Page 31 of Ruthless Sin
“He’s the one I can’t find.”
I take the coffee and drink it.
“Move on the two you have,” I say. “Quiet. I want what they ate for breakfast and who watched them eat it.”
“On it.”
“Marco.”
He does not look up. “Yeah.”
“Casa Lucia perimeter.”
“Adding a third rotation. Cleared with Dante. The clinic doesn’t see it.”
The coffee is bitter at the bottom. Nonna lets it go bitter on purpose.
Izzy is watching me sideways without making it look like she is.
“What.”
“Nothing.”
“Iz.”
“I said nothing.”
She goes back to her screen.
I stand.
“Find me the third,” I say. “By Friday.”
“Before Friday.”
“Good.”
I walk out.
Marco brings me the breakfast intel on the back porch, the heat already rising off the yard. One of the two is at a diner on the West Bank. The other is at a Marigny barbershop that has been a Bratva front since I was a kid.
At sundown the New York office comes on the line and I work through it standing at the back-room window — rotation orders for two soldiers, a broker in Algiers who has gone quiet since Thursday, a payment dispute, a man in Houston who wants a door opened that I am not going to open for him. Marco runs the first half. I take the second. I say no in three languages and watch the yard go dark through the glass while I do it.
When the call ends, Marco says, “Maria left the tray outside her door earlier. It’s gone now. The fork was on top.” He says it without looking up from his screens.
“Thank you.”
He nods. Back to his screens.
The house quiets. I can tell by the way the kitchen goes silent and the light under Nonna’s door disappears.
I shower in water that stays too cold.
I leave the cufflinks in the dish and the watch on my wrist, and walk back to her door.
The jasmine is heavy tonight, thicker than it has been all week, heat that sits on the skin and does not lift even after dark. The plate is not on the floor outside her door. Maria has already taken it down. The wood is closed.
I settle against the wall beside her door with my knees bent, one hand on my thigh, the other pressed flat against the wood at the height where her palm has come to meet mine every night for weeks.
