My stomach growls.
The timing is catastrophic.
He glances down at it and then back up and something shifts in his expression into something that is not quite amusement and not quite sympathy and is somehow worse than either.
He straightens and turns toward the door.
"Get the princess some food," he says to the men behind him. "Once a day. We don't want to spoil her too much."
He walks out but the light stays on this time, which is something.
I sink back against the wall and stare at the ceiling and think about Alana and for the first time in recent memory, I hope she opens her mouth.
Chapter Five
Luca
"—the third truck came in two hours behind schedule," Renzo says, turning a page on the clipboard he carries with the focused efficiency of someone who genuinely enjoys logistics. "Castellano says the delay was at the border, a documentation issue, nothing that can't be smoothed but it'll cost us another?—"
"Have Costa handle the documentation," I reply. "And tell Castellano if it happens again he pays the delay out of his own cut."
"Done." Renzo makes a note. "The warehouse on Fremont needs a new rotation, two of the night crew have been flagged?—"
Renzo has been with me for eleven years.
I trust very few people and the ones I do trust have earned it slowly and at considerable cost. Renzo Lotti earned it by being the only man in a room of twelve who told me the truth whenthe truth was not what I wanted to hear, and he has been at my right hand ever since. He is thirty years old and looks younger and thinks older and has instincts that can't be taught.
He is also, at this particular moment, talking and I am not fully listening. I draw on my cigarette and look at the far wall of the lobby but I see the cell floor. She was sitting on it and the hem of my trousers caught between two fingers, those blue eyes coming up to find mine.
Her lips were dry.
"Pull them both," I cut in. "If they've been flagged they're already compromised."
Renzo looks up from the clipboard briefly. He has known me long enough to know when I am present in a conversation and when I am not, and he is too professional to comment on it. He makes another note.
"The men are talking," he says. "Word got around that you have a woman in the cells. They're saying she's—" a brief pause, "—memorable."
My fingers tighten around the cigarette.
"It's Keller's daughter," I answer.
Renzo is quiet for a moment. "Keller."
He has never liked politicians. His position on them is consistent and unambiguous; they are, in his view, the most dangerous category of dishonest men because they have perfected the performance of honesty and they have institutional cover when the performance fails. I have always privately agreed with him.
Keller in particular.
Most men who come to me want something crude. Money, protection, a problem removed. Keller wanted all three dressed up in the language of mutual benefit and strategic partnership, and he delivered his requests with conviction.
I worked with him because he could give me something nobody else in New York could, access and legitimacy at a level that would have taken me a decade to build any other way. I held up my end. I removed his troubles quietly. And then Phillip Keller decided that the debt didn't exist.
That was the thing about politicians. They believed their own fiction eventually.
"What's your plan?" Renzo asks.
"I want Keller to come in himself," I confirm.
Renzo nods slowly. "The thing is," he says, in the tone he uses when he is about to say something I won't enjoy, "most men notice their children are missing within twenty-four hours. She's been down there for two days."
