At my hand on his daughter's back. At the way she's turned toward me. At whatever is on my face right now that I haven't had time to clear. His expression does something that makes every instinct I have go cold and ready.
Not anger. Anger would be manageable.
Recognition.
He looks at me the way a man looks at something he intends to take apart slowly. He knows I see it. He wants me to.
I hold his gaze.
Then I lean until my lips brush her ear.
"Walk. East exit. Eyes on the door."
Her breath catches. "Is he?—"
"Eyes on the door."
She walks.
I keep myself between her and her father as the corridor opens ahead of us, my hand at her back, the exit pulling closer with every step.
I don't look back at Giovanni Virelli.
I don't need to.
That smile of his isn't the smile of a man watching a defeat.
It's the smile of a man who planned for the exit.
I've worn it myself, in a dozen rooms where everything depended on the other side not knowing what was already in motion.
"Twelve more steps," I say against her ear. "Don't stop."
19
SERAFINA
Itake twelve steps toward the east exit before it happens.
Not a gun. Not Falco. Not any of the threats we planned for, mapped, and built contingencies around.
A hand. On my arm. Firm, certain, coming from my left — the side Luca isn't on — in the half-second it takes for Senator Calloway to step directly into Luca's path and start talking loudly about something that requires immediate attention.
A distraction. Planned. Executed in under three seconds.
I open my mouth.
"Don't," says the man at my side. His voice is low, close to my ear, the voice of someone who has done this before. "He'll be fine. This is just a conversation."
He steers me sideways into an alcove off the main corridor before I can pull free — his grip isn't brutal, but it's absolute. Two more men are behind me, and I clock them too late.
The hand releases me.
I spin around.
My father stands in the center of the room.
The warmth is still there. It's always there. That's what people don't understand about my father — the warmth is real. He genuinely loves me. He has also spent forty years doing monstrous things, and those two facts have always existed in him simultaneously without any apparent contradiction.
