Page 67 of The Devils in the Details

Ari’s answer: “They’re handled.”

Two words. Conversation over. I watched it happen with the fascination of someone witnessing a demolition performed with surgical precision. That’s it? Two sentences and he’s done?

The efficiency of it was almost obscene.

Theo made his first move during a natural shift in the room’s grouping. He angled toward me with the casual confidence of a man who believed that casualness was convincing. His smile was warm. Brotherly.

I stepped closer to Ari’s shoulder. Not much. Half an inch. The kind of movement that most people wouldn’t notice and Theo noticed immediately, because Theo had been watching for it.

I turned to Luca. “The Sicilian financial structures you mentioned earlier — the holding pattern through Malta before the Cyprus pivot. Was that a regional preference or a tax consideration?”

Luca’s eyebrows went up. The question was specific, informed, and landed in exactly the right place to anchor a conversation that Theo could not enter without revealing that he had nothing to contribute. Luca answered. Tony joined. Vinnie leaned in. The circle closed.

Theo stood outside it with his warm smile and nowhere to put his hands. I didn’t look at him. Didn’t need to. The arithmetic was clear: go stand in the corner, cousin. Adults are talking.

His second attempt came during a room shift. People moving, drinks being refreshed, the natural turbulence of a social space recalibrating. Theo angled toward me with the determined patience of a man who had decided that the first failure was circumstantial and the second would succeed on merit.

I held his eye contact. One beat. Long enough to say I see what you’re doing and it’s not working. Then I looked back at Ari.

Ari’s hand settled at the small of my back. Barely touching. More temperature than pressure. The warmth of his palm through the thin fabric of my shirt registered somewhere below my sternum with the specificity of coordinates being entered into a system.

He did not move it.

Theo stopped moving. Just stopped. His expression didn’t change. His posture didn’t change. But something in him went still in the way things go still when they recognize a boundary they hadn’t known was there.

Oh. That’s what that feels like from the receiving end.

File that permanently.

Alexios pivoted to me directly when the room had settled into its new configuration. Gracious. Condescending. The kind of gracious that cost him nothing and made sure everyone knew he was spending it anyway.

“And you must be Ari’s... assistant.” The pause was deliberate. The word “assistant” arrived with the faint edge of a man who found the concept charming in the way one finds a child’s drawing charming — appreciative of the effort, unconvinced by the execution.

“I handle information management for the Romano operation.” I kept my voice pleasant. Empty. The tone of someone reading from a script he had written himself and was reasonably certain the audience hadn’t seen.

“Information management.” Alexios repeated it like he was tasting the words to see if they had gone bad. “That must be interesting work.”

“It is.” I smiled. The smile that cost nothing and meant less. “Especially the parts where the information turns out to be about the people in the room.”

Alexios’s expression did a small, controlled recalibration. The kind of recalibration that happened when a man who had decided the chessboard was arranged in his favor discovered that someone had moved a piece he hadn’t been watching.

His smile held. Of course it held. Alexios Romano’s smile was engineered to hold through anything short of structural collapse, and even then it would probably request a moment to compose itself before acknowledging the debris.

“How fortunate that we all have nothing to hide.” He said it smoothly. The smoothness of a man who had rehearsed this line in a mirror and was reasonably certain it landed.

I didn’t answer. Didn’t need to. The silence between us carried the weight of something that had been true for longer than either of us was willing to admit, and admitting it would have required more honesty than the room was prepared to accommodate.

Ari’s hand was still at the small of my back. Warm. Steady. The warmth of a man who treated touch the way he treated everything — with the focused attention.

Alexios made his next move in the open because men like Alexios always did — they rehearsed the speech in the mirror, they timed the pauses, they selected the vocabulary with the care of someone arranging flowers for a funeral they were reasonably certain would be someone else’s.

He stepped into the center of the room with the confidence of a man who had already decided how this ended, and for approximately ninety seconds, I almost believed him.

“Gentlemen.” His voice carried. Warm. Measured. The tone of a man who thought he had earned the right to be heard. “I appreciate the invitation to speak. What I have to say comes from a place of genuine concern for the stability of our alliance, and for the Romano family in particular.”

He framed it as concern. Of course he did. Concern was the packaging that dangerous things came in when the audience required plausible deniability. Irregular circumstances of Ari’s ascension. Unresolved questions about family standing. The weight of a name that had been synonymous with stability for generations, now in the hands of a man who had never been formally acknowledged by that name until circumstance forced the issue.

Smooth. Well-constructed. Delivered with the confidence of a man who had rehearsed it in the shower, in the car, probably in his sleep. I could have taken notes on the technique. The man had talent. Wasted on a script that was about to meet its editor.