Page 31 of The Devils in the Details

I picked up my drink. Turned back to the window. Florence had gone from amber to deep gold, the Arno dark now, the bridges silhouetted against a sky that was doing its best impression of something worth looking at.

Behind me, I heard the sound of a laptop being closed, the soft click of the latch, the shift of fabric as Zephyr stood, shouldered the bag, adjusted the strap across his chest.

He paused at the door. I could feel it — the silence that meant he was standing there, deciding whether to say whatever was in his head, weighing the cost of words against the value of whatever they would accomplish.

“You’re welcome, by the way,” he said. Lightly. The tone of a man who had moved five hundred million dollars and was pretending it was no more significant than holding a door.

“I know,” I said.

The door opened and then closed. The sound of it was soft, final, the kind of sound that settled into a room and stayed there.

I stood at the window. The lighter clicked once in my left hand. Open. Held for a count of two. Snapped shut.

The drink was empty. I did not refill it. Refilling it would have been the next logical step, but logic had limited jurisdiction over the part of my brain that was currently replaying turquoise sparkles on hardwood floor, bare feet, a white T-shirt sliding off one shoulder, and the specific way Zephyr had looked up at me from my desk chair like he belonged there.

He did belong there. That was the problem.

The family had its legs back. Five hundred million dollars, sitting in accounts that had been empty when I took over, returned by a man who treated international finance like a game and my study like an extension of his living room.

I should have been thinking about what that meant. About restructuring. About which of Geno’s people had taken the money and how many of them were still breathing. About the conclave, about Alexios, about the fifty-three other problems on the list that didn’t have turquoise toenails attached to them.

I wasn’t thinking about any of that.

I was thinking about the crack in the restraint. The shift. The way it had felt to stand close enough to count the fine lines at the corners of his eyes and not reach for him.

This was a problem. A significant one. The kind of problem that didn’t get solved with knives or threats or the cold silence that had served me for thirty-two years. The kind of problem that got worse the longer I let it sit.

I needed to be sharp. I needed to be careful. The family had legs now, which meant it could move, which meant the enemies would notice, which meant the knives would come out sooner rather than later.

I could not afford to be distracted by turquoise sparkles on hardwood floor.

The lighter clicked. Open. Shut.

I was going to have to solve this soon. Before I solved it the wrong way.

The wrong way looked like my hands on his skin. The wrong way looked like the sound he would make when I got him properly, when I pinned him to that desk and watched that fast, clever mouth go slack with something other than words for once.

The wrong way had a body count attached to it, and the body at the top of the list was mine.

I set the empty glass on the windowsill. Florence spread below me, ancient and patient, and somewhere in this building, Zephyr was doing something with a spreadsheet or a caramel or both.

The lighter clicked one more time. Held the flame. I watched it dance orange against the darkening glass, then I snapped it shut and went back to work.

Chapter Eight

~ Zephyr ~

The study was quiet. I had my feet up on the desk. Bare feet, toes painted turquoise, catching the late afternoon light that came through the shuttered windows in warm diagonal bars.

Papers were spread across the dark wood in a pattern that made sense to me and would look like abstract art to anyone else. My laptop sat open to a spreadsheet that was currently doing something to indicate which Romano shell companies were real and which existed only in the fever dreams of whoever had been running Geno’s books.

I was three caramels deep and my brain was doing that thing where it moved at twice its normal speed while making questionable decisions about humor.

Then the door opened without a knock.

I looked up.

Theo Romano stood in the doorway like the room had been expecting him. He was wearing a tailored suit, charcoal, Italian cut, the kind that cost more than most people’s cars and made no secret about it.