“No.”
“Does Alessandro pay you by the word withheld or the woman irritated?”
He almost smiles. Then footsteps sound from behind him.
Marco. He comes around the corner with a folder in one hand and a face arranged into the bland respect men use when they know they are about to become complicit. He stops when he sees us.
“Problem?” he asks.
“No,” Luca says.
“Yes,” I say.
Marco looks between us. There’s a reason he runs the day-to-day operations. He can calculate danger quickly.
And today, apparently, I’m danger.
“Miss Brennan,” he says carefully, “the council meeting is private.”
“All interesting things are,” I say.
“It would be better if you waited in your suite.”
“Better for whom?”
He hesitates.
I smile. “How refreshing. Honesty through silence. Alessandro’s influence is spreading.”
Marco looks past me toward the south suite door. Then back at Luca. Something passes between them.
Whatever’s happening in that room involves me. They don’t want me there. Therefore, I need to be there.
I take one step around Luca. This time, he catches my wrist. The gesture is so clean, so practiced, that rage arrives before fear. I look down at his hand. Then at him.
“Remove it.”
His jaw shifts once. He removes it.
Good. We’ve all learned something.
I smooth the fabric over my wrist, though there is no mark. “If you touch me again without permission, I will bite you.”
Marco blinks.
Luca says, “Understood.”
“I’m not joking,” I say.
“I know.”
The council chamber doors are two corridors away. A voice rises from inside. Muffled, male, old enough to have become convinced that cruelty is wisdom.
Giulio Marchetti.
I don’t hear every word, but I hear one.
“Rehabilitation.”
