I shook my head. We'd talked around my situation enough that he had a general shape of it — girl from Italy, complicated family, needed a fresh start. He hadn't pushed for details and I hadn't offered them. Another understanding.
"Good," he said simply, and went back to the dishes.
The lunch rush was heavier than usual despite the rain, and I was still moving when the door chimed at half past one.
I looked up out of habit.
My blood froze.
Three men. Dark expensive suits, long wool coats, leather gloves. Moving with the particular unhurried certainty of people who had never once in their lives needed to rush because the world arranged itself around them. I knew that walk. I'd grownup watching men walk exactly like that through my father's house.
My brain ran the calculation in about two seconds.
I was in Constantine Venosa's city. I had been here for a month. I had not checked in with the family, which was not optional — it was a rule, as fundamental and non-negotiable as any other rule in this life. You entered another family's territory, you announced yourself. You didn't hide. You didn't pretend the rules didn't apply to you because you were trying to leave the life behind. The life didn't work that way, and I had always known the life didn't work that way.
I had chosen to ignore it because the alternative was letting people know where I was, and I wasn't ready to trust anyone with that information.
Now those rules were standing in the doorway in expensive wool coats and I had approximately thirty seconds to decide how to handle this.
Play it cool. My father's voice, of all people, in my head. Never let them see you calculating.
"Hello, gentlemen." I put a smile on my face and waited. "How can I help you?"
Jacob came out from the back, wiping his hands on a dish towel, and I watched his face go through something in the half second before he arranged it into neutrality. He knew these men. Not personally perhaps, but he knew what they represented — the particular architecture of power that ran underneath this city like its own underground river. Jacob had lived in Chicago long enough to know exactly which current you didn't swim against.
“Jacob, if you don't mind, I need to talk to Cecilia in private, please." The tallest of the three spoke. Dark eyes, a jaw that looked like it had taken a hit or two and not minded, the easy authority of a man who was used to being listened to. He wasn't the top of this particular chain — I could tell that from theway he held himself, capable and confident but with one degree of deference built in, the posture of a man who answered to someone — but he was close to it.
Jacob appeared at my elbow. "What have you gotten yourself into, CeCe?" His whisper was low and urgent. "Do you know who these men are?"
"I haven't done anything," I said through gritted teeth, which was mostly true. "And no, I don't know who they are," which was mostly a lie.
"She hasn't done anything wrong," the man said, patient in the way that people were patient when patience was a choice and not a limitation. "We just need to talk to her. I assure you, sir, we aren't here to cause trouble."
Jacob set his dish towel on the counter with the deliberateness of a man making a decision. "Thank you, Signor." He looked at me with something between sympathy and apology. “I’ll go upstairs. CeCe, ring the bell when you're done."
He disappeared up the back stairs and I didn't blame him. One of the men turned the open sign to closed just as a customer reached the door. The click of the lock might as well have been a gunshot with the way I jumped.
Venosa men. Which confirmed what I'd already suspected the moment they walked in. Constantine Venosa knew I was here. He knew I'd been here for a month. He knew I'd broken protocol.
Whatever happened next was going to depend entirely on what kind of man he was.
"Please, Signora, have a seat." The tall one gestured to a booth. I moved slowly, buying myself the seconds I needed to think. Slid onto the bench. Watched him settle across from me, his eyes steady and unhurried. The other two men positioned themselves facing the door, their backs to us, which told methe conversation was meant to be private and the door was the concern — not me.
That was marginally reassuring.
"I'm Lorenzo," he said, which I hadn't expected. Names implied a kind of negotiation rather than enforcement. "And you already know why we're here."
I kept my mouth shut, I wasn’t about to offer more information than he needed. Lorenzo looked at me for a moment. “But, that's going to be a conversation for someone above my pay grade." The corner of his mouth moved very slightly. "He'll want to hear it from you directly."
The door opened.
I felt it before I saw it — the shift in the room, the way Lorenzo straightened almost imperceptibly, the way the two men at the door seemed to pull themselves together without visibly moving. The particular change in atmosphere that happened when the person everyone in the room actually answered to walked in.
I turned.
He was taller than I'd built him in my imagination, which was saying something given that I'd been dreading this moment for a month. Dark suit, no coat despite the December cold, dark hair, and a face that would have been merely handsome if it weren't for what was happening behind his eyes — a quality of focused intelligence that took in the entire room in one sweep before settling on me with an attention that felt almost physical.
The man looked at me the way a man looked at something he'd been trying to understand from a photograph and was now seeing in three dimensions for the first time.
