man who had stopped pretending that belonging here was a question rather than an answer.

I reached for the nightstand. My fingers found the caramel—gold foil, slightly crumpled, the crumple of something that had been handled by large, careful hands and placed exactly where it was supposed to be.

Ari’s arm tightened as I unwrapped it. The pressure was specific—not restricting, possessive, the kind of possessive that was something warm and it had been there longer than either of us was willing to admit.

I ate the caramel. Sweet. Salty. The taste of a series of catastrophic decisions and committing to every one of them.

I am so done for.

Completely. Irrevocably.

I didn’t say it. Didn’t need to. The arm across my ribs pressed slightly warmer, and the certainty of that pressure suggested that Ari already knew, had known for longer than was professionally appropriate, and had decided that knowing was enough.

The palazzo hummed its nighttime soundtrack—old pipes settling, the distant click of a thermostat adjusting, the quiet of a building that had been standing for four centuries and had just witnessed something it hadn’t been designed to accommodate.

I closed my eyes. Ari’s breath was warm against my shoulder. His arm across my ribs. His heartbeat steady against my side, slower than mine, more deliberate.

Tomorrow waited, patient and inevitable. A room full of men. A family name that still smelled like smoke. And me standing at the devil’s shoulder because belonging there was not a question, but an answer.

Chapter Fifteen

~ Aristoteles ~

The armored Range Rover smelled like leather and gun oil. I sat with my back to the cabin wall, boots planted on the steel floor, my denim vest heavy across my shoulders.

I carried four knives total—two in the vest, two in the boots—and the weight of them was familiar in a way that breathing was familiar. Not something I thought about. Something my body knew.

Leon sat in the front seat. Arms crossed, face blank, the stillness of a man who had been running security protocols in his head since approximately three in the morning and had reached conclusions he wasn’t sharing.

His eyes moved from the window to the door to Zephyr and back, a continuous low-frequency inventory that had been running for the entire drive from Florence.

Zephyr had his laptop bag across his chest and his bare feet on the floor. Turquoise sparkles catching the low interior light, toes curled against the cold metal like someone who had forgotten shoes were a thing people wore to formal events involving organized crime.

“I told you to wear shoes.” I didn’t look at him. The window offered a view of the coast unfolding in pale morning light, and I was using it.

“You told me a lot of things.” His voice was dry. Amused. The tone of a man who treated instructions as suggestions and suggestions as entertainment. “I filed most of them under ‘contextual, negotiable.’ Shoes fell into the negotiable category. The turquoise, however, is non-negotiable. I consider it diplomatic armor. You wouldn’t understand. Your aesthetic range begins and ends with ‘denim’ and ‘also denim.’”

Leon’s eyes moved to the ceiling. Briefly. His version of an eye roll, compressed into a gesture so subtle that most people would miss it entirely.

The lighter clicked in my hand. Open, held for a count, shut. The small orange flame danced against the dim cabin, and I watched it the way I watched everything else.

Carefully.

The D’Angelo estate came into view above Genoa. Pale limestone perimeter wall, maybe twelve feet high, manned gate with two visible positions and at least one I couldn’t see from this angle.

I catalogued exits. Sightlines. The curve of the drive where it disappeared behind a stand of cypress. The position of the second armored car behind us, carrying four of my men who had been selected for this job the way Leon selected everything—with the cold arithmetic of a man who treated personnel as instruments rather than people.

The gate opened. Slow. Controlled. The kind of motion that suggested the man operating it had been told to expect us and had decided, privately, that he hadn’t made up his mind about what that meant.

Tony’s underboss stood just inside the perimeter. Medium build, dark hair, the watchful stillness of a man who had been doing this long enough to know that first impressions were usually wrong and he wasn’t in a hurry to form one.

“Mr. Romano.” His voice was even. Professional. The tone of someone reading from a script he had memorized but didn’t entirely believe. “Mr. D’Angelo is expecting you in the main salon. Your security detail can wait in the east courtyard. There’s coffee. Sandwiches. The usual.”

I nodded once. The kind of nod that said I had heard him and had nothing to add, because adding things required words and words were decorative in situations where both of us understood the danger.

He escorted us through the grounds. Gravel underfoot, the crunch of it carrying in the morning quiet. Cypress lining the drive, shadows long and thin across the pale stone.

The hush of a property that ran on controlled force—not the aggressive silence of something afraid, but the patient quiet of something that had decided violence was a tool rather than a temperament.

Zephyr walked at my shoulder. Bare feet on gravel, which should have been impossible and wasn’t, because Zephyr treated physical discomfort the way most people treated minor inconveniences—as background noise rather than data.

His laptop bag bounced against his hip with each step, and the sound of it was steady, rhythmic.

The main salon opened off a wide stone terrace. Double doors, wrought iron handles, the kind of entrance that had been designed to make visitors feel small and had probably succeeded for about two hundred years before someone like me walked through it and didn’t care.

The room was full. Not crowded—D’Angelo money meant space was never a problem—but occupied in the way powerful rooms get occupied, with men standing in configurations that looked casual and weren’t.

Tony D’Angelo by the fireplace. Honey eyes, dark hair, the watchful ease of a man who had inherited power he never asked for and was still deciding what to do with it. He held a whiskey, ice mostly melted, and he wasn’t drinking it. The glass was a prop.

I’d used the same one.

Luca Sabatino near the windows. Broad-shouldered, bearded, the calm of a man who had survived worse rooms than this and had developed opinions about which ones were worth his attention.

He stood with one hand in his pocket, the other holding a drink he also wasn’t touching, and his eyes moved across the room with the patience of something that had been still longer than most things had been moving.

Vinnie Borelli was by the bar. Silver-streaked, polished, the kind of authority that came from decades of being the smartest man in every room he entered.

His husband Nicky stood beside him, chestnut-haired and alert, and the two of them occupied their corner of the salon with the easy confidence of people who had decided that belonging was something that happened on their terms rather than as a performance.

Other family heads. Their spouses. Drinks in hand, conversation calibrated to the volume that suggested everyone was aware of the microphones and had decided, collectively, that the things worth saying wouldn’t be said where microphones could hear them.

The welcome was warmer than I expected.

Tony saw me first. His eyes found mine across the room, held for a beat that felt longer than it was, and then he was crossing the floor to greet me.

“Ari.” His hand found mine. Firm grip, calluses that matched mine in different places, and he held it a half-second too long, a handshake that carried a message neither of us was going to say out loud.

I filed it. Said nothing.

Luca nodded from across the room. Once. Decisive.

Vinnie raised his glass. A fractional lift, acknowledgment without quite arriving at welcome, and then his eyes dropped to Zephyr’s bare feet and something moved behind his expression—amusement.

He leaned toward Nicky. Said something low. Nicky’s mouth curved, warm and unguarded, and the two of them looked at Zephyr’s turquoise-sparkled toes with the appreciation of people who treated color as a legitimate form of diplomacy.

Zephyr noticed. Of course he noticed. The man noticed everything, filed it, and decided whether to care about it approximately three seconds faster than most people could form the thought.

He did not adjust his posture. Did not cover his feet. Stood beside me with his laptop bag and his bare toes and the absolute certainty of someone who had decided that the room could adapt to him rather than the other way around.

I stood in the middle of it without adjusting a single thing.

Denim vest. White shirt unbuttoned halfway, sleeves rolled to mid-forearm. Tattoos visible at the wrists, the collar, the places where the fabric didn’t reach. Boots that had seen dock work and blood and the kind of wear that comes from standing your ground when standing was the only option left.

Around me: tailored suits. Pocket squares. Cufflinks that caught the light when men moved their hands to emphasize points that didn’t need emphasizing. Shoes polished to a shine that suggested someone else had done the polishing and the man wearing them had better things to worry about.

The contrast was not subtle. I preferred it that way. Subtlety was for men who needed to announce themselves, and I had never needed to announce anything.

A servant appeared with a tray. Whiskey. Water. Something clear in a tall glass that might have been gin and probably was. I took the water. Zephyr took nothing.

The man drank tea exclusively because coffee did something to him that made other people want insurance, and there was no tea on the tray, which meant he would wait until something caffeinated appeared or until his blood sugar reached critically irresponsible levels, at which point he would locate caramels through methods that bordered on supernatural.

I scanned the room. Once. Slow. The way I scanned dockyards at three in the morning when the fog was thick and the only thing keeping your knives clean was knowing where everyone else was standing.

Half the men in this room wanted me dead. The other half hadn’t decided yet. The arithmetic was clear, and clear arithmetic was something I could work with.

Zephyr’s shoulder pressed against mine. Warm through the fabric of my shirt, the heat of a body that ran several degrees warmer than it had any right to, and the contact registered somewhere below my sternum with the specificity of coordinates being entered into a system.

The lighter clicked in my hand. Open, held, the small orange flame steady against the salon light, and I watched it for a count of three before snapping it shut.

The sound was final.

Showtime.

The study that Tony led us to smelled like old leather and expensive whiskey. Heavy curtains drawn across the windows. No view of the road, which was either paranoid or prudent depending on how long you’d been doing this, and everyone at the table had been doing it long enough that the distinction didn’t matter.

Low lighting from brass sconces on the dark-paneled walls. A table that seated eight, walnut or something close to it, polished to a soft gleam that caught the lamplight in long, patient streaks.

The door closed. Soft. Final. The kind of sound that happened when a room decided it was done with the outside world for the foreseeable future.

Every man at the table was armed. I could see two bulges under Tony’s jacket, the slight asymmetry of a man carrying on his right hip.

Luca’s piece was smaller, something Italian with clean lines, worn the way a man wears a watch he’s had for decades—without thinking about it.

Vinnie’s was expensive, probably custom, the kind of firearm that cost more than most cars and shot exactly the same bullets as everything else.

Leon stood against the wall behind my chair. Arms crossed. Still. The human equivalent of a loaded weapon with the safety engaged, which was Leon’s default state and the one I preferred him in.

