Page 41 of Taking Savannah
"That's the short version, but we already knew that, we just didn’t know it ran this deep."
"What about the Castillo alliance?" She looks at Emilio.
"Holding." He uncrosses his arms and leans both forearms on the bar. "Ferrara's been solid. His rank and soldiers, less so. We had an incident reported at the shared checkpoint outside the port facility. Bonaccorso soldier mouthed off to a Castillo guard. Carmelo corrected the situation."
"Corrected how?"
"The soldier lost two teeth and gained a lasting appreciation for interorganizational cooperation."
"Carmelo's methods never change." Dahlia shakes her head. "And the data from Kreiss? What's Alexandra found?"
Charlotte leans forward. "We're running pattern recognition on the encrypted files. Most of it's financial. Routing patterns that connect to accounts outside the country, shell companies layered three and four deep. But there are communication logs that reference organizational structures we haven't seen before. Code-named positions within a hierarchy." She pauses. "The word Custodian appears seventeen times across four separate files."
Dahlia's face does a thing.
It's fast. Half a second, maybe less. A tightening around her eyes and a flattening of her mouth. She taps the counter and I pour again, then picks up her glass and drinks and when she puts it down her face is the flat mask again, same volume, same weather report.
But I saw it. Because I'm standing three feet away with nothing to do but pour drinks and watch faces, and Dahlia just heard the word Custodian and her body reacted before her brain could stop it.
She knows that word. Not from these files. Not from Alexandra's briefing. She knew it before she walked into this compound, and the fact that it's showing up in Kreiss's data is a piece of information that just rearranged something behind her eyes.
Nobody else catches it. Claudio is looking at Charlotte. Charlotte is looking at Dahlia but from the wrong angle. Emilio is looking at me, and when our eyes meet I see it. He caught it too. Not the expression, maybe, but my reaction to it, because Emilio reads me the way I read rooms.
I don't push. Pushing a woman who just arrived to say goodbye to her father about a word that clearly means something she's not ready to share would be the wrong move, and I didn't survive twenty-six years by making wrong moves. I survived by pouring drinks and keeping my mouth shut and filing information in the part of my brain that Gigi built, the part that stores things until the right moment to use them.
Bam sits through all of it without speaking again. He finishes his whiskey at some point, one long swallow, and turns the glass upside down on the counter.
I watch these people talk and drink and circle the thing they came here to face, and I think about families. Not the blood kind, but the built kind. The kind you assemble from people who showed up when nobody asked them to and stayed when it would've been easier to leave.
Gigi was my family. The whole thing. Start to finish. And when she died the whole thing died with her and I've been walkingaround with an empty space where a family used to be, filling it with bar shifts and bottle caps and a stubborn refusal to need anyone because needing people is how you get hurt.
Until Emilio.
That fucker wrecked my lonely hermit crab thing I had going on.
But these people need each other. I can see it in the way Charlotte's hand stays on Claudio's knee. The way Dahlia's shoulder drifts toward Bam's chest when she's not paying attention. The way Emilio keeps making sure everyone's glass is full and everyone's talking and nobody's sitting alone with the weight of what's coming.
They need each other and they'd never say it and that's fine because the saying isn't the point. The showing up is.
I'm showing up, too, in my own way. Behind a bar with a rag over my shoulder and a bottle in my hand, the same way I've always shown up, by being useful in a room full of people who are hurting. It's not the same as being family. But it's the closest thing I've had in years and my chest aches with how much I want it and how scared I am that it won't last.
Claudio and Charlotte leave first. His arm around her shoulders, her head tilted into him. They say goodnight. Charlotte squeezes Dahlia's hand on the way past and Dahlia lets her, which is a big deal from a woman who hasn't let anyone touch her all night except Bam.
Dahlia stands, and the tiredness hits her all at once. Her shoulders drop. Her eyes go heavy. Coming home and a dying father and a bar full of whiskey and whatever the word Custodian did to her insides is doing a number on her.
"Good bar," she says.
"It's getting there."
"Same time tomorrow?"
"I'll be here. I'm apparently a permanent fixture now."
She almost smiles and nods her head. Then she walks out, and Bam follows her, his boots heavy and even, and the sound of them fades down the corridor until it's gone.
The bar is quiet. Emilio is still at the end of the counter. He hasn't moved. His glass is empty and he's holding it the way I hold the bottle cap, not for what's in it but because his hands need a thing.
"You saw it," he says.
