Page 12 of The Devils in the Details

“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.