Zephyr took the chair to my right. Laptop already open, fingers moving across the keyboard in the rapid bursts and pauses of a man who treated other people’s secrets as a recreational sport. Bare feet on the rung of the chair, one knee bent up, turquoise sparkles catching the low light in small defiant points of color.

The butler had brought glasses in from the salon. They sat on the table in a loose cluster, ice melting, the soft clink of crystal against wood the only sound for the first thirty seconds after the door closed.

Then Tony spoke.

“Three weeks ago. Private club in Milan. Cash for the room, no phones permitted.” His voice was flat. Efficient. The tone of a man reading from a report his people had compiled and he had probably memorized. “Alexios met with two capos from a Borelli-adjacent fringe. Old guard. Men who’ve been waiting for a reason to question the new alliance since it formed.”

I nodded once.

Luca leaned forward. His forearms on the table, hands folded, the posture of a man who had decided that what he was about to say deserved the room’s full attention.

“Sicilian contacts picked up chatter.” His voice was quiet. Measured. “A debt. Alexios called it in from a man who runs enforcement for a family that’s been looking to destabilize the conclave for two years. The timing wasn’t coincidence. The amount wasn’t small.”

Vinnie set his glass down. The crystal made a soft, precise sound against the wood, and the room turned to him the way rooms turn to men who have built empires on being the smartest person present.

“Wire transfer.” He didn’t look at notes. Didn’t need to. Vinnie Borelli treated financial intelligence the way most men treated breathing—as something that happened without apparent effort. “Routed through four shells. Terminated in an account connected to a name on Alexios’s known-associates list. Timed eleven days before the conclave.”

None of it was clean proof alone. A meeting could be business. Chatter could be noise. A wire transfer could be anything from a bribe to a birthday present, depending on how creatively you wanted to read the calendar.

Together, it was a portrait. The kind of portrait that didn’t need a frame because the edges were already clear to everyone in the room.

Zephyr fingers moved across the keyboard, rapid and precise, and the soft percussion of the keys was the only sound for approximately four minutes.

Then he turned the screen.

“Cyprus holding company.” His voice was dry. Clinical. “Shares a registered agent with two of the shells Alexios used for his embezzlement. The agent’s name appears on incorporation documents filed in Nicosia seven months ago. The timing lines up with the first withdrawal from the Romano accounts that exceeded fifty thousand.”

The room went quiet. The kind of quiet that carried weight, the silence of men processing information that had just rearranged their understanding of the board.

Zephyr wasn’t done. He tapped a key. Another. The screen shifted, numbers rearranging themselves into a pattern that made sense to him and, gradually, to everyone else in the room.

“Communications metadata.” Not content. Pattern. A cluster of encrypted messages between three numbers, timestamps running in a tight sequence across forty-eight hours. “Two of the numbers are already identified as Alexios loyalists. The third is unknown. The cluster peaks in the forty-eight hours following our video call where I shared the Romano intelligence.”

He let it sit. No editorial. No commentary. Just the numbers on the screen and the implication hanging in the air between us, patient and inevitable.

Alexios had been warned. Someone on the periphery of that call had carried the news back. The implication was clear, and it was something every man at this table understood in his bones.

I let the silence run. Counted it. One heartbeat, two, three, the rhythm of a room full of dangerous men doing math in their heads and not liking the sum.

Tony broke it. “What’s his play look like when he moves?”

I looked at him. Held his gaze across the table. The honey eyes were steady, watchful, the expression of a man who had inherited a war he never asked for and was now determined to win it on terms that made sense to him.

“Not violence on conclave grounds.” My voice was low. Flat. The tone I used for statements of fact that were not subject to discussion. “Alexios is too careful for that. Too aware of the rules. Instead, he’ll use the rules.”

I leaned forward. One elbow on the table, the lighter clicking open in my left hand, held for a count, snapped shut.

“A motion of no confidence in Romano standing. Backed by old-guard loyalists and whatever allied leverage he’s purchased. Designed to strip me of the seat before I can consolidate it.” I held Tony’s gaze. Luca’s. Vinnie’s.

One by one, the way I’d learned to do it on docks where looking away first meant you lost something you couldn’t afford to lose. “If he gets enough voices in the room to question the legitimacy of the transfer of power, he doesn’t need a gun. He just needs a vote.”

Vinnie’s mouth curved. “That’s a civilized way to do something ugly.”

“My uncle has always preferred the appearance of civilization.” The lighter clicked. Open. Held. The small orange flame steady against the dark wood of the table. “The distinction has never made him less dangerous.”

The conversation ran long. Contingency mapping. Personnel positioning. Which family heads were likely to be sympathetic to Alexios’s argument based on old blood ties, which would follow whoever looked strongest in the room when the vote was called.

Leon spoke twice. Both times with clipped precision, sharing conclusions rather than speculation, and both times the room listened the way rooms listen to men who have earned the right to be brief.

Zephyr said nothing further unless asked. His fingers moved over the keyboard in a continuous low background, the soft percussion of keys undercutting the conversation like a metronome keeping time for something none of us could hear.

Twice he slid the laptop across the table without comment. Once to Tony, once to Luca. Both times the recipient looked at the screen, absorbed whatever Zephyr had pulled, and then looked at me with an expression that had recalibrated by approximately two degrees.

I said nothing about it. Zephyr’s value lived in the gaps between what people expected and what he delivered, and explaining that value would have been like explaining gravity to men who had been walking on it their entire lives.

The soft clink of glasses. Ice melting, whiskey going warm in crystal that had probably cost more than most people’s monthly rent. The background hum of security personnel outside the door, boots on stone, the soundtrack of men standing watch in a house where standing watch was not decorative.

Leon made notes on a pad he produced from his jacket. His handwriting was block capitals, tight and precise, the kind of penmanship that suggested he had been taught by someone who believed that clarity was a moral virtue.

Zephyr sat with one knee bent up on the chair, laptop on the table, bare feet on the rung, entirely unbothered by the room full of armed men around him. His fingers moved, paused, moved again, and the casual certainty of it was either the most alarming thing about him or the only thing that made complete sense.

Probably both.

The lighter clicked in my hand. Open. Held. The small orange flame danced against the dark wood of the table, and I watched it for a count of three before snapping it shut.

The sound was final.

We had a picture. Clearer than I’d expected, built from fragments that none of us could have assembled alone.

The butler appeared at the study door like a man who had been trained to deliver bad news without changing his expression, which was exactly what he was.

He stood in the doorway with his hands folded at his waist and his posture impeccable, the kind of posture that suggested he had been standing that way for longer than most of the men in the room had been alive, and he addressed Tony with the composed deference of someone who understood hierarchy the way another man might understand oxygen.

“Mr. D’Angelo. Alexios Romano and his son have arrived at the gate. They’re being brought inside now.”

The room didn’t move. Not a muscle. Not a breath. The stillness of men who had been waiting for this moment and had discovered, in the waiting, that they were entirely ready for it.

Tony nodded once, a single downward motion of his chin, decisive. The butler withdrew. The door closed behind him with the soft, final sound of something that had been set in motion and could not be called back.

I stood. One motion. Boots on hardwood, the denim vest settling across my shoulders with the weight of something that had been there long enough to feel like skin. I straightened the vest with one pull—left hand on the lapel, a single adjustment that took approximately half a second and communicated everything I needed it to.

I looked at Tony. Then Luca. Then Vinnie. Then Leon, standing against the wall with his arms crossed and his expression blank in the way that meant he had already decided where he would be standing when the door opened and was now waiting for everyone else to catch up.

My face was entirely closed. Every decision already made, filed, implemented in the quiet spaces between heartbeats where I did my best work.

The arithmetic was clear. Alexios walking into this house meant something had changed in his plans, and changed plans from a man like my uncle meant one of two things: either he believed he had the leverage to move openly, or he was desperate enough to try anyway.

Neither option improved my afternoon.

“Showtime.”

They filed out. Not together. Not in formation. The casual arrangement of people who had not planned anything, moving through the corridor toward the great room with the easy confidence of men who treated performance as a skill rather than an affect.

I took position with my back to the window. Light poured through the glass behind me, warm and diffuse, throwing my shadow across the marble floor in a long, dark streak that ended approximately where anyone entering the room would have to stand to address me.

Zephyr moved to my shoulder. Laptop bag across his chest, the strap cutting a diagonal line from collarbone to hip, and his face had settled into something pleasant and unreadable.

His shoulder pressed against mine. Warm through the fabric, the particular heat of a body that ran several degrees warmer than it had any right to.

Tony stood near the fireplace. Luca by the bar. Vinnie was beside a tall bookshelf. Their aides positioned behind their shoulders, the human furniture that powerful men kept close as reminders that they were not alone.

Leon stood six feet to my left. Not beside me. Not behind me. Six feet, exactly, the distance that meant he could cover the door and the window in a single motion if needed, and Leon was rarely wrong.

The main entrance opened at the end of the hall. Heavy wood on iron hinges, the sound carrying through stone and old plaster with the weight of something that had been designed to announce arrivals whether the arrivals wanted announcing or not.

Two sets of footsteps. One measured, unhurried, the cadence of a man who had never needed to hurry because rooms had always waited for him. The other lighter, quicker, the rhythm of someone who had learned to move through powerful spaces without seeming to occupy them.

Alexios’s voice carried from near the door. Smooth. Warm. The ease of a man who believed he was walking into a room he already owned, deploying charm the way another man might deploy a firearm—with precision and the quiet confidence of someone who had used it enough times to know it would work.

“—appreciate the invitation. My father mentioned the D’Angelo property had been restored. He undersold it. The stonework alone is worth the drive from Florence.”

The voice rounded the corner. And there he was.

Alexios Romano. Fifty-five years old, silver-haired, impeccably groomed, the polished surface of a man who had always moved in business circles.

