Page 27 of The Devils in the Details

The heat lingered where his palm had been. I could feel it through the cotton of my shirt, a ghost of contact that my nervous system was refusing to relinquish, like it had decided that patch of skin was now under different management.

I turned into my room, closed the door behind me, and leaned against it for approximately three seconds while my expression did something I would not have wanted witnessed by anyone with functioning eyesight.

When my three seconds of sheer panic were up, I pushed off and crossed to the desk where my laptop sat and opened it up to the document I’d been working on.

I didn’t sit. Standing felt better. Standing let me stare at the screen without pretending that I was actually reading anything on it, which I wasn’t. My brain could not currently process due to bandwidth allocation issues elsewhere.

I thought about that hand, the heat of it through the cotton of my shirt, the way it had stayed there, deliberate, the kind of touch that knew exactly what it was doing and had chosen to do it anyway.

I thought about the fact that he had come himself. Not Leon. Himself. Six-foot-three of controlled menace, personally deployed to a public square because someone had followed the caramel guy.

The implications of that lived in a neighborhood my brain was still mapping, and the real estate values were rising by the minute.

I thought about the way Ari had looked at my mouth in the hallway. Just for a second. Down and then away, like he’d caught himself, like he was correcting a calculation that had arrived at an answer he wasn’t ready to implement.

I’d seen it.

I see everything.

It’s what I do.

I opened a new document. My fingers hovered over the keys, and the words that wanted to come out were not the kind that belonged in a financial audit or an NDA or any document that would ever see the light of a printer.

I reached into my laptop bag. Found the last caramel. Unwrapped it with the focused attention of a man who was using sugar as a structural support for a nervous system that had been operating at capacity since approximately the moment I had met Ari and my brain had registered him as a problem I was going to enjoy having.

The caramel went into my mouth, sweet and salty. The flavor of a man making a series of questionable decisions and committing to every one of them.

I started typing. Numbers. Accounts. The vendor fraud from this morning, the transaction history, the clean rounding that had tipped me off. Professional things. Things that belonged in a document.

Things that had nothing to do with the heat of a hand on a lower back or the sound of a not-quite-laugh in a courtyard or the way a pair of black eyes had looked at my mouth and then looked away like the looking itself was the transgression.

I typed. The keys clicked under my fingers, steady and familiar, and somewhere in the building—down the hall, through a door, in a study that smelled of cigarette smoke and bad decisions—Ari was also not thinking about me.

I was almost certain of it.

Then the certainty unraveled, thread by thread, until I wasn’t certain at all, and the warmth behind my sternum had nothing to do with the caramel and everything to do with wanting something that was standing on the other side of several very good reasons why wanting it was a catastrophically bad idea.

I kept typing. The document filled. Numbers. Accounts. The clean, clinical architecture of financial forensics, built to withstand scrutiny.

Somewhere in the margins, in the spaces between digits, in the pauses between keystrokes, something warmer lived. Something that had nothing to do with ledgers and everything to do with a hand on a lower back and a decision that hadn’t been announced yet.

I ate the last of the caramel and kept working, and the warmth stayed where it was, patient as the lemon tree in the courtyard, putting in the work, earning its space.

Chapter Seven

~ Aristoteles ~

The Florence palazzo smelled the same. Stone, beeswax, the faint musty smell of rooms that didn’t get enough air — none of it had changed in seven days, which was its own kind of insult.

I stood in the courtyard and let the evening settle against my shoulders. The lemon tree was still there. The stone bench was empty. The iron table had a thin layer of dust that Leon would have someone remove by morning.

Seven days. Three of them out of town on a contract dispute that should have taken one. A shipping route through Livorno, a captain who thought his cut was negotiable, a conversation that ended with the man on his knees and my boot on his throat and thirty thousand euros walking back into Romano accounts where it belonged.

The other four days were what I’d told myself was discipline.

Discipline looked like this: a hotel room in Pisa with a view of a wall. One phone call to Leon per day. No calls to Florence. No texts. No updates on whether Zephyr was still in the building, still eating caramels, still rearranging the family’s financial records with the focused attention of a man who treated embezzlement like a puzzle and not a death sentence.

On Day Five, a subordinate walked into my hotel room without knocking. The door hit the wall hard enough to rattle the framed landscape above the bed — some generic Tuscan vista in colors too bright to exist in nature.