By noon, the retraction posts to the press wire. The brand calls it “strategic realignment”. To me, it is balance restored. Russo’s name returns to the guest list, this time above Benedetti’s. The owner himself sends an invitation to the gala, both as an admission and insurance. My presence in that room tells everyone which debts are settled and which are still open.
The gala is not for pleasure. It is a ledger in silk. Chandeliers, photographers, a circle of investors who mistake light for safety. I will stand among them, the silent proof that the house still remembers who keeps its windows intact. Benedetti will be there too, or some of his men will. The brand owner will feel safe. Safe men talk too much and turn bold. Bold men forget the room has corners.
I am there to listen when the corners start talking back.
I run my checks. The suit is Napoli, charcoal black. The shoulders are soft and the cut clean and private. No one at thegala could guess what rides beneath it. The front row would faint if they knew. I smile, wry and small.
The holster sits high and flat against my ribcage. The pistol is polished and oiled. An extra magazine rides in my inside pocket, and a slim knife sits at my belt. None of it shouts. It reads like professional discretion, not menace.
There are security measures at shows—bag checks, roving guards, and a scanner at the door—but I know all my moves. My credentials are neat and unremarkable. Everything is calibrated to avoid fuss and notice, not to provoke it.
The palazzo doors open to light and money. Heat and movement press forward in one slow wave. Music glides over marble while photographers and clients orbit for the best angle, polite noise hiding sharp intent. I step left, then another half-step, and the column takes me out of frame. Silk, tulle, and perfume drift together until the room feels lit from within. My place is against the stone, where I can see both exits and the mirror that watches the long room. I note the staff first. They know more than guests. One bartender’s hands are too clean for a man who pours. He is not a bartender. He is house security planted in a vest. The earpiece tells me which team he belongs to. He is not ours, not Benedetti’s.
I assess the possible threats. A thin man in a navy suit stands with his toes pointed at the south doors and never moves them. He watches the wrong things. Inside his jacket, a small blade does not escape me. I mark him. A woman with a cross-body bag keeps her elbow locked over it and her jaw clenched. She is not here for the show. She is here to hand something to someone who is late. I mark her. Two men by the dais wear donor pins and bad shoes. Their eyes have the flatness you get when you have seen men die. Soldiers in borrowed tuxes. They could beBenedetti, or they could be ours. I mark them and wait for a signal. None comes.
Then the runway opens and the room shifts. I do not pay for fashion, but I understand theater. The look that owns the night steps out, and the crowd tilts with it. She moves like a river, the skirt all business until it decides not to be. The organza lifts and settles like a secret, whispering that office and stage can share the same floor if a woman chooses it. I like that. The woman hasstile e sangue freddo, style and composure. Phones rise in a glittering wave. Good work. Someone at Verlane knows how people look when their hands remember purpose.
Then she walks.
You would expect her face to be colder. It is not. Her eyes catch green under the lights and hold it. She is enjoying the work, confident and self-contained. Freckles the brand did not bury. Hair that looks as if it takes an hour but moves as if it took five minutes and a clean brush. She knows how to hold a gaze without holding still. That is an art. The crowd watches the clothes. I watch her hands as she takes the turn. Fingers ease, then settle. She has control.
I do not like being pulled by strangers. I feel the pull anyway. It tightens when she looks across the room, not at the front row, but at the column. At me.
Bold. She sees a man who does not belong and stops pretending she does not see him. My rules are simple. Never be photographed. Never bring civilians into this. Never let interest cloud the job. Interest is a soft word for what moves in my chest when she smiles at nothing and then smiles at me.
I look away and complete my sweep. The CFO stands beneath a chandelier with a woman who laughs as if he has just told the best joke in Milan. When he sees me, he flinches, then buries it under a grin. Good. He remembers.
A man with a Benedetti posture stands across the room near the double doors. The Benedetti clan has been the Russos’ disease for twenty years, all polish on the surface and rot underneath, men who dress like bankers and move like soldiers. The scar beneath his right eye marks him as a Falchi runner, one of the small fish they use when they do not want the blood traced back to them. He should not be here, not this close to the runway, not inside a building that still owes us clean money.
My mind stays on business. Benedetti has been edging into Russo territory for months, testing for cracks, pushing through ports and nightclubs that were ours before their fathers learned to shave. One mistake here, one whisper to the wrong donor, and the night turns from silk to smoke. The gala may smell of perfume and champagne, but under the chandeliers, it is still a table, and every man at it is playing for territory.
The finale arrives with confetti and the designer’s bow, and the room roars. I move with it, grazing shoulders, drifting back to the column that gives me a clean sightline to the side doors. My drink in my right hand is both prop and sensor. The glass tells me how people brush when they pass, how close they dare come, whether I am about to be interrupted. I do not like surprises.
She crosses the floor toward me, and I do not pretend otherwise. My gaze pulls her. The rest of the room narrows until it is only sound and light. The dress is deep green now, bias-cut silk that throws her eyes into gold at the edges. Her smile belongs to rooms like this, but not only to them. The freckles the brandcould have erased stay where they belong. I do not like that I notice.
She lifts my whiskey and drinks, says something about guarding glasses. I hear the words, and I hear what sits beneath them—humor, provocation, a test. I answer with a line, and she names the distance in me. I tell her maybe I am the door. It amuses her that I might be a door and never a diversion. I mean it, and I should be angry, but her smile reaches a place I have kept empty on purpose.
She asks my name. I tell her Teo and add that I make problems smaller. She calls me vague, and she is not wrong. I ask about her work, and she answers that she sells winter dreams, and that is the truth. Her hazel eyes catch the light and warm. They are expressive without theatrics, quick to laugh, and quicker to track a room.
We dance. I place my right hand at the small of her back and keep it half an inch lower so the line of my arm makes a deliberate shadow. She notices the difference and relaxes by degrees. She moves like someone who learned young how to claim a room. When I turn her at the change in the melody, she thinks the motion belongs to the song. It does not. I am guiding her to hold a line that keeps the east wall camera from framing my face.
We finish at the French doors. She wants air, and I want the same. Outside, Milan unfolds. The cathedral spire cuts the sky, a tram hums below, and the arc at the wire throws a scatter of sparks like cold confetti. She lists three parties she should attend and then says "pizza on a curb" as if she is naming a prayer. I tell her to do that. She laughs. The sound is small and honest, and I enjoy it.
She glances at my jacket and reads more than cloth. I shift my stance to obscure the holster and the ridge that gives away the shape beneath. She asks for a secret. I do not offer one. She is sharp and calls it security, pretending she knows the trade. Close enough. The night is honest in its cold. The chill writes itself across her shoulders. I could take her back inside, hand her to the room, and let the night tidy itself. Half my head says I should do that. I do not.
“Come with me,” she says. “There is a hotel across the street. The bar cares about the pour.”
It would be simple, and it would be careless. A Falchi runner leans at the far end of the balcony, pretending to smoke while listening. The hotel will be a stage, not a refuge. Eyes and phones will be everywhere. I want a place I control.
“My suite,” I say, turning my face to her. “If we go anywhere, it will be there.”
She searches for a hook and finds none. “Is it far?” she asks.
“No,” I say.
I steer us through the door and into the press of bodies. I do not take her hand. My knuckles part a service corridor and we move under a strip of office light that smells of paper and toner. She watches me, curiosity and caution balanced on the same line. She does not break it. Good.
The driver waits in the alley, engine low and eyes on mirrors. I open the rear door and let her slide in ahead of me. “The hotel,” I tell him, and he pulls us smoothly into traffic, keeping a straight line toward the river and the tower where I keep a suite under an alias, close to the cathedral and the exits.
