Page 37 of Blood Orange Christmas
We inch, trying to steal inches from a cliff. The elder cradles his wrist and tries to look like he planned it. The younger rethinks his life. Pippo shakes in a way that means he’ll bite if someone asks him nicely.
“Wait,” Harrison mouths. He taps twice. The answer comes from my apron pocket vibrating against my ribs—Camilla’s text, brittle and sure.
Two minutes. He’s inside the gate.
The radio follows with her voice. “He’s here.”
The men hear that too. The elder’s mouth hardens. He finally looks like a man who can imagine dying.
We don’t move. We learn the shape of stillness. I can feel my boy’s small hand in the space between his hand and mine like a rope stretched over water.
Footsteps on stone in the distance, a rhythm I know better than my own. Calm men under a storm. Somewhere, a door sighs shut. The whole house leans toward us.
“Hold,” Harrison says. “Mark in ten.”
“On your shoulder,” I tell him, a promise I mean and hate.
I roll my shoulders. My fingers slip in my pocket around the little knife I use for citrus—thin blade, honest. People underestimate kitchen steel. It likes being underestimated. The handle sits right in my palm, the way a word sits right when you’ve earned it.
“Marco,” I mouth. “Bravissimo.”
He breathes like I taught him. One, two, three, four. His scarf rides his breaths like a flag. He doesn’t cry. He is very aware.
Behind us, the saints keep their hands up. The fountain doesn’t give the word back. The wind skins the ravine with a sound like whispered names.
“Mark,” Harrison says, and we move as the chapter of us that doesn’t know how to wait gives way to the one that does.
16
DANTE
Twelve hours gone and the day keeps trying to take a bite out of me. Split knuckles, a graze along my side, coat salted with dust and blood that isn’t all mine. At the quarry road, Paolo’s last ping dies on a goat track. His car sits sideways against fieldstone, doors yawning, engine ticking as it cools. Two sets of prints dent the verge, one dragging. A cigarette stub with the wrong brand grinds into the mud. It’s the quiet after an argument I miss by minutes.
I don’t pray. I count—angles, exits, bad ideas. Boys with rented guns learn headlights don’t blind me. Underestimating me does. One runs. One doesn’t run again. The one who matters keeps his feet behind other men and his name behind his teeth.
The coupe’s speaker stays live to the house on Luca’s line. It hisses, pops, then a guard’s voice cuts in so clear it feels like he’s sitting beside me. “We have eyes on a child near the ravine. He’s not alone.”
The road falls away under me like bad ice.
There’s only one child whose name lives under my tongue. I don’t ask which. I don’t answer. I put my foot down. The car snarls and takes the bend like it owes me money. Snow spits, rethinks it, spits again. Vines flicker past, row after row of white ribs climbing the hills.
“Greenhouse door open,” Harrison says inside my car like he’s inside my head. Calm. Even. “Crumbs. Mitten. Red fiber.”
“Lock it,” Camilla answers, all fingers and metal. “Guests in. Doors sealed. Lines cut. I’m blind under the cedars. Fixing.”
“North ridge clean,” Rocco grates. “I don’t like clean.”
The back road into the vineyard is a ribbon someone dropped and forgot. I drive it faster than sense and not as fast as need. The gate camera blinks awake when my lights kiss it. The latch thunks before I finish swearing at the wind.
“Open,” Camilla says. “Inside.”
Gravel spits. The arch swallows the car. I’m out before the engine remembers how to idle. Men turn into edges along the walls. The house breathes like it remembers older wars and decides to be useful.
Serena is already running. Skirt fisted high, hair dragged back hard, eyes black and bright like she swallowed the stove. Snow freckles her shoulders. She doesn’t slow when she sees me. She cuts the air.
“Ravine,” Camilla says. “They doubled back. Greenhouse crumbs, sugar. Mitten. Two on the goat path. There’s a third—watching.”
“How do you?—”
