Page 16 of Blood Orange Christmas
My fingers don’t shake. That’s the miracle. I set the lemon down. I turn. The knife is safe in my hand because I hold it by the spine and not the blade. The kitchen is as quiet as a church and as loud as a heart. Dante stands just inside the door, older in the jaw, sharper at the eyes, wearing a dark coat I do not recognize. The room leans around him like rooms do, like it was built years ago to make sense of this exact shape standing here. He looks at me the way a man measures distance when the distance has a name. I could say a thousand things. I can’t say any of them. So I say theonly one that doesn’t turn me into the person I promised myself I wouldn’t be. “It’s winter,” I say. “Lemon helps.”
7
DANTE
Villa Rosso, present day
Rome clings to you. Umbria looks you over and decides whether you belong. Villa Rosso sits on a slope like an old cat that’s learned not to come when called. I bought it for its kitchens and the line of sight to every approach. I stay for the quiet, even if quiet never lasts.
She’s here.
I’d told myself a hundred lies about what I’d do if I saw her again. I would be reasonable. I would be cold. I would be kind, which is another kind of distance. Four years is enough to dull a blade. It does not blunt a memory. I hear her voice through the corridor before I make the corner, and every room in Milan I ever left behind crowds into one second and burns.
I stop at the kitchen threshold because cooks hate men who walk in like they own the stove. The staff pretend not to notice me. Good staff always do. She stands at the far table, hair tied back, sleeves rolled, a lemon in one hand and a zester in the other, making the air honest. She hasn’t changed the way that matters.She still moves like she has a plan for the next three steps and a backup if the floor gives way.
“Still cooking with lemon, I see,” I say.
Her head turns. She’s careful with the knife, holding it by the spine, not the blade. That’s Serena. She never wastes motion. She never wastes a chance to live.
“It's winter,” she answers. “Lemon helps.”
I could ask her when she started calling winter by its first name. I could ask her why she didn’t call me anything at all for four years. Instead, I nod to Gabriella to bring the rest of the crates and step back. I don’t get any closer than the copper pans will reflect. There is a boy to see first.
I find him in the courtyard with the caretaker’s dog, who forgets he’s meant to be dignified and surrenders his dignity for a thrown cork. The boy throws badly and laughs like it still counts. He has a small backpack with a car jammed wheel-first into the side pocket. He talks to the dog like he expects answers and isn’t disappointed when he doesn’t get them. He scowls when the dog refuses to return the cork and the scowl hits me like a bad memory—my father, age eight, in photos that never made it to frames because he didn’t like his own mouth when he was serious. The boy has my mouth when he’s serious.
“Marco,” Gabriella says behind me, gently like the boy might spook. “This is thepadrone.”
The boy turns, takes my measure, decides I won’t do. “I’m playing,” he informs me, which is the kind of boundary I respect.
“Then play,” I say. “When you’re done, the kitchen has a bowl with your name on it. Tired cars like radiators. Tired boys like soup.”
He brightens at soup, which tells me Serena’s raised him right. Food first. Everything else after. He runs back to the dog, who has eaten the cork and looks proud.
I go to the study because the study has a window that lets you watch the courtyard without being seen. Harrison is already there, a shadow with a ledger. He doesn’t use the ledger for money. He uses it for names. He nods once in the direction of the kitchen, another toward the drive, a third toward the olive shed where we wired a camera last week after someone who shouldn’t have known the way found the back road.
“You didn’t send the invitation,” he says.
“No.” I lift the envelope again like the paper might give up a secret the second time. Unmarked. Couriered to an office I closed three years ago. Clean fingerprints. Too clean. “Our mole did.”
“Inside or out?”
“That’s what the summit is for,” I say, and we both know how funny that sounds.
The summit is a dinner in suits and a knife fight in spreadsheets. Old families, new money, lost boys with expensive cufflinks. We sit in a room and say “interests” and “territory” and “supply” like we’re planning a wedding. A marriage of convenience needs a witness, a pen, and someone ready to run if the wine turns. I left Milan because the rooms there were full of ghosts and boys who wanted to be men by morning. Umbrian air is clean, it’s alsothin. You run out of breath faster if you try to talk and lie at the same time.
I watch Serena through the glass. She sets out her knives in a line like soldiers at attention and then ignores them for a lemon and salt. She makes a quick oil with zest, warms it, tests it with bread like a prayer. She feeds people who never fed her. She’s still the truest thing in any room we share.
“You knew she was alive,” Harrison says.
“I knew she was alive and well,” I answer. I don’t add how often I checked, how far I paid for news that said nothing except she worked, she paid rent, she bought too much fruit. None of the reports ever mentioned a boy.
“Not alone,” Harrison says, low.
“No,” I say, and the word tastes like a confession and a victory at once.
We don’t say the rest. We don’t say that when I saw the mouth, the scowl, the car in the pocket, I did the math in a single breath and felt the floor tilt. We don’t say that I deserve the knife the sight of that boy puts in my ribs. We don’t say that a man like me doesn’t get gifts like this without a bill.
I step away from the window because men who watch too long do stupid things. I have a house to harden and a summit to host. I call for Rocco, who runs the outer ring, and Camilla, who handles phones with hands too clean to be noticed. We keep our copybooks separate. Rocco talks in meters and sightlines. Camilla speaks in numbers that look like grocery lists and ring in pairs.
