“Ah, Nikki, there you are.”
He smiled, showing white teeth. Then he saw her face, and adjusted to a serious expression.
“My father said he’d spoken with you,” he said. “I’m glad.”
Nikki thought about Vincente Di Pavola, that same smile as he greeted her from his yacht, his kind empathy a pretext for the transaction he’d wanted—the NDA he needed her to sign.
“Why the fuck should you be glad?” she demanded. “What makes you think I would ever want to see you?”
She continued towards her building. Enzo pushed back from the table and followed.
“Listen…just listen,” he said. “We were good together…you used to care about me.”
She stopped and glared.
“I did. And then you fucked Carmela; you gave Raffaele Barile a key to my home so he could beat the shit out of me; you refused to help when I needed you—when they were going to kill Gianni and Francesca and the kids. There’s no coming back from that, Enzo. This is when you leave and I never have to see you, never have to think about you ever again.”
The cold words burned her throat, a scouring pain to remove any vestigial remnant of love or loyalty. She struggled to breathe.
“I need you to sign an NDA,” he said. “Sign it, and I’ll be out of your life.”
“No,” Nikki said, and continued walking.
Enzo followed. “I need this. My father needs me protected before he lets me take over operations.”
Not long ago, she would have given anything to heal Enzo’s desperate need for Vincente’s approval. It was a bitter irony that father and son should unite around this.
“I can’t think of a single reason why I should help you,” she said.
She opened the gate to her building and stepped through, closing it behind her with a clang.
“He’ll pay you,” Enzo continued. “Anything you ask. I know things are difficult for you financially. You need help with the apartment…withCalypso…he can help.”
She took the stairs two at a time.
Enzo called out, “Carmela is pregnant…. I need this, Nikki.”
She hated the way her heart raced, how it ached…how her eyes burned.
Indoors, without waiting to take off her shoes, Nikki crossed to her training room. She slammed her fist into the punching bag, kicked and hit it again and again.
—
The anger ran its course, burning through her muscles, bloodying her unprotected knuckles, and bruising her shins.
Nikki showered.
She briefly considered eating chocolate for breakfast, then thought better of it and made a proper meal with bread, cheese, tomato, and avocado. Then she washed up, cleared the dining room table, and wiped away the crumbs.
She wouldn’t think about Enzo, she decided. The best—the only—thing to do was to work. She wasn’t part of the murder investigation anymore, but she’d promised Audrey Lake that she would find Claire’s killer, and she’d meant it. Now, she needed to figure out where to begin.
She seemed to hear Adriano’s voice in her thoughts:You must see—must understand the players and how they fit together.
The memory awakened a sense of Adriano again—the way he huffed out his breath, hands shoved in his pockets as he strode around a room, and their mother would say,You don’t solve a problem by moping. Think it through. Build a system. Analyze.
Nikki located a stack of note cards and set them on the table. On these, she wrote the names of everyone she knew associated with Claire Sexton and the information she had for each. Next, she wrote the details she’d learned about Claire’s murder, arranging this in a rough timeline across the table.
On Saturday, Claire had tucked Audrey into bed, then disembarked fromThe Prophet. She’d taken jewelry and cash, though not her passport. She left at night, unseen, and didn’t tell anyone. Three days later, during mass, she was stabbed to death in Chiesa del Gesù Nuovo.
