"Three transit routes," I say. "The Calletti warehouse. And the Morandi compound, which we've been using for?—"
"Don't finish that sentence," Matteo says, not unkindly. "Walls."
I stop.
Matteo stands at the head of the table, and the quality of his attention in this moment is the reason he runs this organization and not any of the rest of us. He isn't reacting. He's already three moves forward, running it.
"We don't move on this yet," he says. "No response, no increased visible presence on the boundary, nothing that tells him we're rattled." He looks at each of us. "We find out what he's actually after before we give him anything." He turns to Enzo. "Pull everything we have on O'Rourke movements for the last month. Not just the east side, everything. I want the full picture."
"Already pulling," Enzo says.
"Dante, talk to Castellano. I want eyes on that boundary round the clock, but quiet. No uniforms, no obvious rotation." Matteo's gaze moves to me last. "Rafael. Your house is now the closest Brotherhood asset to the De Luca alliance. Which means if this is connected to Salvatore in any way, you're the first point of contact."
I hold his gaze. "You think it's connected."
"I think Killian O'Rourke going quiet for three weeks and then appearing on our boundary three days after you married Salvatore De Luca's daughter is a coincidence I'm not willing to believe in," Matteo says. "Watch your house. Watch her."
The room is quiet for a moment.
Watch her.
"Understood," I say. I already am.
CHAPTER TEN
GIA
The bedroom is very quiet after he leaves.
I stand in the middle of it for a moment, listening to the sound of nothing. His footsteps down the hall. The distant click of the front door. Then just the house settling around me, small sounds that fill the silence without doing anything useful about it.
I change into my own things, the soft trousers and the oversized top I brought from Paris that have seen me through approximately forty percent of my emotional crises, and I sit on the edge of the bed with every intention of sleeping.
I lie back.
I look at the ceiling.
I think about his hands on my back.
Stop,I tell myself.
I think about his hands on my back anyway.
The thing about tonight is that those gatherings are not new to me. Unlike my sister, I grew up in the mafia world, which means I have been in rooms exactly like Conti's estate since I was old enough to be dressed up and pointed at important men. I know how they work. I know the handshakes that are transactions and the smiles that mean something else and the second conversation running underneath every first one.
What I was not prepared for was him.
One word. That's all it took with Marchetti. I have lived in this world my entire life and I have never seen anything like it, which is saying something, and I am furious at how attractive I found it, which is saying something else entirely.
He is such a confusing man.
Cold over breakfast but he carries my shoes and kneels on cold stone to put slippers on my feet with his thumb pressing into the arch of my foot. I felt it go all the way up my spine and told myself it was nothing and I am still telling myself that and it is still not working.
I stare at the ceiling for another ten minutes and establish conclusively that sleep is not happening.
Fantastic. Wonderful. This is going great.
I get up.
