Page 18 of The Devils in the Details

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.