"I'm watching our six."
"You're watching me."
"You're in our six."
The corner of her mouth moves. Not quite a smile — closer to the expression she gets when she's decided to let me have something.
It burns low in my gut, slow and persistent. An ember I've stopped trying to put out.
Alessandro spotsme before I spot him.
His eyes find Serafina first, then me, and one eyebrow lifts. Almost imperceptible. I give him nothing. He gives me the look he's been giving me since we were boys.I see exactly what's happening. We'll discuss it later.
Then Clara appears at his elbow — Alessandro's wife, built for rooms like this — and reclaims him. He's smirking on the way out. I choose not to interpret it.
Matteo finds us ten minutes later. One look at me. One look at Serafina. One look at my hand on her back.
He says nothing. He never has to.
Valentina extends her hand immediately — Matteo's girlfriend, the fashion designer whose waitlist reads like a Forbes ranking. The introduction is barely necessary. "Valentina Russo."
"Serafina Virelli." A beat. "Is that from the winter collection?"
Valentina smiles. The real one. "You have a good eye."
"Every woman in New York has been losing her mind over that neckline for three months," Serafina says, with the flat delivery of a medical fact, which makes it funnier and more genuine than anything else said in this room tonight.
Something clicks between them. Quick, quiet, entirely feminine. The recognition of two women who built something of their own in worlds that had other plans for them.
Valentina's eyes cut to me. "I hope he's treating you like a queen. If he isn't, I have several unfinished alterations I could misplace by accident." A conspiratorial drop in her voice. "He's the troublemaker in the family. Always has been."
"My suits are not a bargaining chip, Valentina."
"Everything is a bargaining chip,tesoro— darling." She pats my arm. "That's what I keep telling Matteo, and neither of you ever listens."
Serafina looks at me with an expression I've never seen on her before.
Delighted. Genuinely, openly delighted, like she's just discovered something she intends to deploy against me for the foreseeable future.
"I like her," she murmurs against my ear. "A lot."
Matteo claps a hand on my shoulder on his way past. Firm. Brief. The grip of a man expressing something in the only language Moretti men actually know.
Don't screw this up.
Then they're gone.
We work the room.
She's good at it. Better than she wants to be. I watch her field-strip a state assemblyman's question in three sentences, then receive a donor's compliment with exactly the warmth it deserves, which is not much, and the donor walks away feeling like he received something.
She was built for this world.
She hates it.
I can see both things at once, and they wreck me in equal measure.
"You're good at this," I say when we find a moment near the bar.