His suit was expensive. Well-tailored. Pocket square, cufflinks, the attention to detail that suggested he had dressed for this room specifically, which he had, because Alexios Romano did nothing without calculation and the calculation was always visible if you knew where to look.

Behind him, Theo.

Dark olive complexion. Sharp jaw. Dark brown eyes that carried the quality of careful, patient attention that read as warmth until it didn’t. Tailored clothing, expensive watch, the polished presentation of someone who had never had to work hard for anything and had developed opinions about people who had.

His eyes found the room. Moved across it once, inventorying, the look of a man reading a space he had decided belonged to him and noting the changes.

They found Zephyr.

I felt it. The fractional shift in Zephyr’s posture, the way his shoulder pressed slightly warmer against mine, the tension that happened when Zephyr’s body registered a threat before his brain had fully categorized it.

He did not look at Theo. His eyes stayed on me. Blue, steady, holding my gaze with the intensity of a man who had decided that whatever was happening in the doorway was secondary to whatever was happening between us, and the warmth behind that decision cost me something every time I felt it.

I did not look back. I was already watching the door, had been watching it since the hinges creaked, and the room full of men arranged behind me had decided, at least for today, that they were watching it with me.

Alexios’s smile was perfect. Warm. Calculated. The kind of warmth that seemed genuine without quite arriving there, because arriving there would have required admitting that he meant it, and Alexios Romano had built his life on meaning nothing that couldn’t be weaponized later.

“You didn’t mention you’d be bringing company, Ari.” His eyes moved to Zephyr. Assessed. Dismissed. The look of a man who had decided that the five-foot-five blond with bare feet and a laptop bag was beneath his attention and was now making sure everyone in the room understood that he had reached this conclusion deliberately.

“I’m not required to supply you with my itinerary.” My voice was flat. Even. The tone I used for statements that were not subject to discussion.

“Clearly.” Alexios’s smile didn’t change. Didn’t need to. The warmth stayed, steady as bedrock.

Theo’s eyes were still on Zephyr.

I could feel them without looking. The lighter clicked in my hand. Open. Held. The small orange flame danced against the diffuse light pouring through the window behind me, and I watched it for a count of three before snapping it shut.

The sound was final.

Alexios Romano believed he was walking into a room he owned. He was wrong. The room belonged to the men standing in it, and at least for today, those men had decided that standing meant something more complicated than whatever plan my uncle had brought with him.

Chapter Sixteen

~ Zephyr ~

The lighter click had landed with the weight of punctuation, and the room held its breath for exactly the count it needed to decide what came next.

I stood at Ari’s shoulder with my laptop bag cutting across my oversized T-shirt and my bare feet on marble that cost more than everything I’d owned at twenty-two. I’d refused the fancy suit.

I’d rather go naked.

I watched Alexios Romano work a room the way a surgeon works a cadaver — with precision, with detachment, and with the quiet confidence of a man who had done this enough times to know the anatomy by heart.

The silence had its own language. I’d heard silences before. This one said: we are watching you now, and the watching will continue until someone decides to speak.

That someone, predictably, was Alexios.

He moved to Tony first. Of course he did. Tony D’Angelo stood by the fireplace with his whiskey glass and his honey eyes and the stillness of a man who had inherited power he never asked for and was still learning its vocabulary.

Alexios took Tony’s hand with both of his own. Warm. Firm. The handshake of an old friend who had never been a friend and wasn’t planning to start today.

“Your father would be proud of what you’ve built here.” Alexios’s voice carried exactly the right note of warmth, the kind that sounded genuine if you weren’t paying attention to the math underneath. “Geno always said the D’Angelo property was the jewel of the coast. He undersold it. The restoration is impeccable.”

Tony’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Thanks.”

Two syllables. Tony D’Angelo treated conversation the way Ari treated obstacles — as something to be cleared rather than negotiated. I filed the exchange under “politely disinterested” and moved on.

Alexios turned to Luca next. The nod was calibrated — enough deference to acknowledge the Sabatino standing, not enough to suggest submission.

Luca returned it with a stillness that could have meant anything and meant everything if you knew how to read it, which I did, because reading rooms was what I did when I wasn’t reading spreadsheets, and spreadsheets were easier.

He avoided Vinnie, causing the man in question to chuckle.

Then he came to Ari. Last. Of course last. The nephew line landed with the dental-work smile behind it, and the word sounded like something you’d find in a dictionary under “demotion.”

“Nephew.” Alexios’s hand extended. Ari took it. The handshake lasted exactly as long as protocol required and not a millisecond more. “You look well. The Florence air agrees with you.”

“I’m fine.”

Alexios’s gaze swung to me. Quick. Dismissive. Under two seconds, the assessment of a man who had decided I was furniture with a pulse. I smiled back. Pleasant. Empty. The smile that said I see you and I have opinions about it and you would not enjoy hearing them.

His eyes moved on.

Theo’s didn’t.

I felt it in my peripheral vision like a temperature drop. Theo’s gaze settled and stayed, and the stillness at my shoulder shifted approximately two degrees toward something colder.

Ari’s posture didn’t change. His breathing didn’t change. But the air between us got denser, the way it did when something predatory entered his field of vision and his body made calculations his face wasn’t sharing.

The next twenty minutes were a masterwork of civilized menace. Tony played host with the smooth authority of a man who had decided that hospitality was a weapon and he was comfortable using it.

He circulated drinks. He asked questions that sounded casual and weren’t. He made the room feel like a place where conversation happened because he wanted it to, not because anyone had demanded it.

Luca said almost nothing. He stood by the bar with his drink and his beard and the calm of a man who had seen worse rooms than this and had developed opinions about which ones deserved his attention.

When he did speak, it was a sentence. Sometimes two. Each one landed with the weight of something that had been considered and was now being offered, and the room adjusted accordingly.

Vinnie made conversation with the easy warmth of a man who had learned that cheerful people got underestimated, and he had built an empire on being underestimated.

He talked about art. He talked about Sardinia. He talked about things that didn’t matter with the conviction of someone who understood that the things that didn’t matter were often the things that got you closest to the things that did.

Alexios worked the room like a campaign manager with a stopwatch. He pressed flesh. He dropped names. He recalibrated his pitch to each audience with the precision of someone who had studied the playbook and was now running the drills.

To Tony, he was the concerned ally. To Luca, the respectful peer. To Vinnie, the fellow businessman who understood that money was a language and they were both fluent.

The man left fingerprints everywhere. I could have taken notes. I didn’t need to. My brain did what it always did — filed, categorized, cross-referenced — and the running commentary behind my pleasant smile was approximately seventy percent professional assessment and thirty percent the kind of sarcasm that would get me killed if I said it out loud.

Ari did none of this. He stood in the room and the room rearranged itself around him. He spoke when spoken to, like a man who considered words a limited resource, and every sentence landed with the weight of something decided rather than proposed.

Alexios tried twice to draw him into a debate about Romano succession. Framed as family concern both times, the kind of concern that came wrapped in expensive paper and contained exactly nothing sincere.

“The transition has been difficult for everyone,” Alexios said, his voice carrying the calibrated warmth of a man who wanted everyone in the room to hear him being reasonable. “The family structure is still settling. There are legitimate questions about the chain of command that deserve airing before they become problems.”

Ari looked at him. “The chain is clear.”

Four words. The conversation stopped. Just stopped. Like someone had pulled a plug. Alexios opened his mouth, closed it, and moved on to a topic that didn’t require Ari’s participation.

Second try, five minutes later. More subtle this time. A question about Romano holdings in the north, framed to suggest that Ari’s understanding might be incomplete.

Ari’s answer: “They’re handled.”

Two words. Conversation over. I watched it happen with the fascination of someone witnessing a demolition performed with surgical precision. That’s it? Two sentences and he’s done?

The efficiency of it was almost obscene.

Theo made his first move during a natural shift in the room’s grouping. He angled toward me with the casual confidence of a man who believed that casualness was convincing. His smile was warm. Brotherly.

I stepped closer to Ari’s shoulder. Not much. Half an inch. The kind of movement that most people wouldn’t notice and Theo noticed immediately, because Theo had been watching for it.

I turned to Luca. “The Sicilian financial structures you mentioned earlier — the holding pattern through Malta before the Cyprus pivot. Was that a regional preference or a tax consideration?”

Luca’s eyebrows went up. The question was specific, informed, and landed in exactly the right place to anchor a conversation that Theo could not enter without revealing that he had nothing to contribute. Luca answered. Tony joined. Vinnie leaned in. The circle closed.

Theo stood outside it with his warm smile and nowhere to put his hands. I didn’t look at him. Didn’t need to. The arithmetic was clear: go stand in the corner, cousin. Adults are talking.

His second attempt came during a room shift. People moving, drinks being refreshed, the natural turbulence of a social space recalibrating. Theo angled toward me with the determined patience of a man who had decided that the first failure was circumstantial and the second would succeed on merit.

I held his eye contact. One beat. Long enough to say I see what you’re doing and it’s not working. Then I looked back at Ari.

Ari’s hand settled at the small of my back. Barely touching. More temperature than pressure. The warmth of his palm through the thin fabric of my shirt registered somewhere below my sternum with the specificity of coordinates being entered into a system.

He did not move it.

Theo stopped moving. Just stopped. His expression didn’t change. His posture didn’t change. But something in him went still in the way things go still when they recognize a boundary they hadn’t known was there.

Oh. That’s what that feels like from the receiving end.

File that permanently.

Alexios pivoted to me directly when the room had settled into its new configuration. Gracious. Condescending. The kind of gracious that cost him nothing and made sure everyone knew he was spending it anyway.

“And you must be Ari’s... assistant.” The pause was deliberate. The word “assistant” arrived with the faint edge of a man who found the concept charming in the way one finds a child’s drawing charming — appreciative of the effort, unconvinced by the execution.

“I handle information management for the Romano operation.” I kept my voice pleasant. Empty. The tone of someone reading from a script he had written himself and was reasonably certain the audience hadn’t seen.

