Page 29 of The Devils in the Details

I drank the whiskey. It burned the way it was supposed to, all the way down, honest in its simplicity. Pain was honest. Wanting was complicated in ways I didn’t have vocabulary for.

The knock came soft. Two taps, quick.

I already knew.

“Come in.”

The door opened. The air changed. It always changed when he entered a room — something in the density of it, the way the molecules rearranged themselves around a body that carried itself like it had never once questioned whether it belonged.

I didn’t turn from the window. Not yet. The amber light was doing something useful with the Arno, and I needed the useful thing more than I needed whatever was about to walk through that door.

Then he did walk through it, and useful became theoretical.

I turned.

Zephyr stood in the doorway of my study with his laptop bag slung over one shoulder and a caramel in his right hand and absolutely no shoes on his feet.

Tight black capri pants. White cotton T-shirt that had slid off one shoulder, exposing the sharp line of his collarbone and a strip of skin that my eyes found before my brain could redirect them. Bare feet on my hardwood floor, toes painted turquoise with something that caught the fading light and threw it back in small, defiant sparks.

His blond hair was doing that thing where it looked both deliberately messy and entirely accidental, pushed back from his forehead on one side, falling across his eyebrow on the other.

He had a caramel between his fingers, gold foil half-unwrapped, and he was looking at me like he’d been expecting me and the expectation had been confirmed, which was irritating because I hadn’t told anyone I was coming back tonight.

I took him in once. The full inventory. The shoulder. The bare feet. The turquoise sparks on toenails that had no business being on my hardwood floor or in my field of vision or anywhere near the part of my brain that was currently doing something complicated with that information.

Then I looked away. Out the window. At the Arno. At the bridges. At anything that wasn’t Zephyr Kontos standing in my study like the room belonged to him, which was the problem.

He stood in every room like it belonged to him, and my brain had apparently decided that was attractive rather than the liability it objectively was.

“Hey,” he said.

I nodded because I didn’t trust my voice. The whiskey was doing its job, which was to give my hand something to hold that wasn’t reaching for him, and I was grateful for the distraction even if the distraction tasted like regret.

Zephyr crossed to the desk and set the laptop bag down with the ease of a man who had been working at this piece of furniture for seven days and had developed opinions about its ergonomics.

“I found more money,” he said. Brisk. Efficient. Getting to the point with the directness he applied to everything that wasn’t himself. “Embezzlement. Structured. Cleaner than the vendor thing, which means either a different person or the same person who learned from their mistakes, and my money’s on different because people who steal five million usually don’t level up to five hundred million without changing their methodology, but I’ve been wrong before. Once. In 2019. It was traumatic.”

He unwrapped the caramel. Put it in 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 whiskey and everything to do with the way his lower lip glistened when the caramel hit it.

I watched him do this. I was aware I was watching. I was also aware that watching was its own kind of problem, and the problem was getting worse by the second, and the whiskey wasn’t helping as much as I’d hoped.

“Options,” Zephyr said around the caramel. “One: report it. Correct, slow, invites questions from people who have no business asking them, and given the current standing of the Romano family with certain regulatory bodies, I’d classify that as stupid. Two: move it back. Faster, quieter, raises different questions internally about who knew what and when, which is your problem, not mine, and also my preferred solution because it involves me doing the thing I’m good at instead of the thing I’m mediocre at, which is talking to regulators without making them develop facial tics.”

He waited. The caramel shifted from one cheek to the other. His eyes held mine — Aegean blue, wide.

“Move it back,” I said. My voice came out lower than I’d intended, rougher.

Zephyr nodded. Once. Decisive. He flipped open the laptop, set it on my desk — my desk, the mahogany one that had outlived three generations of Romano men and was now hosting a five-foot-five blond with turquoise toenails like this was simply an extension of his workspace, which it apparently was.

His fingers moved over the keys. Fast. Certain. The rhythm was different now focused and precise, He had a quiet confidence of a man who treated international finance like a game he’d already solved.

The typing went on for several minutes. I stood at the window and drank whiskey and did not think about how many caramels he’d eaten in the last seven days or whether he’d slept or what the turquoise polish on his toenails would feel like under my thumb.

Not helpful.

“Done,” Zephyr said. He didn’t look up. His eyes were on the screen, tracking something I couldn’t see, his lower lip caught between his teeth in that way it did when he was verifying.

Then he looked up. Those blue eyes found mine across the study, and the expression in them was pleased.