"Go," she says. "I'll be here when you need me."
“Just going to greet Dahlia. I’ll be back.” I squeeze back and then I let go. I walk out of the bar and into the corridor and toward the east entrance where Dahlia Bonaccorso is walking back into a world she left behind to say goodbye to the man who built it.
The whiskey still warm in my chest and the taste of Savannah still on my mouth and all of that has to take a backseat as I say goodbye to the only Don I’ve ever known.
Chapter Fourteen: Savannah
He'sbeengonethirtyminutes, and I've wiped the counter four times.
The bar doesn't need wiping anymore, but my hands need a job, and the rag is here and Emilio is not, so the counter gets wiped. Repeatedly.
I pour myself the rest of the Macallans because I need it. Cheap liquor makes anxiety louder. Good liquor gives it manners.
I don't even know why I'm anxious. Emilio went to greet Aurelio's daughter, not storm a building. But everyone has been holding its breath since Leone called Dahlia three days ago, and the arrival of someone's child to say goodbye to their dying father is a lot of weird energy to be around.
Technically, I shouldn’t feel any type of way about it, because I didn’t really know him.
Except I do feel something about it. Gigi died in a room that smelled the same way Aurelio's room smells, and I sat beside her bed for six days counting the seconds between breaths, and nobody called anyone to come say goodbye because there was nobody to call. It was just me. Me and the hospice nurse and a sixty-three-year-old woman who raised me and whose lungs quit working on a Thursday afternoon while I was in the cafeteria buying a Sprite.
I wasn't even in the room.
Years and that fact still sits in my stomach and I haven’t bought a Sprite since.
The bottle cap comes out of my pocket. I roll it between my fingers and drink the whiskey and wait.
Emilio comes back with an entourage.
I hear them before I see them. His voice, loud and warm and doing the thing he does when he's trying to fill a room with enough energy to drown out whatever everyone's actually feeling. Then other voices. Claudio's and Charlotte's, asking something about food. And a voice I don't recognize, female,with a flatness to it that says the woman speaking is holding herself together with effort and practice.
They round the corner into the bar, and I get my first look at Dahlia Bonaccorso.
She's shorter than I expected. Mid-twenties, dark hair pulled back tight, leather jacket, black jeans, boots that have been walked in hard and often. Pretty face, strong jaw, and eyes that do the same thing mine do when I walk into a new room. They scan.
Same playbook. Different teacher.
The man behind her is a problem.
Not a threat. A problem in the sense that he takes up so much physical space that the bar, which felt normal-sized five seconds ago, now feels like a closet. He's massive. Not tall-massive, built-massive, the kind of body that comes from years of violent use. Wide through the shoulders, thick through the neck, arms that make Emilio's look decorative. His head is buzzed short, and his face is flat and blunt and designed to end conversations before they start.
He stands behind Dahlia. Not beside her. Behind. Two inches of space between his hand and her lower back. He doesn't touch her and he doesn't need to. It’s an invisible tether that saysminein a language every woman in this room understands.
Claudio and Charlotte file in behind them. Charlotte's got flour on her sweater, which means today was a four-dozen-cookie day, which means the compound's emotional barometer is at fuck-this-shit and Charlotte's been baking her way through it. Claudio is Claudio. Black clothes, no expression, hand around Charlotte's waist.
"Savannah," Emilio says, parking himself at the end of the bar with his hip on the counter, "meet Dahlia. And that lovely mountain of flesh behind her is Bam."
I nod at Dahlia. "Hey."
She nods back. We look at each other, not hostile, not friendly. Two women deciding whether the other one is going to be a headache. Whatever she sees, it passes, because she pulls out the stool in front of me and sits down.
"You're the bartender," she says.
"Yep."
"Good. I need a drink. Something that doesn't come with a speech about how glad everyone is that I'm home." She puts both elbows on the counter. "I've been here forty-five minutes, and I've already gotten three speeches. From men who couldn't look me in the eye while they gave them."
I pull the next best whiskey and pour three fingers. The woman earned it by walking through those gates at all.
She picks it up, smells it, drinks half in one pull, and sets it down. Her face doesn't change. She's been drinking whiskey since before it was cool, or she's too tired to react, or both.
