Page 153 of Valentino

We clink.

I spill wine on the duvet. She doesn't care. She's laughing and crying a little, and I'm doing the same thing, and neither one of us tries to stop.

"To the longest, most catastrophic crush in recorded history, finally doing something useful," she says.

"To boundaries," I say, lifting my glass.

"To boundaries," she agrees, "and to the terrifying Sicilian who taught you what they are."

We clink again and drink, still laughing, wine sloshing dangerously close to the duvet.

Then the door opens.

Valentino

Bruno smokes inside the living room now, which tells me something about the last two weeks.

Aria would skin him for it. She's two rooms away with Carmela and the girls, and he's blowing smoke at the ceiling like a man who's decided he gets one vice tonight and nobody in this house is stupid enough to mention it.

The whiskey is the good bottle, the one Lorenzo keeps for funerals and weddings. No one says which one tonight is.

Pietro takes the chair facing the door. Nico stands near the window with his glass untouched, watching the driveway through the curtain gap. Dante has claimed the end of the couch, one ankle crossed over his knee, settled in like this house has finally stopped expecting him to prove himself.

Lorenzo stands near the bar with the bottle still in his hand.

I sit carefully.

Forty stitches in my back have made me appreciate chairs with actual padding.

"Five days," Bruno says, ash dropping into a saucer he stole from his own kitchen. "Then you're on a plane back. The lawyers in Rome want you available, the FBI wants statements, and Palermo wants to look you in the eye and confirm we kept the old protocols. You being there matters."

"I know."

"There's something else."

He rolls the cigarette between two fingers, taking his time with the words. Bruno does that when the thing he's about to say changes the atmosphere entirely.

"Mancini gets transferred this week. Out of Bergamo, into the permanent facility outside Rome. Federal hold ends, Italian custody begins. There's a window in the transfer."

Dante's mouth curves around the rim of his glass.

He already knows where this is going.

So do I.

I want Bruno to say it anyway.

"I found a way to put you in a room with him," Bruno says. "Twenty minutes. No record. If you still want it."

I nod once.

"I want it."

"Good." Bruno taps ash into the tray. "But you go in for a name, not a body."

"I'll decide that when I'm in front of him."

"No." His voice turns stern. Don first. Cousin second. "You go in, you get what we need, and you walk out. I'm not telling Vittoria her best friend is a widow before the wedding she's already planning in her head."