Chapter 9

Cecilia's POV

I caught Danny's eye the moment Luca leaned back in his chair with that settled look.

Danny was standing just inside the doorway, clipboard tucked under one arm.

I gave him the smallest possible look. The kind that said: help, please, I am standing in a room I should not be standing in, and I would very much like to leave it.

He looked back at me.

Then he looked at Luca.

Then he looked at the green-eyed man sitting across from Luca, and whatever was left of his expression just went flat and careful.

He gave me the tiniest shake of his head.

Not now. Not here. Don't.

I refilled Luca's glass and kept my mouth shut.

So that was that.

I pressed myself back toward the far end of the table and made myself as close to invisible as a person can get while still technically being present.

I kept my movements small. Poured when glasses got low. Didn't make eye contact with anyone unless directly addressed. Became, as much as possible, part of the furniture.

The two of them talked, and I listened without appearing to listen, which was a skill I'd spent years developing and which was currently earning its keep in a serious way.

Most of it was the kind of conversation that happens in rooms like this, all careful phrasing and references I only half understood — port logistics and someone's shipment being held up by someone else's people, territory language wrapped in polite business vocabulary.

Then Luca said a name.

"Vincenzo," he said, and leaned forward slightly. "I brought you something. Consider it a gesture of good faith."

Vincenzo.

I filed that away so fast.

The green-eyed man — Vincenzo — set down his glass and looked at Luca with an expression that gave away absolutely nothing. "What kind of something?"

"The kind that solves a problem you've been having." Luca nodded toward the door, and one of the guards outside stepped in and said something low to someone in the corridor.

They brought in a man.

He was maybe forty, heavyset, with the look of someone who had been having a very bad few days.

His hands were zip-tied in front of him. There was dried blood on his collar. He was trying very hard to hold himself together and not quite managing it.

Luca said, almost cheerfully, "He's been moving product through your port without authorization. People-trafficking side operation, which I understand you find particularly distasteful."

Vincenzo looked at the man for a long moment.

The man started talking, fast — the kind of talking people do when they think words can still help them. He said something about old arrangements and old bosses and how he didn't know things had changed, how he was just following what he'd always been told.

Vincenzo let him finish.

Then he said, very quietly, "The people who gave you those arrangements are gone. I removed them. So the arrangements are gone too."

He said something to one of his men in Italian, and the man came forward and put a short, heavy blade on the table.

I stopped breathing.

Vincenzo picked up the blade from the table.

The man started shaking his head. He was still talking, still trying, and then Vincenzo took hold of his hand and pressed it flat against the table.

The cleaver came down twice. Fast, clean, no hesitation.

The man screamed.

It was a raw, ugly sound that bounced off the wood paneling and went nowhere.

One of Vincenzo's men set a glass on the table.

Vincenzo dropped the two severed fingers into the glass.

He poured the man's own blood over them, enough to fill it halfway, and then he picked the glass up and held it out.

The man stared at it. Vincenzo waited. He didn't say anything else. He just held the glass there until the man took it with his good hand and drank it down.

I don't know how, but he drank it.

I was standing in the corner holding a champagne bottle, and I was sweating.

The man was removed from the room.

Luca was saying something about the port contracts, back to business like a switch had been flipped, and Vincenzo was listening.

And then Vincenzo said, without looking up from the papers Luca had pushed across the table, "You smell nice."

I did not immediately understand that he was talking to me.

"The girl in the corner," he said, and looked up.

Right at me.

"Sorry? I don't know what you mean," I said. "I'm just wearing the same soap as everyone else."

I used the voice. The vacant, harmless, professionally confused voice.

Something moved in Vincenzo's expression.

Not quite a smile. Something adjacent to it, but with an edge I didn't like.

"Funny thing," he said, leaning back in his chair. "I had a pet go missing on me recently. Pretty little thing. Great body. Drove me crazy for about ten minutes before she disappeared."

He tilted his head, looking at me with that unhurried, half-amused attention that made my skin feel wrong.

"You know what's strange? You smell almost exactly like her."

"I wouldn't know anything about that," I said.

"No?" He stood up.

He crossed the distance between us in a few easy steps, and I had just enough time to register the door and how far away it was before his hand came down on my shoulder and walked me back into the corner, steady and inevitable, and then the wall was behind me and he was in front of me and there was nothing in between.

"Hold still," he said, and his voice had dropped into something quieter, almost gentle.

He still had the blade in his hand — the one with blood on it — and he brought it up to my shirt collar, hooked the flat of it under the top button, and pulled down in one slow, deliberate motion.

The buttons gave one after another, and the fabric parted open, and the shirt fell away from my waist, my ribs, the curve of my chest.

"Just need to check something," he said, almost conversationally, his eyes moving down and then back up again with the calm focus of a man who had already decided he liked what he was looking at. "Don't take it personally."