The phone stops. Rings again.
I let it ring.
Whatever he wants—the Rossi situation, the Ferrante negotiations, another lecture on family duty—can wait. Gabriella Rossi and her alliance marriage can burn for all I care. I’ve been dodging that particular trap for eighteen months, and I’ll dodge it for eighteen more if necessary. Gabriella is beautiful, but she always makes me think of a knife. Sharp. Cold. Designed for a single purpose.
I have no interest in being cut.
The phone goes silent and a text follows. Then another.
I don’t read them.
Instead, I watch the window where Violet has appeared.
She’s silhouetted against the warm light of her apartment, standing at the sill where she keeps her trinkets. From this angle, I can see the profile of her face, the way she tilts her head as she looks out at the darkening street. Her fingers reach for something, the blood oranges, and she picks one up, weighing it in her palm.
My jaw tightens.
She doesn’t know I’m here. That’s the thing. She moves without performance, without awareness of eyes on her body, and every unguarded gesture is a scrap of her not meant for anyones eyes.
A spray of citrus oil catches the light as she digs her thumb into the peel.
I can imagine the scent from here. Sweet and sharp and faintly bitter, like Sicily itself. Like her, perhaps. American sweetness over something more complicated. She carries sadness in her shoulders, in the way she walks through crowds without meeting anyone’s eyes.
But there’s steel under the sadness. I’ve watched her climb scaffolding like she was born on it. Watched her argue with suppliers in broken Italian, refusing to accept inferior materials for her precious frescoes. Watched her stand alone in a four-hundred-year-old cathedral as the light failed around her, sketching with the kind of focused intensity that borders on religious fervor.
She cares about things. Dead things. Broken things. Things that need saving.
What would she make of me, I wonder? A living thing beyond repair.
The orange peel drops to the sill in a long spiral. She separates a segment, and I watch.Watch, like a fucking teenager through a bedroom window, like this is anything other than what it is, as she brings it to her lips.
Her mouth opens.
The segment disappears.
My fingers tap the steering wheel. Once. Twice. A rhythm I don’t consciously choose, matching the pulse that’s picked up in my throat. She’s just eating an orange. A mundane act performed by millions of people every day. And yet.
And yet.
Her lips close around another segment, her jaw moving slightly as she chews. For one irrational second I am certain she can see me as she looks out the window, at the street below, at the evening settling over Palermo like a blanket. Certain she’slooking directly into the dark interior of this car and asking herself who sits inside it.
But her gaze moves on, unseeing as she stares into the distance.
She doesn’t know I’m here. Doesn’t suspect.
That’s the thing about Violet Murphy. I’ve watched her scan streets with the wariness of someone who learned young that danger wears friendly faces, and yet she’s remarkably blind to the threat sitting sixty meters from her door.
Because I am a threat. Let’s not pretend otherwise.
I built a billion-dollar empire out of art and blood. The legitimate half buys me seats at charity galas and invitations to museum openings. The other half, the one that really matters, buys fear. Respect. The kind of power that doesn’t need to announce itself because everyone already knows. Men have died by my order. By my hand. I don’t lose sleep over it. They knew the rules when they entered the game.
But she didn’t.
Violet Murphy is an innocent. A civilian. A woman who thinks she came to Sicily to restore crumbling frescoes and found something to believe in, when the truth is she’s been here on my sufferance since her application crossed my desk.
The Marchetti Foundation receives three hundred grant applications a year. We fund maybe twelve. I don’t review them personally, that’s what staff is for, but something about her file caught my attention. The photograph, perhaps. Dark auburn hair, the challange in her eyes, a mouth that looked like it had forgotten how to smile.
Or maybe it was the portfolio. Image after image of her work. Damaged things made whole, broken things restored, beautiful things saved from obscurity and decay. She has a gift. An eye for seeing what something was meant to be, beneath all the damage.