“Information management.” Alexios repeated it like he was tasting the words to see if they had gone bad. “That must be interesting work.”

“It is.” I smiled. The smile that cost nothing and meant less. “Especially the parts where the information turns out to be about the people in the room.”

Alexios’s expression did a small, controlled recalibration. The kind of recalibration that happened when a man who had decided the chessboard was arranged in his favor discovered that someone had moved a piece he hadn’t been watching.

His smile held. Of course it held. Alexios Romano’s smile was engineered to hold through anything short of structural collapse, and even then it would probably request a moment to compose itself before acknowledging the debris.

“How fortunate that we all have nothing to hide.” He said it smoothly. The smoothness of a man who had rehearsed this line in a mirror and was reasonably certain it landed.

I didn’t answer. Didn’t need to. The silence between us carried the weight of something that had been true for longer than either of us was willing to admit, and admitting it would have required more honesty than the room was prepared to accommodate.

Ari’s hand was still at the small of my back. Warm. Steady. The warmth of a man who treated touch the way he treated everything — with the focused attention.

Alexios made his next move in the open because men like Alexios always did — they rehearsed the speech in the mirror, they timed the pauses, they selected the vocabulary with the care of someone arranging flowers for a funeral they were reasonably certain would be someone else’s.

He stepped into the center of the room with the confidence of a man who had already decided how this ended, and for approximately ninety seconds, I almost believed him.

“Gentlemen.” His voice carried. Warm. Measured. The tone of a man who thought he had earned the right to be heard. “I appreciate the invitation to speak. What I have to say comes from a place of genuine concern for the stability of our alliance, and for the Romano family in particular.”

He framed it as concern. Of course he did. Concern was the packaging that dangerous things came in when the audience required plausible deniability. Irregular circumstances of Ari’s ascension. Unresolved questions about family standing. The weight of a name that had been synonymous with stability for generations, now in the hands of a man who had never been formally acknowledged by that name until circumstance forced the issue.

Smooth. Well-constructed. Delivered with the confidence of a man who had rehearsed it in the shower, in the car, probably in his sleep. I could have taken notes on the technique. The man had talent. Wasted on a script that was about to meet its editor.

Ari let him finish. Didn’t interrupt. Didn’t shift his weight. Didn’t change his expression. He stood with his back to the window and his hands at his sides and the stillness of a man who had already made his calculations and was waiting for the room to catch up.

Then he looked at me. One look. Black eyes, steady, the kind of look that carried the weight of an instruction without requiring words. I’d seen that look before. I knew what it meant.

I opened the laptop. The screen lit blue-white against the dark wood of the nearest table where I’d set it during the room shift. My fingers moved across the keyboard — rapid, precise, the percussion of a man who had built this presentation in his head weeks ago and was now simply executing the plan.

I turned the screen to face the room.

Cyprus holding company. Shell architecture rendered in clean, annotated detail. Wire transfers, timestamps, amounts. The communications cluster — encrypted messages between three numbers, the pattern so tight it looked deliberate because it was. The conclave timeline, color-coded, each event positioned with the precision of someone who treated conspiracy as a practical problem rather than a theoretical one.

All of it clean. All of it organized. All of it sitting on a screen in a room full of men who had built empires on reading between lines, and these lines were not between anything.

They were the thing itself.

The room went quiet. The good kind of quiet. The heavy kind. The kind that carried the weight of something that had been true for a long time and had just been named out loud.

Alexios’s composure held for approximately four seconds. I counted. One, two, three, four — There it went. Not a collapse. A recalibration. The kind of recalibration that happened when a man who had built his entire strategy on the assumption that certain information would remain buried discovered that someone had brought a shovel.

Tony broke the silence. His voice was pleasant. Measured. “Alexios, would you like to respond to the documentation?”

Alexios’s smile held. Of course it held. Alexios Romano’s smile was engineered to survive nuclear winter and would probably request a moment to compose itself before acknowledging the radiation.

“The documents are fabricated.” He said it smoothly. The smoothness of a man who had prepared this response and was deploying it with the confidence of someone who believed that saying something made it true. “The timing is convenient. The sourcing is questionable. I would expect more from an intelligence operation that claims to protect this alliance.”

I didn’t let the silence stretch. Didn’t need to. The arithmetic was clear, and clear arithmetic was something I had built my entire professional life on not wasting.

“They’re not fabricated.” My voice was dry. Clinical. “I’m happy to walk through the sourcing methodology. It’ll take about twelve minutes. I’ve done it before. It goes faster when the audience isn’t actively lying.”

The silence that followed was the kind that happened when everyone in a room had reached the same conclusion and was waiting for the formalities to catch up. Tony’s expression didn’t change. Luca’s didn’t change. Vinnie’s didn’t change. But something in the air between us shifted, the way the air shifts before a storm when the pressure finally drops and everyone knows what’s coming.

Ari spoke. Brief. Addressed to the assembled family heads and not to Alexios. A statement of fact rather than a defense.

“The Romano family is present. The Romano family has delivered intelligence that protects every family in this room. The Romano family is done being discussed in the third person by men who bet against it.”

Thirty-five words. I counted. Thirty-five words delivered in the flat tone of a man who treated speech as a utility rather than a performance, and every one of them landed with the weight of something that had been decided long before anyone in this room had arrived.

Alexios, losing ground in real time, made his last play. He reached for the only lever he had left, and the lever was exactly what I would have reached for if I were him and desperate, which meant it was predictable, which meant it was already handled.

He invoked Ari’s illegitimacy. His outsider status. The question of whether a man raised on the docks with no family formation had the judgment to lead a crime family that had been built on bloodlines and tradition for generations.

The room absorbed it. The room had heard this argument before, in different rooms, from different men, and the room had developed opinions about it that were not favorable to the man currently making it.

Tony D’Angelo, who had been raised as an illegitimate secret and was now the most powerful man present, said mildly that he found the argument unconvincing. Two words. “Unconvincing” and “mildly” did a lot of work in that sentence, and the work they did was the kind that left marks.

Luca said nothing. From Luca, nothing meant he agreed with Tony, and everyone in the room who mattered knew it.

Vinnie leaned forward. His silver-streaked hair caught the light from the window, and his expression was the blend of curiosity and genuine interest that made Vinnie Borelli dangerous in ways that most people never saw coming.

“The Romano family’s intelligence work speaks for itself.” He gestured toward the laptop. “Though I am curious about the Cyprus connection. My people missed it. Where did you find it?”

“I’ll send the methodology.” I closed the laptop with a soft click that sounded final. “It’s clean. You’ll like it. Or you’ll pretend to like it and then use it, which is functionally the same thing from my perspective.”

Vinnie’s mouth curved. “Great.”

The conversation had moved on. Just like that. One topic to the next, the way conversations do when the people having them have decided that the previous subject was settled and the new one was more interesting.

Alexios was still standing in it. His smile was still holding. His posture was still perfect. But something in him had gone quiet in the way things go quiet when they recognize that the room has rearranged itself around a center that is no longer them.

Theo stood at the edges. Quiet. Patient.

Ari stood in the center of it with the stillness of a man who had already won. His hand was at the small of my back again. Warm. Steady. The warmth of a man who treated possession as a fact rather than a performance, and the fact of it registered somewhere below my sternum with the warmth of something I had decided I wanted.

I reached into my laptop bag. Found a caramel. Gold foil, slightly crumpled, the crumple of something that had been handled by fingers moving too fast to bother with neatness. I unwrapped it slowly. The crinkle of foil carried in the quiet room.

Vinnie noticed. Of course he noticed. Vinnie Borelli noticed everything, filed it, and decided whether to care about it approximately three seconds faster than most people could form the thought.

“You always carry those?” His tone was curious. Genuine. The curiosity of a man who treated human behavior as data and was collecting a point.

“Yes.” I popped the caramel into my mouth. Sweet. Salty. The taste of a series of catastrophic decisions and committing to every one of them. “They’re a professional requirement. The sugar-to-intelligence conversion ratio is well documented in literature that I made up five minutes ago, but stand by completely.”

Vinnie’s smile widened. “My Nicky would like you.”

“Everyone eventually does.” I said it evenly. The evenness of a man who had decided that stating facts was more efficient than performing modesty, and efficiency was a virtue I had strong opinions about.

Ari, beside me, made a sound. Low. Rough. Not quite a laugh — something adjacent to it.

I tried not to smile. I failed by about the same margin I always failed — which was completely, irrevocably, with the enthusiasm of something that had been waiting for this input and was now compiling a very detailed report.

The room settled into its new configuration. Alexios contained. Theo quiet. Ari standing in the center of it with the stillness of a man who had already won, and beside him, me.

Tomorrow would come. The conclave would happen. A room full of men would watch Ari stand where Geno had stood, and some of them would bet against him, and some of them would lose that bet in ways they would not enjoy.

I couldn’t wait.

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.

I shoved them both toward it. Nico first, then Nicky, my hands on their shoulders with more force than courtesy, and the door swung open on hinges that sounded like they’d been oiled by someone who took hinges seriously.

“Stay here. Do not come out. Do not make noise.” My voice came out flat. Even. The tone I used when the part of my brain that made jokes had temporarily shut down and the part that kept people alive was running the show.

I reached into my laptop bag and pulled my switchblade out. I clicked it open with a sound that was satisfying in a way that had nothing to do with the current circumstances and everything to do with the fact that good engineering was good engineering, crisis or no crisis.

I handed Nicky my bag. The strap was warm from my body, the weight familiar in a way that breathing was familiar. “Guard this with your life.”

Nicky looked at the bag. Looked at the switchblade in my hand. Looked at me with an expression that contained several questions he did not have time to ask.

“The switchblade is mine, the bag is yours.” I met his eyes. Held them. “Don’t mix those up.”

I pulled the door shut. The latch caught with a soft, final sound.

