“Santo too. Dante called him in an hour ago.”
“I know.”
He held the hug another half-second, kissed the top of Angela’s head like a brother would, and stepped back. The grin he gave her was real. The look he flicked at me over her shoulder was not. It was the wary, careful look of a man who had just been asked to walk into a room where his cousin was about to set himself on fire.
He held the door.
“Come in, bella,” he said. “Coffee’s hot.”
We crossed the threshold. The carriage house was warm and full of the smells I knew by heart now — garlic from whatever Tonio had been doing on the stove, the moka, woodsmoke from the fireplace at the far end, and the cologne the brothers wore stacked over each other in the air like layers of paint. Olimpo was sprawled in front of the hearth, head up, ears forward, watching us with the alert calm of a dog who’d already decided we were not a threat.
Voices from the kitchen end of the room. Dante’s, level. Sal’s, shorter. Marco saying something quiet that ended in a laugh that wasn’t a laugh.
I kept my hand at Angela’s back. I felt the bones of her spine through the wool of the coat, the tension humming up under my palm. She walked the way she walked into every room, measuring it, but I had learned by now to read the small tells — the slight in-breath, the way her left thumb pressed against the inside of her left index finger like she was checking a pulse.
We came around the corner of the kitchen.
The room went quiet. Not all at once — in a wave, the way a flock of birds turns. Sal first, because Sal was always first; his head came up from the folder open in front of him on the long reclaimed-wood table, and his eyes found Angela. Then Dante, at the head of the table, who lowered the espresso cup he had just lifted and set it back on the saucer with a click. Then Marco, leaning against the counter with his phone in his hand, who slid the phone into his pocket without looking down. Then Santo, who was standing like an animal, back against the brick wall, arms folded, the muscle in his jaw already moving before he’d had time to think about it.
Four men. Four kinds of stillness. The fire popped in the grate.
I stepped a half-pace forward so that I was at Angela’s shoulder, not in front of her, not behind. Where I had decided, on the drive over, I was going to stand from now on.
“Angela,” I said. “You know Tonio. You’ve met Sal once, briefly. This is Dante Caruso. Don Caruso. Head of the family in Chicago.” Dante did not stand, but he inclined his head a fraction, a courtesy that he extended to no one without intention. “This is his brother, Marco.” Marco gave her a small, careful smile that did not reach his eyes. “And this is Santo. Their brother.” Santo did not move at all.
Angela held herself very still. I felt the breath she took.
“It’s good to meet you,” she said. Her voice was steady. “I’m sorry to arrive without warning.”
Nobody answered. The silence sat on the kitchen like weather.
Dante was the one who broke it, because Dante was always the one who broke it.
“Pietro,” he said. Just my name. The question was the name.
I didn’t answer immediately. I let myself feel it—the dread coming up through the soles of my boots, the cold realization that I had walked the woman I loved into a room with four men whose careful, patient, operation I had just blown to pieces.
Dante’s eyes moved off me to Angela. He studied her for the length of three breaths — not unkindly, not warmly, just with the absolute attention he gave to anything that had just changed the shape of his board. Then his eyes came back to me.
“Sit down,” I said, to her, gently, in the voice I used for her and no one else. “Let me tell them.”
I pulled the chair out for her first. She sat. I sat beside her, close enough that our knees touched under the table.
I put both hands flat on the table.
“I told her,” I said.
No reaction.
“I told her this morning,” I said. “Everything. The Marseilles crew. The motel. The plan. The use of her as bait. The decision in this room yesterday that she would not be informed. All of it. She knows.”
The kitchen made a sound that was not a sound — a collective drawn breath, four men adjusting their weight at once.
“You did what?” Santo’s voice, low.
“I told her.”
“Pietro—“ Marco started, and stopped.
