Page 91 of Ruthless Daddy
Sal stayed last among the brothers and cousins.
He came around the table. He stopped in front of me and he put his hand flat on my shoulder, the weight of a man who was older than me by two years and had been older than me by a hundred years since we were children, and he squeezed once. He did not say anything. He looked at Angela, and at me, and he nodded to her—the small courtly nod he had inherited from our father—and he went out after the others, the folder still under his arm.
Dante was the last.
He paused at the door, his coat already on, gloves halfway up his hands. He looked back into the kitchen at us. His face did the small thing it did when he was moved — a softening at the corners of the mouth that was not quite a smile, a shift in the eyes that lasted not even a full second.
He raised his hand, an inch off his hip.
Then he was gone.
The door closed behind him. The latch clicked. The carriage house, full all afternoon of bodies and voices and bruises and folders, went still.
Angela stood for a moment at the head of the table.
Then her shoulders dropped. I pulled the chair next to hers and I sat down. She came around and sat down too, in Dante’s chair, the chair at the head, because nobody was using it now and it was the closest one to me.
She put her head on my shoulder. The fire popped in the grate.
After a moment, very quietly, she said, “Pietro.”
“Mm.”
“Did you mean what you said. About marrying me.”
I turned my head. I kissed the crown of her hair.
“Every word,” I said.
She was quiet a moment.
“Good,” she said.
Chapter 16
Angela
Thecursorblinkedatme from the second monitor, patient, waiting for the next instruction. I gave it one. The screen refreshed. Northbridge Atlantic Holdings, eleven months at this domicile, four directors of record, two of them dead on paper and one of them a Liechtenstein lawyer who had been a placeholder on three other Valenti shells in 2021. The fourth was a woman named in Maltese registry documents as Anastasia Krol. I knew that name. I had known it eighteen months ago. She was not a person. She was a signature.
I made a note in the black leather book.Krol — still signing. Same hand.
The book was getting full. Pietro had bought it for me in a bookshop in River North a lifetime ago. I had not let myself think about how few pages were left.
Behind me, the carriage house was doing its morning. Tonio was at the stove with the moka and a pan of something that smelled like onions softening in butter. Olimpo was a heavywarm presence at my feet — he had decided, sometime around six a.m., that I was his shift assignment and had not moved. Sal had come through twenty minutes ago, said nothing, set a small espresso cup on the corner of the desk away from the keyboard, kissed the crown of my head with a formality that felt Sicilian and almost paternal, and gone out again. The bruise at his jaw was the color of an old plum now. He had not mentioned it. Neither had I.
Marco had been good to his word. By midnight last night the workstation had three banking feeds I should not have had access to, a redacted DOJ filing I definitely should not have had access to, and a clean pipe into a forensic accounting service whose subscription cost more than my annual salary had at Halberd. I had cried, briefly, when I saw it. Then I had sat down and started working and had not really stood up since.
It was close. I could feel it the way I used to feel a problem closing — a tightening in the chest, a quiet narrowing of the field. One or two more correspondent banks. One more routing pattern. There would be an account somewhere with Enzo Valenti’s tax identifier on it, or his son’s, or a vehicle so clearly his that nobody in the room would argue. I had been doing this since seven. It was just past ten now. I could have it by lunch.
A hand came down on my shoulder. I knew the weight before I knew the hand.
“Eat something, baby,” Pietro said, low, near my ear.
He set a plate on the corner of the desk Sal had used for the espresso. Bread, soft cheese, slices of pear, a few olives.
“I’m close,” I said.
“All the more reason to eat!”
