Page 8 of The Devils in the Details

The hallway smelled like beeswax and wood polish and something underneath both that I couldn’t quite place—something older, earthier, with notes of leather and cold stone and the mustiness of rooms that didn’t get enough air.

I filed it under “bad decisions” in my mental catalog and kept walking.

Leon’s pace was steady and unhurried. He didn’t look back. He didn’t need to. His shoulders were wide enough to block most of the corridor, which meant following him involved walking in the narrow strip of space his body didn’t occupy, like being the second car in a very determined tunnel.

“Nice place,” I tried. “Very... historical. You guys do the frescoes yourselves, or was that contracted out?”

Nothing. Not even a twitch.

“Right. Silent treatment. I respect that. Very enigmatic. Very ‘man of few words.’ I get it. I do. Though for the record, the man-of-few-words thing works better when you actually have words to be sparing with, otherwise it’s just—”

He stopped. Turned. Looked at me with an expression that suggested he was mentally calculating the distance to the nearest window and whether my body would fit through it.

I stopped talking.

We continued walking. The hallway was long, lined with dark oil portraits of men who all shared the same basic architecture—strong jaw, heavy-lidded eyes, the set of the mouth that said “I own things and people and the concept of mercy is negotiable depending on my mood.”

Generations of Romano men, staring down from the walls with uniform mild contempt, as if the act of being looked at by someone walking beneath them was personally offensive.

I counted security cameras at each corner. Weight-sensing pads under two of the rugs, barely visible if you weren’t looking for the slight depression in the pile. The bulge of a firearm under Leon’s jacket, riding his right hip with the comfortable familiarity of something that lived there. Every door we passed was closed.

Then we reached the office, and Leon pushed the door open, and Aristoteles Romano stood there, and my entire internal monologue did the conversational equivalent of driving off a cliff.

Six-foot-three. Two hundred and twenty-five pounds if he was an ounce, all of it the kind of muscle that came from actual work rather than cosmetic lifting. Dark hair, black eyes, and a jaw that looked like it had been carved out of something that had put up a significant fight.

A scar marked one cheekbone, pale against his skin. More scars visible at his collar and on his forearms where his sleeves were rolled to mid-forearm, a topography of violence written in raised tissue.

Tattoos ran down both arms, old work, the ink settled into the skin the way stories settle into places that have heard them too many times to forget.

He was wearing a white shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, a denim vest fitted over it with pockets that were absolutely not just for aesthetics—I clocked the knife handles immediately, one in each interior pocket, positioned for a cross-draw. Silver herringbone chain at his throat. Silver watch. Silver ring with a black onyx stone on his right hand.

He moved with the kind of quiet authority that made the air in the room rearrange itself around him without him asking. Not the swagger of a man who wanted to be noticed. The simpler, more dangerous stillness of a man who had never needed to announce himself because the world had learned, through experience, to step aside when he entered a space.

My first coherent thought was that I would very much like to sit in that man’s lap.

My second thought was that this was a catastrophically bad idea with a body count attached to it, and I should probably file it under “impulses to be examined later, preferably with alcohol and a responsible adult present, neither of which were currently available.”

I filed both thoughts. Smiled pleasantly. The smile felt approximately as stable as a house built on sand during a hurricane, but I committed to it anyway.

“Mr. Romano,” I said. “Zephyr Kontos. Thanks for meeting me.”

He looked at me. Not the way Leon had looked at me—Leon’s look had been assessment, the cold cataloging of a potential threat.

This was different.

This was the look of a man reading something written in a language he wasn’t entirely sure he believed existed, and deciding whether the effort of translation was worth his time.

He gestured to the chair across from the desk.

I sat.

The desk between us was mahogany, wide enough that reaching across it would have required commitment, and old enough that the wood had developed its own opinion about sunlight and human fingerprints.

It had seen better decades. Possibly better centuries.

Ari Romano sat on the other side of it and looked at me like I was a math problem he wasn’t sure was worth solving.

“Your resume says you speak seven languages.” His voice was low, rough, the kind of voice that didn’t need volume to land. It carried in the high-ceilinged room like something with weight.