I went.

The corridor smelled like smoke and something sharper underneath — the particular tang of things that were not supposed to be burning, burning anyway. I moved fast. Bare feet on marble, switchblade in my right hand, the blade catching what little light made it through the haze.

I was looking for Ari in an actively exploding building.

Where was the enormous man? He should be easy to find. He was enormous. Six-foot-three of scarred dock worker with a denim vest and the gravitational pull of a small planet.

How hard could it be?

The answer, as it turned out, was moderately hard, because the D’Angelo estate was approximately the size of a small airport and currently resembled one that had made several poor decisions about its landing approach.

Something creaked overhead. I did not look up. Looking up was for people who had time to worry about ceilings, and I did not have time. I had a switchblade, bare feet, and a cardiovascular system that was doing overtime.

I rounded a corner and found Luca Sabatino standing in a patch of relatively clear air with his back to the wall and his expression doing something complicated.

The man looked like he was holding the outer edge of his composure by force of will. His beard was dusted with something pale — plaster, probably — and his eyes were the shade of focused that happened when the person you loved was somewhere in a building that was coming apart and you were calculating how many walls stood between you and them.

I did not waste time on greetings. Greetings were decorative. Information was functional.

“Nico and Nicky are in the closet off the east corridor. Third door. Solid oak. They are fine.” I delivered it fast and precise, the way I delivered everything when the part of my brain that made jokes had temporarily shut down. “East corridor, third door, solid oak, they are fine. Repeat it.”

Luca’s expression did something I did not have a category for. Something moved behind his eyes — relief, calculation, the specific warmth of a man who had just been handed coordinates for something he needed — and then he was gone.

Not running. Moving with the controlled speed of a man who had somewhere to be and had decided that getting there alive was more important than getting there quickly. His footsteps faded down the corridor, boots on marble, and I stood in the haze and thought: good. One problem solved.

I kept moving.

The second explosion hit while I was halfway down the next corridor. The windows rattled. The floor shook. Something in the ceiling made a sound that suggested it had reached a conclusion about its structural integrity and the conclusion was not favorable.

I rounded the corner at a pace that would have qualified as jogging if I’d been wearing shoes, which I was not, because apparently my professional risk assessment had included “pastries on terrace” but not “barefoot evacuation of exploding mafia estate,” and I was going to have a very pointed conversation with my past self about prioritization.

The hand came out of nowhere.

One second the corridor was empty, the next a hand shot out of a doorway to my left and hauled me inside with enough force to knock the air from my lungs in a single, decisive exhalation. My back hit the wall hard enough to register in my spine. A palm flattened over my mouth before I could make a sound.

My hand tightened on the switchblade. The grip was familiar — worn handle, something I had carried for longer than I cared to admit.

If this is Ari I am going to be furious about my heart rate.

It was not Ari.

Theo Romano crowded me against the plaster. Expensive cologne — something woody and overspent — and bright eyes that carried the quality of careful, patient attention that read as warmth until you were close enough to see what lived underneath.

A man who had decided chaos was an opportunity.

His breath was warm against my face. His palm pressed hard over my mouth, fingers digging into my cheek.

“Hello, Zephyr.” His voice was low. Deliberate. “I’ve been waiting for a moment alone with you. And look, the universe provides.”

I went very quiet. Very cold. The kind of cold that lived in the neighborhood of something primal and had been there longer than I was willing to admit.

Theo’s free hand found my hip. His thumb traced a small circle through the fabric of my shirt, and the gesture was so deliberate, so specific, that my skin registered it as a threat.

“I’ve watched you.” His mouth was close to my ear. His voice dropped lower, each line worse than the last, a detailed inventory of what he wanted to do to me delivered with the calm of someone who had been thinking about it for a very long time. “Every time you stand next to him. Every time you touch him. I’ve thought about what those hands would feel like on me instead. What you would sound like. What you would do if I —”

I could feel his arousal pressed against me. Hard. Deliberate. The pressure of a man who had decided that proximity was consent and consent was a formality he could dispense with.

My free hand worked at the palm over my mouth. Fingernails finding purchase against his skin, buying fractions of an inch. Not enough. Not nearly enough.

My other hand was locked around the switchblade with the grip of someone who had used it before and had no philosophical objections to using it again. The blade was open. Warm from my hand. Waiting.

Theo tightened his hold. His fingers dug harder into my cheek. His hips pressed forward. His breath came faster against my ear, and the sound of it was the sound of a man who had decided that this was happening.

I stopped trying to peel his hand away.

I drove the blade into his thigh with everything I had instead.

The sound he made was gratifying. A scream, high and ragged, the noise of a man who had not seen that coming and was now revising several previously held assumptions about how his afternoon would proceed.

His hand left my mouth. His body folded. He hit the floor hard, one hand clutching his leg, blood already darkening the fabric of his tailored trousers with the efficient spread of something that had found a path and was taking it.

I stepped back. Assessed the angle. The blade had gone in clean — deep enough to matter, not deep enough to hit anything arterial. I was not trying to kill him today. Today was about communication, and the communication had been received with what I considered appropriate volume.

Theo was making sounds on the floor. Wet, ragged sounds. His hand pressed to the wound, blood seeping between his fingers, and his eyes found mine with the hatred of a man who had just discovered that the person he considered prey had teeth.

I looked at him for one beat, two. I considered wrapping the wound. I genuinely did not want to. I finally concluded that Theo had hands and at least one of them still worked, and first aid was a courtesy I was not inclined to extend.

I kicked him in the face.

Not hard. Precise. The movement of someone who had learned to fight in streets without rules and had developed opinions about which parts of the human face responded most effectively to applied force.

My bare foot connected with his jaw — a short, sharp impact — and Theo’s head snapped back against the floor with a sound that suggested several things had been rearranged and not all of them would be returning to their original configuration.

He went still.

I stood over him for a moment. His breathing was ragged. Blood on his lip. Blood on his thigh. The switchblade was still in my hand, warm and wet, and I wiped it clean on the leg of his trousers because his trousers had probably cost more than my monthly rent and I considered this a form of taxation.

I stepped over him and pout of the room. I turned and closed the door, then turned back.

Directly into Ari’s chest.

Ari’s hands were on my arms before my brain had fully registered that the chest I’d walked into was his chest, which said something about my situational awareness that I was not going to examine too closely because examining things required coherence and coherence was several exits behind me.

His black eyes moved across my face. Fast. Precise. The inventory of a man who was running a damage assessment and did not like the initial findings. His hands checked my arms, my shoulders, my face — thumb brushing my cheek where Theo’s palm had been, fingers tracing the line of my jaw with the specific attention of someone cataloguing bruises that hadn’t formed yet.

“I’m fine,” I said. My voice came out steadier than it had any right to.

“You’re bleeding.”

I looked at my hand. A thin line across the knuckles — Theo’s fingernails, probably, a mark I hadn’t noticed in the adrenaline haze of stabbing a man and then kicking him in the face, which was a sequence of events that had not been on my afternoon agenda and was now retroactively occupying several slots.

“It’s not my blood.” I met his eyes. Held them. The corridor around us was smoke and broken plaster and the distant sound of something structural having a very bad day.

None of that mattered because Ari was looking at me like I was something that had been threatened and he was now recalculating several previously held assumptions about the appropriate response.

Ari went very still. The stillness that happened when the temperature dropped and the air got thin and the man standing in front of you had just decided that someone was going to have a very expensive conversation with gravity.

I delivered the full briefing without pausing. “Theo is in the room behind me. Alive. Switchblade wound in the thigh, approximately two inches deep, not arterial. He also has a foot-shaped opinion on his face that I delivered personally and stand by completely. We should probably leave before the next explosion because I have had enough of those today and my tolerance for architectural rearrangement is currently operating at capacity.”

Ari looked at the closed door. His jaw did the thing. The specific thing where the muscle tightened along the line of his jaw and his eyes went flat and dark and the temperature in the immediate vicinity dropped by approximately three degrees.

I grabbed his sleeve and pulled.

He let himself be pulled.

I filed this under significant data. Aristoteles Romano, a man who treated personal space as something he occupied by right rather than request, allowed himself to be steered down a smoke-hazed corridor by a five-foot-five blond with a switchblade and bare feet.

We moved at speed. Ari’s hand shifted from my sleeve to the back of my neck — warm, firm, the specific pressure of someone who had decided that steering was more efficient than following — and guided me around a section of ceiling that had made a poor decision about its relationship with gravity.

The plaster was dust on the marble. The air was thick. Somewhere ahead, voices — shouting, the sound of men who were having a very bad day and were now implementing contingency plans they had hoped would remain theoretical.

We reached the opening to the salon. The double doors were half-ajar, light spilling through the gap in long amber streaks across the ruined marble of the corridor.

Alexios Romano stepped into the doorway with a gun in his hand and the expression of a man who had been rehearsing this moment in front of a mirror for longer than was medically advisable.

Ari moved in front of me without a word.

One step. His body between mine and the gun. His shoulders filled the corridor. The denim vest caught the low light, the silver chain at his throat gleaming dully against the dark fabric of his shirt.

Alexios talked. And he was good at it — I’ll give him that. He clearly believed his own argument, had built a narrative about his own righteousness, and was now delivering it with the conviction of someone who had stopped checking whether the narrative matched the facts.

Illegitimate. A dock worker. A mistake dressed up in a title. The Romano family deserved better. He had always been the logical choice. The bloodline choice. The choice that made sense to men who understood what family meant.

And Ari had ruined it. Ruined a perfectly good non-violent plan by being impossible to remove quietly, so now people had to die, which was apparently Ari’s fault, the way everything was apparently Ari’s fault in the story Alexios had been telling himself.

I clocked the word “non-violent” against the gun currently in Alexios’s hand and did not point this out because this did not seem like the moment for semantic precision, and also because pointing things out to armed men was a habit I had mostly broken by age nineteen and saw no reason to revisit.

