Page 47 of The Devils in the Details

Theodore took it, but didn’t unwrap it. He put it in his jacket pocket with the care of a man accepting a token, and then he was gone, the tap of the cane fading down the corridor, and the library felt both emptier and more solid than it had before he arrived.

Zephyr watched the empty doorway. Steam rose from his teacup, thin and white against the dark wood of the table.

“I like him,” he said quietly.

I looked at him. Those blue eyes held mine with the calm of a man who had just decided that a seventy-five-year-old crime patriarch with a rosewood cane and a dry mustache was someone worth approving of, and the casual certainty of the assessment was either the most alarming thing about him or the only thing that made complete sense.

“That is either a good sign,” I said, “or a problem.”

Zephyr picked up his laptop bag. Sling it over his shoulder with the ease of someone who treated expensive equipment the way most people treated grocery bags.

“Probably both.” He headed for the door, bare feet quiet on the wide-plank floor, and paused at the threshold. “I’m adding the caramels to the invoice, by the way. Diplomatic expenditure. Itemized. The rate is premium because old men with canes are a specialty market and I don’t come cheap.”

Then he was gone, and the library settled back into its silence — old paper, lemon oil, and the weight of a warning that had just landed on the desk with the finality of something that required immediate handling.

Theodore’s car cleared the gate. I heard it — engine noise fading, gravel under tires. I was already moving. Boots on hardwood, corridor to study, phone in my hand before I hit the chair. The screen lit blue-white against the dark wood of the desk, and I found Leon’s number.

He answered on the second ring. Always the second ring. Leon Nikolaidis treated phone etiquette the way most men treated firearm safety — as something that kept you alive rather than something that made you polite.

“Men on Alexios,” I said. No greeting. “Full surveillance. Movements, contacts, communications. Every name he meets with in the next fourteen days. I want to know before he knows I know.”

A pause. The silence that meant Leon was writing this down, not because he needed to, but because writing things down was how his brain processed instructions into action.

“Names by morning,” he said. His voice was flat, even, the tone of a man who had just received an order he had no questions about. He didn’t ask why. Didn’t ask about sources or reliability or the arithmetic that had led to this deployment of resources.

That was one of his best qualities. Leon asked questions when the questions mattered, and he had been doing this long enough to know when they didn’t.

“Good.” I ended the call. Set the phone on the desk. The screen dimmed, went dark, and the study settled into the silence that happened when something had been set in motion and the room was waiting for the consequences to arrive.

Two weeks. The window sat in front of me like something physical — fourteen days between now and the conclave, between a family that was still bleeding from Geno’s wounds and a family that might, with the right leverage, walk back into the room where decisions got made.

The conclave was our shot. The only shot. Attendance-only status ended if I walked in with something the other families needed and walked out with something that put the Romano name back on the map. A deal. Territory. Access to the shipping lanes that Geno had burned when he decided that bombing a rival family was a smarter move than negotiation.

I could not afford a rebellion at my back while I was doing it. Alexios knew that. Theodore knew that. Every old-guard loyalist who had watched an illegitimate dock worker take the seat they believed belonged to legitimate blood knew it, and they had been waiting, patient as graves, for the moment when the arithmetic tipped in their favor.

I would not have one. A rebellion required oxygen to burn, and I had spent the last month systematically removing the oxygen from every room Alexios might try to light a match in.

The door opened. Soft. A single sound, hinges well-oiled, and I didn’t need to look to know who it was. Zephyr stood in the doorway. Laptop under one arm, the strap of the bag cutting across his chest, his free hand holding a caramel he had apparently located in whatever drawer they had been hiding in.

Bare feet on my hardwood floor, turquoise sparkles catching the low light from the desk lamp, and the expression on his face was the blend of watchful and present that meant he had heard enough to form an opinion and was choosing, deliberately, not to share it yet.

He didn’t ask who I called. Didn’t need to. The call had been brief and audible from the corridor, and Zephyr had the insane talent of absorbing information he wasn’t supposed to hear and treating it as something that had been offered rather than something he had taken.

He leaned against the doorframe. Ate the caramel. His eyes moved across my face once.

I glanced at him, once, brief, and Zephyr held it without flinching, without shifting, without doing anything except standing in my doorway with a laptop under his arm and a caramel in his mouth and the absolute certainty of someone who had decided that this was where he lived now and the rest was details.

Nothing was said.

I picked up the phone again. Hit Leon’s number. He answered on the second ring. “Make sure of it,” I said.

Leon’s expression, through the phone, was the configuration of a man who had already intended to. I could hear it in the silence — the fractional pause, the shift of weight, the unspoken confirmation that the instruction had been redundant because Leon Nikolaidis did not do things halfway and had not started today.

“It’s handled,” he said.

I ended the call and set the phone down.

Zephyr was still in the doorway. The caramel was gone, and his lower lip held the faint shine that happened when sugar met skin and decided to stay, and the look on his face was the blend of sharp and warm that made my chest do something complicated every time I saw it.