Page 21 of The Devils in the Details

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.