Alexios pointed the gun directly at Ari. “You need to die!”

Ari said, quietly, “You first.”

The knife left his hand so fast I almost missed it. A blur of silver, the arc of something that had been thrown by a man who had thrown knives for longer than he had done anything else, and then the sound — wet, thick, the sound of metal finding the place it was aimed at.

I did not miss the sound.

The second knife followed before Alexios had finished falling. Before his body had fully registered the first impact, before the gun had fully left his hand, the second blade buried itself beside the first with the precision of someone completing a task he had started.

Alexios went down. The gun hit the floor with a clatter that carried in the quiet salon. His body made a sound — not a scream, something smaller, the sound of a man discovering that the story he had been telling himself had a different ending than the one he’d written.

Ari crossed the room. Three strides. Boots on marble. He picked up the gun, checked the chamber, and tucked it into his waistband.

Then he crouched. Pulled the first knife free with one smooth motion. Wiped the blade clean on Alexios’s jacket — the jacket that cost more than most people’s monthly rent, now serving as a rag for blood that belonged to the man wearing it. The second followed. Same motion. Unhurried. Efficient.

He spoke while he worked. Not to the room. To Alexios specifically, in the quiet tone he used for things that had already been decided.

“We knew about the plan a month ago. The allied families knew a week ago, when I briefed them. Everyone in that room was waiting for you to make your move so they could be in position when you did.” His voice was low. Even. The cadence of a man reading a weather report for a storm that had already passed. “The Romano title was never going to be yours. Your problem — the one you’ve always had — is that you overestimate yourself and underestimate everyone else. That is a very expensive habit.”

Alexios’s eyes closed. His breathing was shallow. The blood on his jacket was dark and spreading, and the room around us was smoke and broken glass and the distant sound of something else coming apart, and none of it mattered because the thing that had been building for months had just reached its conclusion and the conclusion had been written in knives rather than words.

Ari stood. Turned. Crossed back to me in three strides.

He pulled me in with both arms.

One hand pressed to the back of my head, holding me against his chest with the grip of a man who had been thinking about this for the last ten minutes and was not being subtle about it.

His heart beat against my ear — steady, slower than mine, the rhythm of someone whose cardiovascular system had not received the memo that the building was exploding.

A beat. Two. His chest rose and fell under my cheek. The cedar-and-coffee scent of him cut through the smoke like something that belonged there.

“Why aren’t you in the safe room?”

“Couldn’t find it.” Muffled against his chest. The fabric of his shirt was warm from his skin. I could feel the scars through the thin cotton, topography I had memorized without intending to.

“What am I going to do with you?”

I tipped my chin up and looked at him. Those black eyes were warm. Giving away everything — all the heat, all the focus, all the things he had been keeping behind his walls of stone.

“I have a few ideas.”

His arms did not loosen. If anything, they tightened like he had decided that the distance between us was unacceptable and was now correcting it.

I reached into my pocket. One caramel. Gold foil, slightly crushed from the events of the last twenty minutes, the crumple of something that had been handled by fingers moving too fast to bother with neatness.

I unwrapped it. The foil crinkled, loud in the quiet corridor. I broke the caramel in half — not clean, messy, the kind of break that suggested sugar was not something that responded well to precision — and offered Ari half.

He took it. His fingers brushed mine. Warm. Callused. The roughness of hands that had worked docks for longer than most people had been doing anything.

Somewhere in the building, something else exploded. The sound carried through stone and old plaster, a bass note that started in the floor and worked its way upward.

Neither of us moved.

Chapter Eighteen

~ Aristoteles ~

Three weeks after the conclave, the terraced grounds of the Romano estate outside Livorno smelled like turned earth and rosemary.

I walked the upper path with my hands in my pockets. The soil to my right had been freshly tilled, dark and damp, the kind of soil that had been sleeping for years and was now being asked to wake up.

A gardener I’d hired last month worked the far bed with a shovel and the patient rhythm of a man who treated dirt as something that deserved conversation.

He nodded as I passed. I nodded back. The exchange took approximately half a second and contained no words, which was how I preferred most exchanges.

The lighter sat in my palm. Unclicked. Just metal, warm from my skin.

The security office sat where the old wine cellar had been. Leon had suggested it, I’d approved it, and the conversion had taken ten days. Now the room hummed with the low electronic purr of camera feeds cycling across four monitors.

A man I’d brought from the docks sat at the central desk, logging timestamps in block capitals the way Leon had taught him. His handwriting was terrible. His attention was not.

I watched him work for a count of three. His eyes moved from screen to log to screen. He didn’t look up. Didn’t need to. He’d heard my boots on the stone and had already filed the information under “boss, present, not requiring acknowledgment.”

Good man.

Zephyr’s workspace occupied the corner room on the ground floor that had once been a library and was now something that defied traditional categorization.

Three wall-mounted monitors dominated the far wall, each displaying something different — code on the left, financial architecture in the center, what looked like a chess game against an AI on the right, though I’d stopped asking about the specifics ages ago.

The rig beneath them was black and loud, fans running at a pitch that suggested the machine was either working very hard or complaining about it. A bookshelf to the left held reference tomes with spines so cracked they looked like they’d been read by someone who treated books as instruments rather than decorations.

The cushioned window seat was new. I’d had it installed two weeks ago, after watching Zephyr fold himself into the alcove with his laptop balanced on his knees and his back pressed against cold stone for the third night in a row. The cushion was blue. The exact shade of blue of the Aegean.

He wasn’t there. The room carried his absence the way certain rooms carry the ghost of whoever designed them — in the arrangement of the caramels on the desk (gold foil, aligned in a row that was almost, but not quite straight), in the charging cable coiled with the specific neatness of someone who treated cables as problems to be solved, in the pair of sunglasses hanging from the edge of the center monitor like they’d been placed there five minutes ago and their owner would be back any second.

I stood in the doorway and did not go in.

The men I’d brought from the docks moved through the villa with the quiet precision of people who had been selected for loyalty rather than blood. They carried tools. They carried firearms in holsters that didn’t print. They carried themselves like men who had learned that standing your ground was a skill rather than a temperament.

I’d chosen each of them. Not from Geno’s roster. From the periphery — men who had worked the same shifts I had, who had bled on the same concrete, who understood that the only currency that mattered was the kind you couldn’t fake.

They nodded as they passed. I nodded back. The exchange contained no words and all of the information either of us needed.

Alexios and his conspirators were dead. The knife work had been clean — mine on Alexios, Leon’s on the two capos who had been running the Cyprus shell with him. Their assets had been confiscated, traced, and wired to Tony D’Angelo within seventy-two hours of the conclave. The transfer amount had been large enough that Tony’s lawyer had called to confirm it twice.

I’d told him to use it for the villa repairs. He’d said thank you. The exchange had taken eight words total, which was approximately seven more than I’d intended to spend.

The heads of D’Angelo, Borelli, and Sabatino were drafting a peace treaty. Luca had sent a draft. Vinnie had annotated it in red ink that covered approximately sixty percent of the available margin. Tony had called to ask if I wanted input. I’d told him to send the final version. He’d understood.

The phone logs on my desk showed Zephyr’s calls. Daily. Hour-long. Nico Sabatino first, then Nicky Borelli, then a rotating cast of New York numbers that Nicky had apparently introduced him to.

The call durations were increasing. The timestamps were spreading — early morning, late evening, the rhythm of someone who had decided that belonging to something larger than himself was not a threat, but an experiment he was willing to run.

I’d looked at the logs once. Filed them. Said nothing.

The smirk had arrived without permission. Faint. Specific. The expression of a man watching something unfold that he had not engineered and was now discovering he enjoyed anyway.

Zephyr had friends. Actual friends. People who called him to talk about things that had nothing to do with financial architecture or switchblade deployment or the specific physics of being pinned against a wall by a man who weighed two hundred and twenty-five pounds.

The possessive edge arrived with the smirk. Warm. Uncomfortable. The kind of feeling that lived below the sternum and made no effort to explain itself.

I refused to analyze it.

I closed the lighter. The snap was soft. Final. The kind of sound that happened when a man decided that the thing he had been carrying was worth carrying, and the carrying was no longer a question.

The rot Geno left behind had been severed. Cut clean at the root, the way you cut something that’s been poisoning the soil for decades. The core organization beneath it — the men, the structure, the weight of a name that had been synonymous with violence for longer than I’d been alive — had proved worth preserving.

Not because it was noble. Not because it was pure. Because it was mine now, and I had decided that mine was worth keeping.

I turned from the doorway. The late afternoon light fell across the terraced grounds in long amber streaks, catching the turned earth and the rosemary and the distant line of cypress that marked the property’s edge.

Something in the air smelled like settling. Not peace. Not quite. The quieter, more durable thing that lived in the neighborhood of peace without quite arriving there — the thing that happened when the fighting stopped and the work began.

I could work with that.

I’d have to.

* * * *

Bianca Romano arrived at the villa in a black car that cost more than most houses. The driver held the door. She stepped out with the composed elegance of a woman who had been practicing of composure for longer than I had been alive.

Dark hair in polished waves. Sharp dark eyes that missed nothing. The jewelry was significant — gold, diamonds, heirloom pieces from her Greek family worn as quiet declarations of status the way some men wore firearms.

Her posture was impeccable. She moved through the courtyard as though the estate belonged to her and she was tolerating its current occupancy as a temporary inconvenience.

I watched from the security office monitor. The feed was clean, high-definition, the kind of clarity that made every detail legible — the slight tension in her shoulders, the way her fingers tightened around her purse when she passed the place where the old guard had once stood, the fractional pause before she entered the formal salon where Tony D’Angelo’s lawyer waited.

I did not go in. Some conversations were better handled by someone else, and this one had my fingerprints all over it without requiring my voice.

