I turn the shower off. Step out. Wrap myself in the towel.
Don Niccolo Sorrentino. Head of the Sorrentino family. One of the most powerful Camorra clans in Naples. I've known since the first dinner, when he sat at table nine and asked for the wine list with hands that give orders men follow with their lives.
I recognized his face from the photographs Father Domenico keeps in the parish office, the file of local families whose confessions carry political weight. Father Domenico knows every powerful name in this city. He's heard most of them through the confessional screen.
He came in for confession three days before his first dinner at La Terrazza. He confessed. I didn't hear the words. I was too far back. But I watched the alcove.
The candles stayed dark.
All four. Not one flame. Whatever he confessed, whatever weight he carried into that wooden box, it did not cross any of the lines. No murder of innocents. No abuse. Nothing involving children. Nothing sexual.
The candles didn't light for him.
I liked him before I knew his name. I liked the way he walked past my pew, heavy with whatever he'd just spoken aloud, and glanced at me for one second. Maybe two. Not a predatory look. Not the assessment I get from men at the restaurant who calculate my body while I recite the specials. He looked at me the way you look at something unexpected. A painting in the wrong room. A sound you can't place.
Then he kept walking. He didn't stop. He didn't circle back. He walked into the Naples sun carrying his weight, and I sat in the pew with my book in my lap thinking: the candles didn't move.
No candles means he's clean. Not sinless. Clean enough. Clean enough that the system passed over him, that whatever lives in his confession doesn't cross into the territory where I operate.
I liked that. I liked it more than I should have.
I dry my hair. Brush my teeth. Pull on the oversized shirt I sleep in, soft cotton worn thin from years of washing. My apartment is quiet. The courtyard outside my window is dark except for the blue light of my neighbor's television flickering through her curtains.
I get into bed. The sheets are cool. I take my glasses off, set them on the nightstand next to my phone and the crime novel I'm halfway through. The world goes soft at the edges, the way it always does without the lenses, like someone smudged the lines of everything with their thumb.
I think about him.
The dinners. Plural now. He came back the next night. Sat in my section again. Giulia noticed. "Your admirer is back,"she said, bumping my hip with hers as I loaded plates onto my tray. I told her to shut up. My cheeks burned. She noticed that too.
The second dinner was longer. He ordered slowly, asked questions about dishes he clearly didn't care about, extended the interaction the way a man extends a conversation he doesn't want to end. I told him the octopus was the best thing on the menu. He said he'd trust my judgment. I said that was risky. He almost smiled.
Almost. The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. More like the place a smile would go if he let it.
He asked what I was reading. I told him. He knew the author. Of course he knew the author. He quoted a line from the second book in the series, in Italian, from memory, while I stood there holding a bread basket with my mouth slightly open.
I told him most customers don't quote Italian crime fiction at dinner. He said he wasn't most customers. I said I'd noticed.
That was flirting. I was flirting with a Don.
Great survival instincts, Valentina.
I pull the covers up. Close my eyes. My body is tired from the shift. Eight hours on my feet, carrying plates, smiling, being the sweet one. The girl who blends in. The furniture.
But my mind won't stop.
His hands. I keep seeing his hands. The left one resting on the tablecloth, fingers relaxed, a scar on the forearm he touched once, absently, while I was describing the dessert menu. Like the scar was a thought he kept returning to. His right hand holding the wine glass by the stem, not the bowl, the way someone does when they've been taught or when they care about the wine. He cares about the wine.
I wonder what his hands feel like.
Stop.
I roll onto my side. Press my face into the pillow. My heart rate is elevated. Seventy-six. Traitor.
I think about his voice instead, which is worse. The low register he uses when he's being polite, public, managed. The way it drops another half-tone when he says something just for me, leaning forward an inch, the collar of his shirt falling open enough that I can see the edge of a tattoo beneath his collarbone. Dark ink. I couldn't make out the shape. I wanted to.
I wanted to trace it with my finger.
Stop it.
