Page 43 of Ruthless Scar
“She also said if you don’t eat, she’s sending Gia. And Gia lectures.” He looks at Lorenzo. “Both of you.”
Lorenzo takes a piece of bread. Sets it in front of me without a word.
Nico glances between us. At the distance we’re keeping. At the coffee Lorenzo brought me and the hoodie I’m now clocking belongs to a member of this family. His eyebrows lift a fraction.
“What?” I say.
“Nothing.” He backs out of the doorway. “Enjoy lunch.”
The door closes. I stare at the bread. He doesn’t touch the rest until I pick mine up.
I eat. He eats. The bread is criminal. Rosa could topple a government with these ingredients.
“This should be illegal,” I say.
“She’s been making it sixty years.”
“Sixty years and nobody’s weaponized it. Missed opportunity.”
His jaw does that thing. The one I’m not supposed to notice.
He stands. Takes a call from Dante in the hallway. Low Italian I can’t follow. I finish eating. Lick butter off my thumb. Pull up the financial records on Carlo and Tomás while I wait.
He comes back. Sits down. Picks up the file. And his chair is closer.
The picture sharpens over the afternoon. I build a timeline: money from seven sources, laundered through Crescent Holdings, distributed to four locations. The shipping manifests are the thread. Whatever the Benedettis are moving goes through the Tchoupitoulas warehouse.
One anomaly. A separate stream of money running through the same network. Smaller amounts. Weekly. It reads like gambling, not cargo. I flag it and move on. The trafficking network is the priority.
The air conditioning kicks on and I shiver. My shoulders tighten against the cold but my fingers keep moving because the data doesn’t care about my thermoregulation.
Movement. He stands. Crosses behind my chair. Fabric settles over my shoulders. Heavy. Warm. Smelling like sandalwood and gun oil and him.
His jacket. Draped without a word. Without being asked.
I don’t look up. My typing pauses for half a beat, then resumes. The jacket swallows me. I pull it tighter without acknowledging it or him.
He sits back down.
I’m reaching for my mug when he reaches for the same one. His fingers close over mine on the ceramic.
Neither of us lets go. Not after two seconds. Not after five. His warmth bleeding through to my knuckles. His thumb shifts. A fraction. Against the back of my hand.
My chin lifts. His gaze locked where our skin meets.
His phone buzzes against the wood. Dante. He pulls away. Reads the message. Goes flat.
He stands. Grabs his jacket. Through the door. No goodbye.
I sit with both hands around the mug and the shape of where he was.
12
LORENZO
Her hands on the mug. That’s what lingers. Not the data, not the shell companies, not the shipping routes or the leak bleeding us dry. Her hands. Wrapped around ceramic still warm from mine. Fingers curling where my fingers had been.
I’m in the back of the SUV. Sal driving. The compound gates shrinking in the mirror.
