Page 7 of The Devils in the Details

I looked down at my bare feet. Looked at the sneakers by the door, which had last seen daylight approximately two weeks ago. Looked back at my feet.

“Shoes,” I said to the empty apartment. “Right.”

The text arrived thirty seconds later. An address in the heart of Florence, in a neighborhood where the buildings were old enough to have opinions about modern architecture.

I knew the street. I’d grown up three blocks from it, sleeping in doorways and learning which bakeries threw out day-old bread instead of locking their dumpsters.

I closed the laptop. Brushed caramel crumbs off my thigh. Checked the time. Two hours to figure out what to wear to a job interview with a man who ran a crime family and apparently employed people who considered “wear shoes” to be adequate preparatory advice.

This was either going to be spectacular or catastrophic.

I was betting on both.

* * * *

The Romano palazzo occupied a building that had probably been beautiful before the concept of “beautiful” had a name. Ochre plaster, iron-studded door, a small brass plate with no name on it because people who needed to read the nameplate weren’t the people who needed to be here.

The ground floor entrance was exactly what you’d expect from a family that had been accumulating power and art and enemies since approximately the Renaissance—understated in the way that only truly expensive things managed to be, the kind of understatement that cost more than shouting ever could.

I stood on the cobblestone street and looked up. The building looked back down with the mild indifference of something that had survived wars, plagues, and several generations of Romano family leadership without particularly caring about any of it.

The courtyard hit me the second I stepped through the door. Sun-warmed stone, the kind of heat that radiated up through the soles of your feet and said, in the unmistakable voice of several hundred years of Italian masonry, that you were standing on history and it was warmer than you expected.

I’d taken my sneakers off about halfway here because Florence in late afternoon was the temperature of a well-preheated oven and my feet had opinions about being trapped in synthetic materials when the alternative was cool air and cobblestone.

Those opinions had been correct until approximately four seconds ago, when the cobblestones decided that “warm“ was a relative term and “surface of the sun” was closer to the mark.

“Jesus Christ,” I muttered, and hopped onto a patch of shadow. My right foot had already developed the distinct sensation of being lightly grilled.

I put the sneakers back on. The man who’d called about shoes had been right, which was irritating on principle.

I tied the laces with more force than necessary, as if the shoes themselves were personally responsible for the fact that centuries-old stone retained heat like it was getting paid by the degree.

The courtyard was small, intimate in the way that only very expensive spaces managed to be—lemon tree in one corner, fig in another, stone bench and iron table positioned like someone had arranged the entire scene for a painting they were planning to title “Wealthy People Having Profound Thoughts, Probably About Wine.”

The air smelled like stone and green things and the faint drift of espresso from somewhere inside, which my stomach registered with immediate and traitorous interest.

A man appeared in the doorway to the interior. Not the kind of appearance that involved walking—more the kind where one moment there was doorway and emptiness, and the next moment there was a man, and your brain had to catch up to the fact that he’d been standing there the whole time and you just hadn’t noticed him because he was the exact color and temperament of the shadow he’d been occupying.

Leon Nikolaidis. I recognized him from the security footage I’d pulled last night, which he didn’t know I’d pulled and which I had no intention of mentioning unless the conversation got really, really boring.

Up close, he was exactly what the footage had suggested: tall, broad, the kind of build that came from years of physical labor rather than a gym membership. Black hair, brown eyes, and a face that gave away absolutely nothing—not interest, not boredom, not the time of day.

His hands were large and still at his sides in a way that suggested he was comfortable with them being still, which in my experience was not a quality you found in people who hadn’t done violence and been fine with it afterward.

He looked at me. I looked at him. The lemon tree, having no stake in this particular standoff, continued being a tree.

“You’re early,” he said. His voice was exactly what it had been on the phone—flat, informational, the vocal equivalent of concrete.

“Traffic was light,” I said. “Also I hate being late. It makes me anxious, and when I’m anxious I talk, and when I talk people usually want me to stop, so here we are. Early. Mission accomplished.”

He blinked. Once. Slowly.

It was not a friendly blink.

Then he turned and walked back through the doorway without checking to see if I was following.

I followed.