Page 7 of Taking Savannah
"The conversation I overheard, at the club. You know it's not just names and schedules. You know what I'm sitting on."
His face changes. The grin drops and what's underneath is the version of him I saw for half a second in the chair. He's looking at me the way I look at a customer who just pulled a weapon, attentive and still and ready for whatever happens next.
"I know," he says.
"Then you know I'm not going to hand it over because someone brought me coffee and toast. I'll talk to your boss. I'll tell him what I know. But not because I owe you or because I'm scared or because this room has a lock that works from the inside. I'm doing it because I don’t want to live looking over my fucking shoulder forever."
He watches me for a long moment and then nods. Not the easy nod, not the one that comes with the grin. The harder one, the one that says I hear you.
"I'll be in the hall," he says.
He leaves and the door closes behind him. I listen to his footsteps go three doors down and stop, and then a door opens and a voice that isn't his, deeper, quieter, says something I can't catch. His brother. Then a laugh, Emilio's laugh, too loud for the hour, and the door shuts and the corridor goes quiet.
I drink my coffee and eat the toast and wash my face one more time.
Then I pull the bottle cap from the nightstand and press it between my thumb and forefinger.
Gigi used to say the most dangerous thing a woman can do is walk into a room full of men and tell the truth. She said it makes them nervous. Nervous men make mistakes, and mistakes are how you find out who's real and who's full of shit.
I pocket the cap and sigh, straightening my shirt past my hips before I head out the door.
Emilio is leaning against the wall with his arms crossed and his eyes closed and his head tipped back. He opens one eye when he hears me.
"Ready, vixen?"
I roll my eyes, "Sure."
He pushes off the wall and walks beside me. Not in front, not behind. Beside.
I don't trust him.
Or any of them, for that matter.
Chapter Three: Emilio
Oncewegettothe door, I tell her to wait because the others will have questions. She didn’t look too happy about it, but it’s just easier this way. She leaned against the door with a huff and I left her there before she could say some smart-ass comment about it.
Leone's at the head of the war room table with a coffee that looks cold and a stack of papers he hasn't touched and the posture of a man being held up by marionette strings. Alexandra sits to his left, laptop open, fingers on the keyboard in the fast rhythm she gets when she's chasing something through a financial network. She doesn't look up when I walk in. She's gone. Whatever she's building on that screen has swallowed the rest of the world.
Claudio is against the far wall with his arms crossed. He looks at me when I enter and does the full sweep, head to boots, reading my condition in under two seconds. He sees the circles under my eyes. He sees the tension in my shoulders. He sees whatever myface is doing. His expression doesn't change, but his left eyebrow lifts a quarter inch, which in Claudio is a standing ovation.
He knows.
Of course he fucking knows. The twin frequency doesn't lie, and I've been broadcasting on it since the diner.
"Sit down," Leone says without looking up.
I sit and the chair scrapes concrete. Aurelio used to sit where Leone sits. The old man's chair is the same one, leather worn to a shine on the armrests where his hands rested for twenty years. Nobody's suggested replacing it because replacing it would mean admitting he's not coming back to it.
He's been in the private wing for two weeks. The doctors come and go through the east entrance, so the soldiers don't see them, but everyone knows the Don is dying. Where and when are the only open questions, and Leone carries the answer to both on his face every morning when he walks out of Aurelio's room and into this one and pretends he’s okay.
Charlotte told me once, late in the kitchen when Claudio was asleep and she was drinking tea and I was drinking whiskey and we'd hit the hour where people stop performing, that watching Leone hold the organization together while Aurelio fades is the loneliest thing she's ever seen. She said it's the loneliness of a man who inherited his father's weight without inheriting his father's certainty, and the gap between those two things is the thing that will either make Leone or break him in half.
And the fact that Aurelio isn’t actually Leone’s father and the seat belongs to Dahlia, only Dahlia doesn’t want anything to do with the mafia, which left Leone the only logical choice.
"The bartender is secured?" Leone asks.
"She’s waiting outside.”
