Page 61 of The Devils in the Details

The palazzo hummed its nighttime soundtrack—old pipes settling, the distant click of a thermostat adjusting, the quiet of a building that had been standing for four centuries and had just witnessed something it hadn’t been designed to accommodate.

I closed my eyes. Ari’s breath was warm against my shoulder. His arm across my ribs. His heartbeat steady against my side, slower than mine, more deliberate.

Tomorrow waited, patient and inevitable. A room full of men. A family name that still smelled like smoke. And me standing at the devil’s shoulder because belonging there was not a question, but an answer.

Chapter Fifteen

~ Aristoteles ~

The armored Range Rover smelled like leather and gun oil. I sat with my back to the cabin wall, boots planted on the steel floor, my denim vest heavy across my shoulders.

I carried four knives total—two in the vest, two in the boots—and the weight of them was familiar in a way that breathing was familiar. Not something I thought about. Something my body knew.

Leon sat in the front seat. Arms crossed, face blank, the stillness of a man who had been running security protocols in his head since approximately three in the morning and had reached conclusions he wasn’t sharing.

His eyes moved from the window to the door to Zephyr and back, a continuous low-frequency inventory that had been running for the entire drive from Florence.

Zephyr had his laptop bag across his chest and his bare feet on the floor. Turquoise sparkles catching the low interior light, toes curled against the cold metal like someone who had forgotten shoes were a thing people wore to formal events involving organized crime.

“I told you to wear shoes.” I didn’t look at him. The window offered a view of the coast unfolding in pale morning light, and I was using it.

“You told me a lot of things.” His voice was dry. Amused. The tone of a man who treated instructions as suggestions and suggestions as entertainment. “I filed most of them under ‘contextual, negotiable.’ Shoes fell into the negotiable category. The turquoise, however, is non-negotiable. I consider it diplomatic armor. You wouldn’t understand. Your aesthetic range begins and ends with ‘denim’ and ‘also denim.’”

Leon’s eyes moved to the ceiling. Briefly. His version of an eye roll, compressed into a gesture so subtle that most people would miss it entirely.

The lighter clicked in my hand. Open, held for a count, shut. The small orange flame danced against the dim cabin, and I watched it the way I watched everything else.

Carefully.

The D’Angelo estate came into view above Genoa. Pale limestone perimeter wall, maybe twelve feet high, manned gate with two visible positions and at least one I couldn’t see from this angle.

I catalogued exits. Sightlines. The curve of the drive where it disappeared behind a stand of cypress. The position of the second armored car behind us, carrying four of my men who had been selected for this job the way Leon selected everything—with the cold arithmetic of a man who treated personnel as instruments rather than people.

The gate opened. Slow. Controlled. The kind of motion that suggested the man operating it had been told to expect us and had decided, privately, that he hadn’t made up his mind about what that meant.

Tony’s underboss stood just inside the perimeter. Medium build, dark hair, the watchful stillness of a man who had been doing this long enough to know that first impressions were usually wrong and he wasn’t in a hurry to form one.

“Mr. Romano.” His voice was even. Professional. The tone of someone reading from a script he had memorized but didn’t entirely believe. “Mr. D’Angelo is expecting you in the main salon. Your security detail can wait in the east courtyard. There’s coffee. Sandwiches. The usual.”

I nodded once. The kind of nod that said I had heard him and had nothing to add, because adding things required words and words were decorative in situations where both of us understood the danger.

He escorted us through the grounds. Gravel underfoot, the crunch of it carrying in the morning quiet. Cypress lining the drive, shadows long and thin across the pale stone.

The hush of a property that ran on controlled force—not the aggressive silence of something afraid, but the patient quiet of something that had decided violence was a tool rather than a temperament.

Zephyr walked at my shoulder. Bare feet on gravel, which should have been impossible and wasn’t, because Zephyr treated physical discomfort the way most people treated minor inconveniences—as background noise rather than data.

His laptop bag bounced against his hip with each step, and the sound of it was steady, rhythmic.

The main salon opened off a wide stone terrace. Double doors, wrought iron handles, the kind of entrance that had been designed to make visitors feel small and had probably succeeded for about two hundred years before someone like me walked through it and didn’t care.

The room was full. Not crowded—D’Angelo money meant space was never a problem—but occupied in the way powerful rooms get occupied, with men standing in configurations that looked casual and weren’t.

Tony D’Angelo by the fireplace. Honey eyes, dark hair, the watchful ease of a man who had inherited power he never asked for and was still deciding what to do with it. He held a whiskey, ice mostly melted, and he wasn’t drinking it. The glass was a prop.

I’d used the same one.

Luca Sabatino near the windows. Broad-shouldered, bearded, the calm of a man who had survived worse rooms than this and had developed opinions about which ones were worth his attention.