Page 51 of Ruthless Scar
“Shut up.” But the word is soft. I sniff. Wipe my eyes one more time. “Okay. I just dumped years of classified sibling intel on you in a moonlit kitchen. That’s. A lot.” I straighten up. “You don’t get that for free, Lorenzo.”
His hand is in his pocket. The one I’ve watched him reach for when he thinks nobody is paying attention. When he’s thinking. When the silence gets too loud.
“That thing you keep touching.” My voice is hoarse. “Rosa told me it was your mother’s.” He goes still. “I’ve been talking for an hour. You goin’ to give me anything back?” I cross my arms. My voice going flat because my guts are on the floor and his aren’t and I can’t leave this so unbalanced. “Or do you just collect other people’s damage?”
He doesn’t shut down. Doesn’t walk away.
His hand comes out of his pocket. In the moonlight, I see what he’s holding. A rosary. Old. Worn to silk by years of touch, catching the moonlight. The chain loops through his fingers with practiced ease, a shape his hands know every millimeter of, the same way mine know a keyboard.
“She made me promise to keep it.” His voice is rough. Not his commanding voice. Not the enforcer’s flat precision. A different register. Pulled from a depth he doesn’t let anyone hear.
I reach out. Stop. My fingers hovering an inch away. I wait.
His thumb runs over the worn surface. Once. Twice. A rhythm that’s been happening for years, in pockets and dark rooms and places I’ll never see.
“My mother.” Two words. Carrying eleven years.
I leave it untouched. Hold back the push. Swallow the nervous chatter, the joke that would give us both an exit. I stand within reach of his warmth.
The space between my hand and the beads. His hand and the loss they carry.
Neither of us moves.
14
LORENZO
I showed her the rosary. I’ve never taken it out for anyone. Not Dante. Not Giada. Not Nonna Rosa, who washes my clothes and knows what’s in the pocket but has never seen it in the light. It has lived in the dark since we buried her. Last night I held them in the silver light. Let a woman I’ve known for weeks stand near enough to touch them.
She didn’t touch them. She waited.
That was worse.
I’m in the office before she is. Coffee made. Files open. The routine that holds my days together when the rest of me is unraveling. The old wound on my ribs aches. Knife wound. Twelve years old. It does this when the weather shifts or when I’ve been still too long. I roll my shoulder, adjust in the chair. The shirt pulls against raised tissue.
She arrives with wet hair and a mug she stole from Nonna Rosa’s kitchen. Sets up at her side of the desk without greeting me. Our rhythm now. Coffee, data, silence that used to be neutral but is now full of the things we said in a kitchen past midnight.
“I found an anomaly in the Crescent Holdings subsidiary.” She’s typing before her laptop is warm. “Three payments routed through a holding company in Panama. Same amount. Same date each month.”
“Money for protection.”
“That’s what I thought. But the amounts are wrong for protection. Too small for real coverage, too regular for a skim.” She pulls up a spreadsheet. “And the destination account sits inside a shell company that doesn’t produce or employ anyone.”
“Who controls the shell?”
“Working on it.” Her knee bounces under the desk. She catches it. Presses her palm flat. “I need to cross-reference with the property records from last week. The ones with the dead-end routing.”
“Pull them up.”
“I am pulling them up.” She doesn’t look at me. “You know, for a man who speaks in one-word sentences, you’re very bossy about what other people should be doing.”
I turn a page in the surveillance report. Nico’s photos from the Bourbon Street hotel. Three visits. Same room. Same night of the week. The woman who met Tomás in the lobby each time is a civilian in a sundress who held his hand in the elevator.
I close the folder. Not Tomás. Which meant the list got shorter and the names left on it got harder.
“You’re staring at that same page.”
“I’m reading.”
