Page 30 of The Devils in the Details

My phone chimed.

I pulled it from my pocket. The screen glowed blue-white in the dimming study, cutting through the amber haze from the window with the cold efficiency of something that didn’t belong there.

The notification was from the family account. A transfer. Amount received: five hundred million dollars.

I stared at the screen.

The number did not change. Five hundred million. Eight zeroes in a row, neat and patient, the kind of number that changed what a family could do, what a family could be. The kind of number that turned a broken legacy into something that might, with work, stand on its own feet.

Almost every dollar Geno’s people had stripped out before the end, before the bombing, before everything went to hell. Returned in a single evening by a man eating a caramel on my hardwood floor.

I did not let my face do anything. My face had rules. My face did what I told it to do, and right now I was telling it to do nothing, which was the hardest thing I’d asked of it in seven days.

I looked at Zephyr.

Zephyr looked back. Those blue eyes held mine with the calm of a man who had just moved five hundred million dollars across international borders without breaking a sweat and was now waiting for me to say something, preferably something that acknowledged the scale of what he’d done without making him uncomfortable, which was a needle I had never been particularly good at threading.

My restraint developed a crack.

Not a collapse. A shift. The kind of shift that happens when something under pressure finds a weak point and begins, very slowly, to give way.

I crossed to the desk. My desk. Which meant crossing to Zephyr, because Zephyr was at my desk, sitting in my chair, his turquoise-sparkle toenails resting on my hardwood floor like they’d been invited.

I did not stop at the reasonable distance. Reasonable had left the building approximately seven days ago, when I’d pulled a gun on a subordinate for walking into a room too loudly because the sound had reminded me of something I was trying not to think about.

I stopped close. Close enough that I could see the fine lines at the corners of his eyes, the way his lashes cast faint shadows on his cheeks when the light hit them from this angle.

I looked down at him. Six-foot-three looking down at five-foot-five, which put his eyes level with my chest and my eyes looking down at the top of his head, and that was its own kind of problem.

Zephyr did not step back. He tilted his chin up. Held the eye contact. His throat worked once — a swallow, small, deliberate — and then his expression settled into something that looked like curiosity with a warm undercurrent I didn’t have a name for.

“You should know what you just did,” I said. Quiet. The kind of quiet that made the air between us feel thicker.

“I transferred money,” Zephyr said. His voice was steady. The caramel was gone, but his lower lip still held a faint shine, and I was aware of the shine with a specificity that my brain had apparently decided warranted its own dedicated neural pathway.

“You gave the Romano family its legs back.”

He considered this. His head tilted slightly — the tilt that meant his brain was running the statement through several filters simultaneously, checking for sincerity, checking for exaggeration, checking for whatever angle I might be working that he hadn’t identified yet.

“I prefer to think of it as a billable accomplishment,” he said finally. “Item line: ‘financial architecture restructuring, with prejudice.’ You can put it next to the caramels, which are also billable, and before you say anything, yes, I’ve been tracking them, and no, you cannot have the spreadsheet because it would undermine my negotiating position, and I have principles.”

I looked at him. For a long moment. Long enough that the church bells rang somewhere in the distance, the sound carrying through stone and old wood and the narrow space between us where something warm had taken up residence and showed no signs of leaving.

Close enough to share air. Close enough to count the details I’d been cataloguing for seven days — the curve of his neck where it met his shoulder, the way his collarbone stood sharp under the thin cotton, the shade of pink that climbed his throat when he’d been working too long without a break.

I took one step back. Controlled. Measured. The kind of step that cost me something and I paid it anyway because the alternative was standing close enough to touch him, and touching him would be the end of whatever was left of the discipline, and the discipline was the only thing keeping the family standing.

“Add it to your invoice,” I said. “Get some sleep.”

“I don’t sleep at reasonable hours.”

“I’m aware of this.”

His eyebrows went up. “How are you aware of this?”

“I pay attention.” The words landed exactly where they were supposed to. Direct and unadorned.

He held my gaze for a beat longer, then he nodded, once, and reached for his laptop.