Page 26 of Blood Orange Christmas
SERENA
Ilie there with my ear against his chest and count the beats I’ve already lost to him.Leave, he said.Run now. But the villa breathes like a living thing. Every corridor has a memory, every door has an audience, and whoever brought me here in the first place knew exactly where to find us. If I go, I carry a target into the dark with a four-year-old holding my hand. The road has no walls. The stations have cameras. The mole doesn’t need my address. The mole has my name.
So I don’t move. I keep still until his breathing goes steady and the fountain settles and the dog’s collar stops ticking. When I finally slip out of his arms, I go to Marco, kiss his hair, and sleep in the chair between the bed and the door with my shoes on.
Morning comes thin and blue. The kitchen wakes like it always does—ovens humming, copper bright, knives set in a line. I knead lemon zest into dough until it disappears. I bloom saffron, test stock, count clams. Marco eats bread at the window and draws a map that links the fountain to the kitchen to the chapel with arrows and a stick figure that is definitely the dog.
Everyone is polite and tired. The house walks on its toes. The summit sits on the other side of noon like a storm that will pretend it isn’t. I keep Marco close when we explore—saints in the hallway, gramophones sleeping, the pantry with its velvet drawers and lemon-handled spoons that he wants desperately to use. Guards trail us at a distance that says family without saying the word. Every time a door opens behind me, I turn.
By afternoon, the air has a taste. Iron and rain, even though the sky is clear. I’m folding the last of the pasta when the scream comes from the vineyard—high, sharp, cut short. The whole kitchen stops. A spoon clatters. The dishwasher crosses himself without thinking.
I’m already moving. Gabriella calls after me—“Serena!”—but I’m through the door and into the corridor, following the sound past the olive shed and down the slope. Staff scatter at the rows, dark shapes bending and rising. A crate of glasses tips and shatters. Someone shouts for a towel as if that will fix anything.
Luca finds me before I find the scream. He comes out of nowhere, hand at my elbow, steering me sideways. “No,” he says, low, almost gentle. “Not you.”
“Marco,” I say, and the word isn’t a word. It’s a knife.
“Already in,” he answers, and that’s when I see it—my boy tucked tight in Luca’s other arm like cargo, face pressed to the enforcer’s shoulder, eyes wide but dry. Luca hands him to Gabriella in one clean transfer. “With me,” she tells Marco. He goes without making it heroic, and I love him for that.
Luca turns me away from the rows with a pressure I could fight if I wanted to make a scene. I look anyway. Down by the barrels, past the last trellis, a man lies facedown. His hat is five stepsfrom his head. A wide stain blooms under him, wrong and wet against the packed dirt.
“Who?” I ask.
“The wine merchant,” Luca says. “Old vendor. Twice a year, thirty years.”
“Slip?” I ask, and I already know I don’t believe it.
“Hold,” he says, and it’s the same thing.
We reach the edge of the work yard. Rocco is already there, two steps off the body, stopping everyone with one outstretched palm. Harrison arrives from the ridge without looking like he ran. He crouches once, low, eyes on the ground the way some men read a contract. Dante comes last, slow, unhurried, jacket open, hands empty. The circle tightens by a fraction when he steps in. No one looks at me, but everyone knows I’m here.
At first glance, it could be a fall. The barrel lip is scuffed. A smear runs down the curved wood like a clumsy hand. But the blood looks wrong for a head strike. And there is a bottle at an angle under the rack, broken at the shoulder. I can smell it from here—Barolo, old and expensive, violets and tar, ghosts of cherries. The label is mostly intact, off-white, a raised crest, a diagonal slash in the R that I’ve only seen once, in one place.
The cellar.
The locked door with the iron smell under the oak.
Dante’s eyes flick to me for less than a second, then back to the body. It’s a hard line—get out—but he doesn’t say it. He doesn’t need to. Rocco’s palm widens, and everyone who isn’t essential moves back two steps. That includes me.
Guests drift to the lip of the courtyard with practiced curiosity. Camilla materializes with her phones, gives them a smile that suggests weather. “Unpiccolo incidente,” she tells a cluster of pearls. “The terrain. He slipped.Preghiamo.” They murmurpreghiamoand step back because that’s what you do when someone tells you a prayer is enough.
I stand in the shade of the arch with my hands empty and watch the argument that pretends not to be an argument. Rocco points to the scuff on the barrel lip. Harrison shakes his head once and taps a boot at a clean, round mark on the ground where a heel shouldn’t have been. Luca circles the rack without speaking, finally kneeling not to the body but to the bottle, lifting its remaining glass by the neck with a dish towel like a waiter who knows better. Dante doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t need to. Every time he speaks, the circle adjusts.
The guests are shepherded to lunch. The kitchen restarts like a heart with a hand on it. I go where I’m told—to the stoves—but I don’t set a pan on the flame until I count staff faces. Marco sits at my window, brave car on the ledge, jaw set. I kiss the top of his head and keep my apron on.
Luca appears in the doorway with the broken bottle. He waits until we’re alone at the pass and sets it down between us wrapped in a linen that used to be white. The glass mouth is sheared, the cork rammed inside the neck like a plug. He uses a paring knife to lift something from the bore. A thin strip of paper, folded tightly. He doesn’t touch it with his fingers. He lays it on the steel and smooths it with the back of the blade.
“La cena è l’arma,” he reads. The dinner is the weapon.
The kitchen sounds recede—steam, clatter, a voice calling “hot”. All I hear is the fountain outside counting seconds like a metronome.
“Instructions?” I ask.
“A message to someone outside,” he says. “We think the merchant was the mule. The bottle came from the cellar.”
“The locked cellar,” I say.
His eyes flick to my face. He nods once. “Someone broke the cork from below and fed the paper up the neck. Clever. Easy to pass at a tasting. And it smells like celebration.”
