Page 17 of The Devils in the Details

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.