The formal salon had been prepared. Windows open, light pouring across the pale stone floor in long warm streaks. A table had been set with water, pens, a folder of documents color-coded in a system that Zephyr had designed and that I had approved because it was efficient and because Zephyr had looked at me with that expression that suggested the color-coding was non-negotiable.

Tony’s lawyer was a compact woman with gray hair and the calm of someone who had been delivering bad news to powerful people for decades. She stood when Bianca entered. Offered water. Bianca declined with a gesture so slight it barely qualified as movement.

The terms were laid out in a flat, professional cadence.

Cyprus shell companies. The architecture, rendered in color-coded detail that made the flow of money as legible as handwriting. Alexios’s signature on incorporation documents. The timing — seven months of systematic withdrawal, timed against conclave preparation, the kind of pattern that looked deliberate because it was.

Three copies. One for D’Angelo. One for Borelli. One for Sabatino. Each family head held documentation that would not stay buried if certain conditions were not met.

The choice was clean because clean choices were the only kind worth offering. Permanent, silent withdrawal from all Romano affairs. Bianca’s personal assets intact — the Greek family money, the jewelry, the social contacts that were hers by right rather than marriage.

Theo’s quarterly dividends severed. Complete. Immediate. No grandfather clause, no gradual transition, no performance of dignity that would allow either of them to save face in rooms where face was currency.

Or the documentation went public. Not to law enforcement — to families. The old-guard networks, the social circles, the people who moved in the same rooms Bianca had spent decades cultivating and who would not be quiet about what they learned.

Reputation was her currency.

The documentation was designed to spend it.

Bianca listened. Her expression did not change. Not a muscle. Not a breath. The composed elegance held through every syllable, the way a well-built wall holds through weather it was designed to withstand.

She reached for the pen. Signed. Three copies, three signatures, each one delivered with the steady hand of a woman who had decided that losing with dignity was preferable to fighting a battle she had already lost.

The pen made a soft sound against the paper. The kind of sound that happened when something significant concluded without ceremony.

Bianca gathered her purse. Adjusted a diamond bracelet on her wrist with the casual attention of someone checking a watch. Her eyes moved across the room once — inventorying, the way she had always inventoried rooms, filing details about people and places she considered beneath her and would never admit she had noticed.

“Athens,” she said. Not to the lawyer. To the room, or to no one, or to the version of herself that needed to hear it spoken aloud to believe it was real. “I’ll be in Athens.”

She was preserving what remained. Grieving a husband she had tolerated rather than loved, in the way women of her station tolerated rather than loved the men who provided the structure their lives required.

Alexios had been that structure. Now the structure was gone, and Bianca Romano was doing what women like her had always done — adapting, recalculating, finding the next configuration that would allow her to maintain the appearance of control.

The offer had been mine. Not stated, not signed, not delivered in a room where either of us would have to acknowledge it. Handled through D’Angelo’s legal channel because channels were what they were for — to create distance between the decision and the person making it, so that the decision could stand on its own without the weight of history attached.

I had allowed her to walk away clean. Personal assets intact. No violence, no humiliation beyond what the documentation itself contained, no public reckoning that would have satisfied the part of me that remembered every dismissive glance, every clipped reference, every time the word “nephew” had landed in a room like a demotion.

She did not deserve it. I had given it anyway. Not because I was generous. Because generosity was cheaper than the alternative, and I had already spent enough on Alexios to last a lifetime.

The car departed. Black against the pale gravel, moving down the drive with the unhurried pace of something that had somewhere to be and was not in a hurry to get there.

I watched it until the cypress swallowed the taillights, and then I watched the empty drive for a count of three because three was the number I used when I needed to be certain something was finished.

The lighter clicked in my hand. Open. Held. The small orange flame steady against the dim monitor glow.

I snapped it shut.

* * * *

Leon’s men picked Theo up on a Tuesday morning in Florence. Unremarkable sedan. No markings. The kind of car that belonged to nobody and everybody, the automotive equivalent of a man who had decided that being invisible was more useful than being impressive.

They brought him in through the service entrance. Gravel under tires, the sound carrying in the morning quiet, and then boots on stone as two of Leon’s dock-raised men walked him toward the security office with the casual efficiency of people delivering a package they had been told to handle with care.

Theo walked with a limp. The kind of limp that suggested he was trying not to limp and failing. The dark line on his thigh — visible through the thin fabric of his trousers when he shifted his weight — was clean and precise.

I’d seen the scar once already, in the security footage from the D’Angelo estate corridor. Zephyr’s switchblade, driven in with everything he had. The angle had been good. The depth had been better. Theo had bled enough to matter and not enough to die, which was the arithmetic Zephyr had been running whether he’d admit it or not.

The security office smelled like coffee and gun oil. Steel-framed desk. Surveillance screens cycling camera feeds along the north wall. No family portraits. No ornate furnishings. No anything that suggested the room belonged to a man who cared what visitors thought of his taste.

I’d chosen it deliberately. Some conversations happened better in rooms that had no history, and this one had enough history to sink a ship without adding decoration to the weight.

Theo sat in the chair across from the desk. His hands rested on his knees. His dark olive complexion had taken on a gray cast that suggested he had not been sleeping well, or eating well, or doing any of the things that kept a man’s color where it belonged.

His jaw was sharp. His eyes carried the quality of careful, patient attention that read as warmth until you were close enough to see what lived underneath, and right now what lived underneath was fear, plain and undisguised, the kind of fear that made no effort to hide because hiding required energy he no longer had.

I did not offer water. Did not offer courtesy. Did not offer anything except the terms, delivered in the flat, factual voice I used for statements that were not subject to discussion.

“Romano dividends are finished. Effective immediately.” I leaned forward. One elbow on the desk. The lighter sat beside my hand, metal cool against the steel. “Your access to every asset, every account, every property, every contact is revoked. Complete. Permanent. The architecture supporting your mother’s allowance remains intact. Yours does not.”

Theo’s breath caught. One small, involuntary sound, the noise of a man who had been expecting something bad and had just discovered that the something was worse.

“You walk away clean.” My voice did not change. Did not need to. The weight of the sentence lived in its certainty, not its volume. “Alive. Hands intact. Face intact. Free to start over anywhere but Italy. Anywhere. Choose a city. Choose a country. Choose a life that has nothing to do with the name you carry.”

I let it sit. Counted it. One heartbeat, two, the rhythm of a room where silence did more work than speech ever could.

“Permanent.” One word. Final. The kind of word that closed conversations rather than opened them.

Theo went pale. The gray cast deepened, something shifting behind his eyes — calculation, recalibration, the specific look of a man who had built his entire understanding of the world on a foundation that had just been declared structurally unsound.

He nodded once. A single downward motion of his chin, decisive, the nod of a man who had heard the terms and understood that negotiation was not an option on the menu.

“Thank you.” His voice was quiet. Rough.

I did not acknowledge the thanks. Acknowledgement would have suggested that I had done him a favor, and I had not done him a favor.

I had made a calculation about the cost of killing him versus the cost of letting him live, and the arithmetic had come out in favor of letting him live because dead men attracted attention and attention was something I could no longer afford.

Leon appeared in the doorway. Arms crossed. Expression blank. The human equivalent of an exit sign with the added feature of being armed.

Theo stood. The movement cost him — his weight shifted to the good leg, the bad one bearing minimal pressure, and the wince was small and controlled and told me everything I needed to know about how thoroughly Zephyr’s switchblade had made its point.

Leon escorted him out. Boots on stone, the sound fading down the corridor, and I did not watch them go. My eyes stayed on the desk. On the lighter. On the surveillance feed where the unremarkable sedan waited at the service entrance, engine running, driver behind the wheel with the patience of a man who had been told to wait.

The office was quiet. The screens hummed. Somewhere in the villa, a door closed with the soft, final sound of something that had been set in motion and could not be called back.

I picked up the lighter. Clicked it open. Held the flame, orange against the gray morning light filtering through the security office window, and watched it dance for a count of three before snapping it shut.

* * * *

Two days after Theo left Italy, I sat at the desk in the study with the leather-bound ledger open and a pen in my hand. The numbers were clean. The columns were aligned.

The secure line rang. A soft electronic pulse, the sound the phone made when the call was coming from somewhere that had been vetted and cleared and deemed worth the bandwidth.

I picked up on the second ring. Did not speak. Speaking first was decorative, and decoration was for men who needed to announce themselves.

Tony D’Angelo’s voice came through the line. Clear. Even. The tone of a man who had rehearsed what he was about to say and had decided, privately, that rehearsal was worth the calories.

“Ari.” No preamble. No small talk. Tony treated conversation the way I treated obstacles — as something to be cleared rather than negotiated. “The intelligence you delivered at the conclave prevented three operational losses. Borelli’s shipping route through Malta. Sabatino’s northern holding. One of mine that I’m not detailing on this line. The architecture was clean. The timing was better. You saved men who didn’t know they needed saving, and that’s the kind of work that doesn’t get thanked often enough.”

I said nothing. The silence stretched. Tony was comfortable with silence. He had learned, somewhere in the months since inheriting a family he never asked for, that silence was often the most honest response a room could offer.

“Next conclave.” His voice shifted. The kind of shift that suggested he was moving from acknowledgment to invitation, and the invitation was the part he had rehearsed. “Full participant. Not attendance. Not observation. Full. Your seat at the table. Your voice in the room. The allied families are drafting the language now. It’ll be formal by week’s end.”

I held the phone. The weight of it was familiar in my hand, plastic and metal and the faint warmth of a connection that spanned several hundred miles of Italian coastline.

“I will be there.” Four words. Delivered in the flat register I used for statements of fact that were not subject to discussion.

The line went quiet. For a beat, two, the kind of silence that carried the weight of something that had been true for a long time and had just been named out loud.

“Good.” Tony’s voice was warm. The warmth of a man who had made a decision and was comfortable with its consequences. “Bring Zephyr.”

The call ended. The soft electronic sigh of a connection severing, and then the study was quiet again — old wood, warm air, the hush of a room that had been standing for centuries and had opinions about the people who passed through it.

