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“Five years,” he says, his voice wrecked. “And I still remembered you wrong. You’re better.”
Then he moves, and he stops being gentle, and I don’t want him to be. He fucks me hard and deep, the headboard knocking the wall, his free hand gripping my hip hard enough to leave marks I’ll find in the morning and press with my fingertips just to feel them. I wrap my legs around him and meet every thrust.
“Mine,” he growls into my neck. “You hear me? Mine.”
“Yours,” I hear myself say, and I mean it.
The second orgasm tears through me, and it drags him over with it. He groans my name into my hair and empties himself deep inside me, hips grinding, his whole body shuddering against mine.
Afterward, he lets go of my wrists and kisses each one, the inside, where the pulse is.
I lie in the dark with my head on his chest and the locked door across the room, and I sleep without listening for anything at all.
CHAPTER 32
ENZO
Emilio Vasari takes his coffee black, in a bakery in Bensonhurst that has been run by the same family since Truman, at a table in the back where he can see the door.
He’s in his fifties, silver at the temples, with the soft, forgettable face of a man who sells insurance. The ring is on his right hand. Gold, worn smooth, an old crest that isn’t only Italian. He holds his cup in his left.
Stevie would be insufferable about it if she were here.
“Accardi.” He doesn’t stand, and he doesn’t offer his hand, which I respect. Handshakes are for men who need to prove they aren’t holding anything. “You came alone.”
“Anthony is across the street pretending to read a newspaper. I’m told he’s very bad at it.”
That earns me the corner of a smile. I sit.
“Five years ago at the Velvet Room,” I say, “Luca Santini stood up with a microphone and told jokes about a waitress. Half the room laughed. You didn’t.”
His cup stops halfway to his mouth. “That was a long time ago.”
“You were at the bar. Ring on your right hand, glass in your left. Three men with you. None of you laughed.”
He sets the cup down very carefully. “Who told you that?”
“The waitress.”
A long silence. Then he laughs, quietly, and it sounds real. “Of course she did. Nobody looks at the help, and the help looks at everything.” He shakes his head. “My mother cleaned houses on Staten Island for thirty years. She could tell you which husbands were cheating from the laundry.”
“Then you know what she’s worth.”
“I know what she’s worth.” He studies me. “What I don’t know is what you want.”
“Luca took the Red Hook piers from your family.”
His face doesn’t move. That’s answer enough.
“He’s coming for me,” I say. “Soon. He’s loud, he’s borrowed against everything he owns, and the men behind him are there for the money, not for him. When it breaks, I want to know where you’ll be standing.”
“You want me to turn on him.”
“I want you to wait. Stay right where you are. Smile at him. Take his money.” I lean back. “And when I call, I want you to remember who didn’t laugh.”
“I already do.” Vasari turns his cup a quarter turn on the saucer. “Every month, his people ask to rent my crews. Muscle for hire, cash up front. Luca doesn’t trust his own men anymore, so he pays mine.”
Then he’s quiet a long time. Outside, a bus groans past, and the front windows shiver in their frames.
