Sal closed the folder.
“You burned forty-eight hours of work, Pietro.” Flat. No heat. “Cousin work. Surveillance work. Three men I had to call in favours for. The customs intercept Marco built from scratch. You may have lost us Enzo.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know.”
“Do you?”
“I know exactly.”
Santo pushed off the wall. He didn’t come toward the table—Santo was too disciplined for that in front of his brothers—but he moved, and the move was enough. “You walked her in here. You broke an op and then you walked the asset into the room where we’re meant to fix it. That’s the play? That’s the fucking play,cugino?”
“Santo.” Dante.
Santo stopped. But his eyes stayed on me.
Beside me I felt Angela’s hand find my thigh under the table. Not gripping. Resting. The weight of it grounded me.
Marco spoke. Quiet. The voice he used in negotiations.
“Why?”
I looked at him. Of all of them, Marco was the one I had thought might be hardest, because Marco built the patterns we were now talking about breaking. But his face was open in the way it got when he was actually asking, not performing.
“Because I told her I wouldn’t lie to her.”
“Pietro—“
“I signed a contract with her, Marco. You drew it up. You watched me sign it. She wrote in the margin in her own hand that I had to be honest at all times. No games. I signed under that line.”
“That was the dynamic,” Marco said carefully.
“It’s more than that. It’s a promise.”
The fire popped in the grate. Olimpo had stood up at some point and was now standing in the middle of the room with his huge head turned toward the table, ears forward, as though he understood enough of the tone to want to know what came next.
Tonio cleared his throat.
He was standing at the counter, arms folded, where he had drifted at some point during the conversation. He had not spoken since we sat down. Now he did.
“He did the right thing,” Tonio said.
Sal’s head came around slowly. “Tonio.”
“He did the right thing, Sal.”
“You don’t get to—“
“I get to say what I think at this table. You all keep telling me so.” Tonio uncrossed his arms. He looked at Sal, and at Dante, and at his brother Santo who was still half a step from the wall. “He told us yesterday. He said, she will know. He said it twice. He said it to Dante’s face. We told him to lie to her anyway. And what we were asking him to do—be honest with me, all of you—is sit in bed with the woman he is in love with for forty-eight hours and pretend nothing was happening while professionals from Marseilles built a snatch around her. That is what we asked him for.”
“It was operational—“
“It was a shit thing to ask,” Tonio said. Mild. “I went along with it. I’m not pretending I didn’t. But he did the right thing and we did the wrong thing and now we are angry at him because his right thing made our wrong thing harder.”
“Tonio,” Dnte said. Not a rebuke. A pause button.
“Boss.”
“Sit down.”
