Page 29 of Blood Orange Christmas
“Accounting has the cellar key on a ring. Gabriella keeps a duplicate in a kitchen safe.” He pauses. “Both are present.”
“So the lock was opened without a key.” I swing the beam again. The edges of the bolt are fine-haunched. Someone worked with a thin bar, leaned, and waited. “Stay with her,” I say to Harrison. “No one in. No one down.”
Harrison nods. I step to Serena. “Move back from the door,” I say quietly.
She holds my eyes. Then she takes one step back. It is not surrender. It is a loan.
I take the first three stairs without sound and listen. The cellar is large and built into the hillside. The ceiling is a low arch. Theracks are old wood and new steel. The air is cold. The smell of iron is stronger here, but not fresh. Not today. I do not go farther. I want to see the pattern before any more dust is moved. I take one more breath and step back up into the hall.
“We secure it,” I say. “We set a man at each end and one on the chapel side under the olive press. We do not open it again today. Not for anyone. Not for the Pope. If a bottle needs to leave this cellar, it will wait.”
“Your guests will notice,” Serena says.
“My guests will eat what they are served,” I say. “If they do not notice, it means I have chosen well. If they do, it means I have work to do.”
She folds her arms. “You are going to run your summit and pretend you can hold my hand through a locked door.”
“I am going to run my summit,” I say, “and keep you alive.”
“You did not keep me alive four years ago,” she says softly. “I did.”
The words land like a small stone that still knows how to break glass. I take them. They are true. I could tell her she is here because of the things I did after she left. The men I cut loose. The deals I broke. The routes I shut down because they were too close to her street. I could tell her about the names I collected and the one I burned that made a cousin cry and a boss sell a house. None of that matters to her now. It should not.
“We are leaving this hallway,” I say. “Now.”
“Because you say so?” she asks.
“Because there are ears in these walls and I do not feed them.”
She almost smiles. It is not kind. “There are ears in every wall you stand next to.”
“Walk,” I tell her and put my hand lightly on her elbow. It is not a threat. It is a guide. She could pull away. She does not. Harrison falls in three paces behind. By the time we reach the top of the stairs, the corridor has collected staff with the innocent faces people put on when they stop to tie a shoe and listen. I look at each face. I see fear. I see appetite. I see a girl from laundry who is too new to be part of this and a footman who has worked in three houses and liked none of them. I see Gabriella at the far end, her chin high, her hands steady.
“Kitchen,” I say to Serena. “We talk there.”
We turn into the service corridor that runs behind the pantry. The saints on the long wall watch us pass with their blank eyes and their hands lifted for things I do not believe in. I open the door into the kitchen and let her pass me. Harrison stops at the threshold like a hinge. He will speak if he has to. He will be furniture if that is what the room needs.
The kitchen is the only honest room in the villa. Heat. Knives. Work. Everything else is talk. Copper bowls hang above the prep table. Flour tins line the shelf. A pan dries on a towel. The smell is lemon, butter, and steam. Marco’s drawing from this morning sits on the window ledge, the arrows linking fountain to kitchen to chapel with the dog drawn bigger than all the buildings.
“Sit,” I say.
“I will not,” she says.
“Then stand still.”
She plants her feet. I do not waste time. “You and Marco leave at first light,” I say again. “You go with two cars and a name that does not belong to you. Harrison will give you the bag we keep for this. There are clothes. There is a phone that calls one number. There is a set of papers that will get you through a checkpoint if the man checking wants to get home for dinner. There is cash. There is a story. There is a plan for the first three hours and a backup for the fourth.”
“I said no,” she says, and her voice goes up for the first time all day. “You cannot protect us and run your summit. You said so yourself.”
“I do both or I do neither,” I say.
“You are not a god.” She points at me with the hand that has fed men who do not know what it costs to be fed. “You move people like plates. You stack them and tell yourself you did not break them because you did not hear the crack. I am not a plate.”
The room tightens. I let my voice go quieter. Quieter makes people lean toward truth. “You think I want you here.”
“You told me last night to go,” she says. “Then you kissed me like leaving was a joke.”
“I told you to go because if you die in my house, I will never be able to sleep in any other.” I take a breath. “You were never supposed to be here.”
