Page 69 of The Devils in the Details

Ari stood in the center of it with the stillness of a man who had already won. His hand was at the small of my back again. Warm. Steady. The warmth of a man who treated possession as a fact rather than a performance, and the fact of it registered somewhere below my sternum with the warmth of something I had decided I wanted.

I reached into my laptop bag. Found a caramel. Gold foil, slightly crumpled, the crumple of something that had been handled by fingers moving too fast to bother with neatness. I unwrapped it slowly. The crinkle of foil carried in the quiet room.

Vinnie noticed. Of course he noticed. Vinnie Borelli noticed everything, filed it, and decided whether to care about it approximately three seconds faster than most people could form the thought.

“You always carry those?” His tone was curious. Genuine. The curiosity of a man who treated human behavior as data and was collecting a point.

“Yes.” I popped the caramel into my mouth. Sweet. Salty. The taste of a series of catastrophic decisions and committing to every one of them. “They’re a professional requirement. The sugar-to-intelligence conversion ratio is well documented in literature that I made up five minutes ago, but stand by completely.”

Vinnie’s smile widened. “My Nicky would like you.”

“Everyone eventually does.” I said it evenly. The evenness of a man who had decided that stating facts was more efficient than performing modesty, and efficiency was a virtue I had strong opinions about.

Ari, beside me, made a sound. Low. Rough. Not quite a laugh — something adjacent to it.

I tried not to smile. I failed by about the same margin I always failed — which was completely, irrevocably, with the enthusiasm of something that had been waiting for this input and was now compiling a very detailed report.

The room settled into its new configuration. Alexios contained. Theo quiet. Ari standing in the center of it with the stillness of a man who had already won, and beside him, me.

Tomorrow would come. The conclave would happen. A room full of men would watch Ari stand where Geno had stood, and some of them would bet against him, and some of them would lose that bet in ways they would not enjoy.

I couldn’t wait.

Chapter Seventeen

~ Zephyr ~

I had a pastry in one hand and the best cup of tea I’d had in six months in the other, which meant I was operating at approximately ninety-seven percent of my optimal functionality and the other three percent was reserved for observations about the Ligurian Sea being unfairly pretty and the fact that I was barefoot on a stone terrace that cost more than most people’s yearly salary.

The terrace stretched wide and pale under the midday light, warm stone under my turquoise-sparkled toes, the kind of stone that had been absorbing Mediterranean sun for centuries and was now generously sharing the wealth with anyone standing on it.

Below us, the coast dropped away in a series of cliffs and coves that the tourism board would have murdered for, all olive groves and cypress and the particular blue of the Ligurian Sea that looked like someone had taken the concept of water and dialed it to eleven.

Nico Sabatino sat to my right with his knees drawn up and his blond hair catching the light. He was the quiet one of the three of us, which was not saying much because I’d been talking for approximately seven minutes without pausing for breath.

Nicky Borelli had spent the last three of those minutes trying to determine whether the pastry filling was apricot or peach through a process of enthusiastic consumption that bordered on forensic.

“It’s definitely apricot,” Nicky said, licking his thumb with the focus of someone conducting a peer-reviewed study. “The tartness profile is all wrong for peach. Peach is sweeter, rounder. This is pointy.”

“I have never heard a pastry described as ‘pointy,’” I said. “I’m adding it to my vocabulary and you can’t stop me.”

“You should.” Nicky grinned. The man had the kind of grin that made you want to like him even when he was wrong, which was inconvenient because he was usually right about things that didn’t matter and wrong about things that did, and I found this combination both irritating and deeply endearing. “Pointy pastries, round pastries, the whole geometry of baked goods. Vinnie thinks I’m insane. I consider it a professional interest.”

“Vinnie thinks everyone is insane,” Nico said mildly. He’d been nursing the same cup of tea for ten minutes, which either meant he was a slow drinker or he was the kind of person who treated beverages as background rather than foreground, and I strongly suspected the latter. “He just arranges us on a spectrum. I’m somewhere in the middle. Nicky is off the chart.”

“Off the chart in a good way,” Nicky clarified.

“There is no good way to be off the chart,” Nico said. “That’s the definition of off the chart. The chart has given up.”

I laughed. The sound came out warmer than I’d expected, which was its own kind of data point. I did not make friends easily. I did not make friends at all, typically. Friends were liabilities in a world where the people who knew you best were the people who could hurt you worst.

I had built my entire adult life around the principle that the only person I could reliably count on was the one I saw in the mirror, and even then the jury was occasionally out.

Statistically speaking, making friends at a mafia conclave was approximately the dumbest thing I could do with my afternoon.

And yet…

“So Luca,” I said, reaching for another pastry because the plate was there and I had opinions about pastry plates that went unaddressed. “The man speaks in paragraphs of silence. I’ve had conversations with him where he said four words and I walked away feeling like I’d been briefed for a military operation.”