"Yes."
"You've been in here for hours?"
He glances at me. "Since you went to sleep."
"That's…incredible."
"My mother taught me," he says, without me asking. "When I was about twelve. She said it was important to have a signature dish." He adds cannellini beans to the pot and stirs them in. "Ichose ribollita because it annoyed Benito that I could make it and he couldn't."
"That's a very you reason to learn to cook."
"Yes," he agrees, without any apparent shame.
"So your mother taught Benito to cook as well? How much time did you spend together growing up?"
"He came down from Florence during the school breaks and one weekend a month. My mamma and his thought it was important for us to know each other."
"And your father didn't mind?"
"Oh, he did, but my grandfather was still alive back then and my mother went to him about it. He had a real soft spot for her and told my father to let her do whatever she wanted. He died when I was fifteen and Benito was thirteen. By then I was a Made Man and if I wanted to visit my brother in Florence, nobody could stop me."
After that revelation he goes quiet and so do I. He was already in the mafia at fifteen. Does that mean he'd killed someone by then? That's what you have to do to get in, isn't it?
A shudder goes through me, not at the thought of Adriano taking a life because I've made peace with that concept, but at the realisation that he started so young.
At fifteen the biggest drama in my life centred around persuading my parents to let me stay out later at the weekends. He was being initiated into a world there’s no way out of but death. The contrast couldn’t be starker.
The silence drags on for a while as Adriano cooks. Eventually he turns to me.
"Paolo's coming over."
He's mentioned his right-hand man to me but as yet I haven't met him. Apparently he was on a family vacation. Who knew enforcers did such things?
"Tonight?"
"Any time now. There are things we need to discuss." He looks at me briefly. "You don't have to disappear."
"You want me to meet Paolo."
"He's important. You're important. You need to meet sometime."
I'm still basking in the glow of being told I'm important when singing in the corridor heralds Paolo's arrival. He walks in, hands in pockets, massacring the songFlowers. It's not the first glimpse of this man I expected. The way Adriano talked about him I'd pictured him more as the knife-juggling sort of entertainer.
He's shorter than I imagined too. With dark hair going gray at the temples, eyes that have seen things I don't even want to think about and a smile as wide as the Tiber, he looks at Adriano and then at me. He sniffs the air.
"Ribollita."
Ah, identifying dishes from their aroma is his party trick.
"Sit down," Adriano says.
Paolo grabs a bottle of wine and two glasses and joins me at the table.
"Eliza, Paolo. Paolo, Eliza," Adriano says without turning to look at us.
Paolo studies my face and his eyes darken. These men really do not like to see a woman hurt which is ironic since I'm pretty sure Adriano thought about killing me more than once in the beginning. I tilt my head to the side.
"Four stitches." I'm strangely proud of that.
