Page 41 of Blood Orange Christmas
I go to the door and meet the first waves with open coat and empty hands and a smile I learned from a man who died trying to teach me patience. Old Man Corsi kisses both my cheeks and smells like leather that never saw a tool. His heir hovers two steps back, jaw working on an opinion he thinks is a plan. Moretti himself doesn’t come. He sends a cousin with eyes like a knife you don’t trust and a laugh that wants you to. Two young men from Florence shake my hand like they’re practicing, and a woman from Naples gives me a long look that weighs the house, Serena, me, and the price of oranges in a single flick.
“Buona vigilia,” they say, mouths lined with sugar, eyes full of teeth.
“Buona,” I return. “Welcome to my table. It is a safe night if you behave.”
Serena stands at the kitchen threshold in a clean apron, hair tied back, wrists scrubbed, lemon living in her skin. She’s moved her station like we planned—closer to the service door that leads to the short corridor behind the pantry and the heavy oak that guards the cellar. We talked it through in three sentences and a look. We keep the pass tight. We build a fake pass to draw eyes. We put real plates into hands we trust through the short door. If the cellar is where the snake comes from, then the person I trust most stands where she can hear it move. I hate it. It’s what works.
She catches my eye and tilts her head a fraction toward the saints’ hall. I read it. The guests are already testing edges. The Naples woman asked if the lemon spoons are real or a story. The Moretti cousin came within three planks of the wrong side of the pass and smiled like he hadn’t. Serena barely turns her shoulders and the room obeys. I pretend that’s normal and take the weight off her back with my feet.
“Dante,” a voice calls, warm and wrong, and Paolo steps into the light like an apology wearing a suit.
He looks good. He always does. Coat that fits, hair that belongs to a magazine that doesn’t exist in this house, hands that never show dirt even when he’s been digging. But there’s a glassiness in his eyes tonight, a shine that isn’t grief and isn’t pride. Polished, yes. Polished like something was sanded too long.
“Where have you been?” I ask evenly, greeting and question in the same breath.
“Busy,” he says, palms up, the word he uses when he wants me to think he’s indispensable. “Tracking the first sin, not the last one. Your chef?—”
“Say her name,” I cut, not polite.
He meets my eyes, and for half a second the shine cracks. “Serena,” he says. “I went looking for who made the man before her sick. The one we were promised. I thought if I found who cleared her lane, I’d know who wants you off balance. I wasn’t ducking. I was working.”
“If you miss when I call, you’re ducking,” I say. “You got lifted off a goat road. You went off the map. Who touched you?”
“A couple of boys who rent courage by the hour,” he says, shrugging like it can slide off. “Not Moretti. Not Corsi. Outsiders. The bottle note is theater. The real game is the head count.”
“What head count?” Harrison asks from the ledger side, voice like winter air.
Paolo glances at him and puts his weight back on charm. “Someone is borrowing our soldiers when you aren’t looking,” he says. “Reassigning men without your hand on the page. I went to pull the string, and it took me where you didn’t like. I’m here now.” He spreads his hands like he’s just asked a choir to sing. “You know I bleed this house.”
I look at his hands, clean as ever. I remember the feel of Marco’s shoulders tucked into my collar. I remember the kitchen knife in a stranger’s belly and the thread of red scarf caught on agreenhouse hinge. I can hear the ravine talking to itself under everything.
“We’ll talk later,” I say, already moving him where I can see him and the door at once. “Right now, we feed the wolves and keep them from thinking they own the pen.”
He nods like a man who thinks the meeting went the way he wanted. It didn’t.
We pull the war council after the second course, in the small room off the library where the maps hang and the old desk has teeth marks from another life. I call for all of them—Harrison, Rocco, Luca, Camilla, Paolo, and two more who earned their names the hard way. Only half of them come on time. The others send apologies and two-minute promises and footsteps that go the wrong way first. It’s not chaos. It’s choreographed lateness. That is worse.
“Report,” I say, spine against the desk.
“North wall is still angry,” Rocco says, pleased. “Three attempts to look like a smoke and a kiss. We sent them away with a story they won’t tell twice. South path tried to nap. We woke it.”
“Phones,” Camilla says, eyes on me, because she’ll read the room before she reads the screen. “Three international numbers hit the ridge box and died. The gate camera blinked twice and kept the film. The pantry mic is clean. The chapel is a quiet room. The greenhouse has a new chain and a dog who thinks he’s a cop.”
“West road,” Luca says, mouth quirked. “Two cars, both local. I made them feel like tourists. They won’t buy postcards.”
“Reassignments?” I ask.
Harrison answers with a single line. “Someone shifted four men from the east watch to the inner ring for an hour without the call coming through me.”
“Who signed it?” I say.
“Paolo’s login,” Harrison says like he’s naming a weather front. He doesn’t look at Paolo. He looks at me.
“I was off the board when that happened,” Paolo says quickly, palms up again. “If my name’s on it, someone put it there for you to see. I’m not moving chess pieces in your house without telling you which game.”
“Someone is,” I say, keeping my voice quiet so the truth is louder. “Someone likes to spell my name with borrowed hands. Someone wants a kitchen knife in the wrong place and a boy at the edge of a hill.”
Serena isn’t in the room, but she might as well be. She lives inside every choice I make now. I look at the map of the dining room and the circles I drew before lunch. I move them. I put the loud men close to the ovens so the heat and noise dull their bragging. I seat the careful ones where I can see their hands and their eyes at once. I move the Naples woman next to the saints’ hall because I want her to understand I see her coming and I don’t mind. I slide the Moretti cousin away from the service door to a chair that looks important and isn’t. I move Serena’s prep table one length closer to the cellar, not so she’s in danger, but so if the lock breathes, she’ll feel it before a camera does. I put two of my men in waiter jackets and two waiters in suits at the end of the room to make liars work for it.
