Page 38 of The Devils in the Details

Zephyr hadn’t moved. His breath was warm against my collarbone, steady. His eyelashes cast faint shadows on his cheeks, dark against skin that had gone pale with the aftermath of adrenaline.

The torn collar of his shirt hung open, exposing the sharp line of his collarbone and a strip of skin that my eyes found and my brain registered and filed under “later, examine thoroughly, possibly with both hands.”

The bruises on his arms were darkening. Theo’s fingerprints, five points each, already purple at the edges. I catalogued them with the cold precision of a man who kept ledgers, who remembered every mark, who understood that certain debts accrued interest faster than others.

My phone lit up. The second call. A contact in Rome, a name that didn’t appear in any Romano file because the man had been useful precisely once, four years ago, and useful men who stayed useful did so by keeping their names out of files.

I answered. Held the phone close, voice low, the tone I used when the person on my lap was asleep and the person on the line needed to understand that volume was a courtesy I was currently extending.

“Conclave security,” I said. “I want eyes on it two weeks out, not one. Your people, not mine. I’ll cover the difference.”

A pause. The sound of keys clicking, the rhythm of someone taking notes while pretending they weren’t.

“That’s a significant departure from standard protocol,” the contact said. His voice was gravel and cigarettes, the voice of a man who had been doing this long enough to know when a request was unusual and smart enough not to ask why.

“Standard protocol got five people killed at the Naples summit. I’m not interested in repeating history.”

The lighter clicked open. The flame danced orange against the dark study, throwing long shadows across the desk where Zephyr’s laptop bag sat open, papers spilling out, the chaos of a mind that moved too fast to bother with organization.

“Consider it handled,” the contact said.

“Good.”

I ended the call and set the phone down again.

The lighter snapped shut.

Zephyr shifted once, small, his body adjusting against mine. His hand tightened on the fabric of my shirt, fingers curling into the denim vest, and then relaxed again, sinking back into the deep rhythm of sleep.

I watched his face. The unguarded stillness of it was something I hadn’t seen before. Awake, Zephyr was all motion—hands, words, the rapid percussion of a brain that processed information faster than most people could speak it.

Asleep, he was something else entirely. Quiet. Still. The peace of a body that had been running on borrowed energy for longer than it was designed to and had finally, mercifully, found a place to stop.

His lower lip was slightly parted. The caramel shine was gone, replaced by the soft dryness of sleep, and something warm moved behind my sternum that had nothing to do with the weight on my lap and everything to do with the fact that this man had run toward me when Theo had put hands on him.

He had folded himself under my desk like it was the most logical shelter in the world, and he was now sleeping against my chest with the absolute trust of someone who had not stopped to question whether that trust was warranted or not.

It wasn’t. That was the problem. Trust was a currency I had never earned and had no business spending, and yet here it was, warm against my collarbone, breathing slow and even, its turquoise-sparkled toes dangling over the edge of my thigh.

My phone lit up a third time. The Genoa contact. A man whose name I would never say out loud in a room with witnesses because the favor he owed me was the kind that got people killed if the wrong ears heard about it.

I answered, my voice lower now. “Talk.”

“The perimeter you asked about.” The man’s voice was quiet, measured, the voice of someone who understood that phones were not private and certain words carried more risk than others. “It’s clean. No movement. No visitors. The subject has been home for three days straight, which is unusual, but the pattern is consistent. Whatever he’s planning, he’s planning it from inside.”

I absorbed this. The lighter clicked open, held, the flame steady in the still air of the study.

“Keep watching,” I said. “Daily reports. Anything changes, I hear about it before the change finishes happening.”

“Understood.”

The call ended.

Three calls, forty minutes. It wasn’t lost on me that I was a man running a crime family from a chair with a sleeping civilian in his lap and my list of problems was growing longer by the hour.

The conclave was six weeks out. The security paperwork needed to move. Theo was still walking around with his skull intact, which was a generosity already under review, and somewhere in the dark corners of Florence, the old guard was watching, waiting, calculating whether the illegitimate dock worker with the blond on his lap was something they could outlast or something they needed to remove.

Zephyr’s weight had settled against my chest—his right shoulder tucked under my arm, his left hand curled against his own collarbone, his face turned so that his forehead rested against the side of my neck.