Page 22 of The Devils in the Details

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.