I set the phone down. Did not move. Did not reach for the pen. Did not do anything except sit in the chair and let the weight of what had just happened settle into the places it needed to go.

Full participant. Not the sanction. Not the reparations. Not the provisional status that had been Geno’s legacy and my inheritance. A seat. A voice. The thing that Alexios had spent months plotting to take and had died trying to reach.

The lighter sat on the desk beside the ledger. I leaned forward. Pulled the ledger closer. The numbers waited, patient and inevitable, the kind of arithmetic that did not care whether the man reading it had a seat at the table or a knife in his boot.

My pen found the next line. The ink flowed dark against the pale paper, the specific black of something being written by a hand that had learned its consistency through years of work that nobody had thanked it for.

I worked. The study around me held its quiet. Somewhere in the villa, a door closed. Somewhere beyond the windows, the terraced grounds stretched toward the cypress line, the turned earth dark and damp under the afternoon light.

The devil, I had learned a long time ago, lived in the details. In the numbers. In the quiet spaces between decisions where the work actually happened, away from the performance of power and closer to the substance of it.

Geno had never understood that. Alexios had understood it and weaponized it. I had simply done the work, because the work was what remained when everything else had been stripped away.

And now the work had a seat. Had a voice. Had a place in a room where the men sitting at the table had looked at what I built and decided it was worth keeping.

* * * *

My mother Althea arrived at the villa on a Thursday afternoon in a car Leon had arranged. Black. Unmarked. The kind of car that suggested its passenger was someone worth driving carefully rather than someone worth announcing.

She stepped out with the steady bearing of a woman who had never had the luxury of falling apart and had developed opinions about people who did.

Her dark eyes moved across the courtyard once — inventorying, the way she had always inventoried rooms, filing details about the places her son occupied.

I stood at the top of the steps. Did not go down to meet her. Some greetings happened better at eye level, and eye level was what the steps provided.

She climbed them slowly. One hand on the wrought-iron banister, the other holding her purse with the grip of someone who treated possessions as extensions of herself rather than decorations.

Her work-worn fingers traced the metal as she climbed, feeling the cool of it against her skin, and something in the gesture told me she was reading the estate the way another woman might read a book — through touch, through attention, through the quiet accumulation of detail that most people missed.

I walked beside her in silence. Through the entrance hall with its limestone walls and vaulted ceiling. Up the staircase where the banister had been polished to a soft patina that caught the afternoon light. Across the terraced gardens where the lavender and rosemary were reclaiming soil that had been neglected for longer than either of us wanted to admit.

She did not ask questions. Did not need to. The questions had been answered in other rooms, on other calls, in the spaces between what I had told her and what she had inferred, and Althea Papadopoulos had always been better at inference than most people were at direct statement.

The formal garden opened onto the lake view. Water stretching toward the cypress line, pale blue under the late light, and the contrast of it against the dark green made something in the air feel settled in a way that gardens rarely did.

Althea stopped. Her hands found the stone balustrade. Her fingers curled around the edge, grip firm, and she stood there for a long moment looking at the water as though it were a sentence she was trying to read.

“It’s a good place.” Her voice was quiet.

“Yes.” One word. The word carried the weight of everything I had built and everything I had kept and everything I had decided was worth preserving when the alternative was walking away.

She turned to me. Those dark eyes found mine, held, and the expression in them was something I had no category for — pride, yes, but beneath it something warmer, something that had been there since the first day she had looked at her son and decided he was worth the fight even when the fight had no obvious ending.

“Your father never deserved it.” Not bitterness. Fact. Delivered with the calm certainty of a woman who had carried the fact for decades and had never once mistaken it for an opinion.

“No.” One word. Final.

She slipped her arm through mine. Warm through the fabric of my shirt, her weight against my side familiar in a way that breathing was familiar, and we stood there at the balustrade while the lake held the light and the gardens breathed around us and the quiet did the work that words had never been particularly good at.

That evening, Zephyr appeared in the kitchen barefoot with his laptop bag slung over one shoulder and his hair doing something that suggested he had been running his hands through it for approximately the last forty minutes.

He clocked Althea at the counter, glanced at the serving dish on the high shelf she was reaching for, and crossed the room in three strides that contained more grace than most men managed in shoes.

“Allow me.” He reached past her, fingers finding the dish with the ease of someone who treated height differentials as logistical problems rather than limitations, and handed it down with a small flourish that was entirely unnecessary and entirely Zephyr.

Althea took the dish. Her eyes moved across his face once — measuring, the look of a woman who had been reading people since before he was born and was now collecting data on the five-foot-five blond who had just inserted himself into her kitchen with the confidence of someone who belonged there.

What followed was twenty minutes I had not budgeted for and would not have traded for anything.

Olive oil storage. Greek versus Italian oregano — the former sharper, the latter sweeter, a debate that involved Zephyr reaching into three separate cabinets to produce evidence and Althea nodding along with the patient attention of someone who had strong opinions about herbs and was enjoying the rare opportunity to express them to an audience that actually cared.

Then my diet. Which Zephyr discussed with the detailed precision of a man who had been keeping notes, apparently, what I ate, when I ate it, and how thoroughly I chewed each bite.

“He skips breakfast. Consistently. I’ve implemented a caramel-based intervention that has achieved marginal success. Lunch is whatever Leon puts in front of him, which is usually protein and whatever green vegetable was least offensive at the market. Dinner he eats standing up approximately sixty percent of the time, which I consider a personal failing on my part that I am actively addressing through the strategic deployment of chairs in high-traffic areas.”

Althea listened. Her expression did not change. But something moved behind her eyes — amusement, genuine, the kind that cost her nothing and she was paying it anyway.

She looked at Zephyr for a long moment. The measuring gaze deepened, settled, and then she said, dry as stone, “I can see why he keeps you.”

Zephyr shrugged. One shoulder, casual, the gesture of a man who treated being kept as a fact rather than a performance. “Everyone eventually does.”

I stood in the doorway and filed the exchange under permanent storage. The warmth behind my sternum had nothing to do with the kitchen temperature and everything to do with the fact that my mother and the man I had decided belonged in my bed were discussing my chewing habits with the focused attention of people who had appointed themselves my nutritionists without my consent.

I could work with that.

I’d have to.

After dinner, Zephyr found me on the balcony overlooking the lake. The water caught the last light, pale gold against dark blue, and the grounds below were hushed in the way that gardens get when the day is ending and the night hasn’t quite arrived.

He stood close. His shoulder pressed against mine, warm through the fabric.

“Your mother asked three questions about my past while you were away.” His voice was quiet. Steady. The steadiness of a man who had decided that honesty was worth the risk and was now implementing that decision. “When I answered the third honestly, she put more food on my plate.”

I looked at the lake. The light was fading, gold bleeding toward blue, and the surface of the water held the transition without apparent effort.

“I’m aware she’s not subtle.”

“I like her,” he stated.

“I know.”

A beat. The kind of beat that carried weight, the silence between two people who had learned that some things didn’t need to be said until they did.

Zephyr turned to me. Those blue eyes found mine in the fading light, held, and the expression on his face was something I had no category for — sharp and warm at once, the contradiction that lived in the neighborhood of Zephyr and had never bothered to explain itself.

“This is real, right?” His voice didn’t waver. Didn’t need to. The question was delivered with the quiet certainty of a man who already knew the answer and was asking anyway because hearing it mattered.

I met his gaze. Held it. The lake below us, the gardens, the villa behind us, the weight of a name I had inherited and a life I had built and the man standing beside me who had walked into both without flinching.

“Yes.” One word. The word carried the weight of everything I had decided and everything I had kept and everything I had allowed myself to want despite knowing better.

Zephyr nodded once. He leaned into my arm. His weight against my side, warm and certain, and I slipped the lighter into my pocket with my free hand — metal cool against the denim, the small orange flame dormant — and wrapped my arm around his shoulders.

His head settled against my chest, his breath warm through the fabric of my shirt, and we stood there while the lake below shimmered with the last of the light and the night arrived quietly, without announcement, the way good things often did.

The devil might be in the details, but I was the devil so I decided what the details were, and right now, they consisted of the family I’d successfully taken over, the sight of my mother in a place where she’d always belonged, and the man in my arms.

None of the other details mattered.

~ The End ~

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Macon

Burke

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That One Time

One More Time

Remember That Time

GODS OF CHAOS

How To Summon A Boyfriend

Demon-In-Law

GUARDIANS OF THE PACK

Protecting His Own

Fighting For His Own

MAFIA MAYHEM

The Capo's Boy

The Boss's Boy

The King's Boy

The Jefe's Boy

The Oyabun's Boy

MAFIA MAYHEM – ITALIAN CONNECTION

Bound To His Oath

Inheriting the Mafia

The Devils in the Details

MARRIAGE MAYHEM

The Marriage Contract

The Marriage Runaway

The Marriage Switch

The Marriage Betrothal

The Marriage Merger

The Marriage Secret

The Marriage Negotiation

The Marriage Clause

The Marriage Compromise

The Marriage Blunder

MCKENZIE RIVER BOYS

Knox

Harlow

Ransom

Quiad

Bodean

SHIFTER KINGS

Alpha Knows Best

Savage Bite

SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE

Forgiveness

Reckoning

Absolution

Temptation

Redemption

SINGLE TITLES

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Human Vampire Prince

Prince Charming NOT!

The Art of Seduction

Hoping On Forever

Howl To Me

Saving Grace

The Last Dance

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About Aja Foxx

The vicious bite of an enemy, a shout, a cry in the dark. A lover's touch, the whisper of a kiss. A sigh, a groan, heart beating faster, desire surging through a body. Love words spoken in the shadows. The yearning for a soft caress. I'm a writer of fiery passion in all its glorious forms. Paranormal, Contemporary, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, MM Romance books. There is no limit to my imagination.

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