Page 42 of Blood Orange Christmas
Paolo watches the pieces move with his head tilted like music is playing and he can’t quite place the song. “You want me by thecellar,” he offers, eager to be essential. “If there’s a door that opens, I’ll close it.”
“I want you where I can see you,” I say. “At the study door. Anyone tries to leave with a story, you take it away from them before it grows legs.”
His mouth tightens for the first time tonight. He nods like he’s chewing a lemon and decides not to show it. “As you say.”
We break the council and pour back into the rooms like we’re nothing more than good hosts who like to count things. The third course lands—the saffron that smells like a warm hour you wish you had two of—and the noise in the dining room lifts and settles in the way that tells me the food has the floor. Serena moves through her kitchen with those small, exact movements that turn a person into a metronome. She’s teaching a girl from the pastry station how to hold a knife so the wrist doesn’t pay the bill for the hand. She glances at me once over the pass, just enough for me to give her one small nod that means the world is as safe as it can be when it isn’t.
The Naples woman catches my eye and lifts her glass like a test. I lift mine in return and don’t drink. The Moretti cousin laughs a touch too loudly at something nobody funny said. Corsi eats like a man who expects someone else to do his chewing, and I let him.
Between courses, I walk the spine of the house—saints’ hall, pantry landing, the short corridor where old air lives, the chapel where two men sit with their backs to the door and their eyes on the windows like they expect God to knock. Luca’s text buzzes my cuff.
21:17 Paolo at sideboard—slipped in with the Orvieto pair. I’ve got him collared by eyes.
Marco sleeps two rooms away with a dog under his hand. Every step I take is an answer to the only question that matters. Can I keep them safe? The answer tonight is yes, until it isn’t.
On my way past the security room, I stop because men who keep their promises check their tools. The door is closed but not locked. My rule is locked or open, nothing in between. I open it. The equipment glows that soft idiot blue. I smell hot dust and plastic. The monitors roll slowly and neatly through the feeds—gate, ridge, hall, kitchen pass, saint wall, chapel—like a parade you don’t clap for. The vineyard view is blank, and that’s wrong.
“Back up,” I say to no one and everyone and tap the vineyard screen. It stutters, shakes, and then gives me a polite black square with white letters that make my tongue go bitter.
NO FILE.
I roll the hours back by hand. Ten minutes ago. The vineyard gives me snow and vines. Twenty minutes. Snow and the shadow of a man who belongs there. Thirty. The same. An hour. The same. The window that should hold the run from the greenhouse to the ravine—the little crumbs of sugar, the flash of red thread, the shape of two cowards who thought they’d borrow a boy—stays empty like it never happened.
Camilla appears at my shoulder without the door breathing. Her mouth flattens at the screen, not surprised, angry at herself for not being. “Don’t say it,” she warns quietly.
“I won’t say it,” I answer, because there’s no sentence in that language that makes my hands behave.
Harrison steps in behind me with a ledger and a face like stone that decided to be useful. He looks once, long. “Copy?” he asks.
I shake my head. “They didn’t lift it. They killed it where it lived.”
“From here?” he says, eyes on the little slot where a card should be sleeping and isn’t. “Or from the spine?”
“Either way,” I say, and my voice is too calm. “They touched my eyes and I didn’t catch their wrist.”
On the kitchen feed, Serena slides a tray toward the pass and wipes the lip like she’s blessing the plate. On the hall feed, the saints lift their hands to nothing in particular. On the chapel feed, a dog lifts his head, hears a sound four rooms away, and decides it isn’t worth waking a boy for.
The vineyard feed stays black. The hours that matter most right now have no record. The person who wants me blind just told me they’re in the room with the lights. I put my hands flat on the desk and press until the wood talks.
“Whoever erased my tapes,” I say, not loud, not quiet, “ate at my table tonight or will tomorrow.”
Camilla’s fingers flick once over the panel and die. “I can build us new eyes,” she says, practical as a grocery list. “But I can’t build yesterday.”
“Then we bait them with tomorrow,” I say. “In the meantime, Harrison, tell Luca to do a thorough sweep of Paolo’s room.”
Harrison doesn’t nod. His presence is assent. He taps the ledger with one finger where the numbers add up to a truth I don’t like. Someone is inside the circle I draw when I close my eyes.
Out in the dining room, laughter rises and falls like the surf in a city with no sea. In the kitchen, Serena lifts her chin and the room moves. In the chapel, my son sleeps with a hand on a dog’s ear and trusts a promise I’m going to keep even if I have to tear the locks off the world.
I close the security room door with my palm, and the soft click sounds like a gun in a church.
18
SERENA
The only thing that can take my mind off all the stress around me is a long, hot shower. Steam rises in thick, curling tendrils from the hot water cascading over my skin, turning the tiled shower into a hazy cocoon where the villa's shadows can't reach. I've locked the bathroom door, but the anger simmers under my flesh like embers refusing to die. Dante's summit, the cellar's secrets, Marco's safety—it's all tangled in my chest, but the tightest knot is the one tied to him, to the man who keeps vanishing. My hand slides down my belly, fingers parting the folds between my thighs as I lean against the cool marble wall. The water pounds my shoulders, rhythmic and insistent, mimicking the pulse throbbing in my core.
I close my eyes, picturing Dante's face. But the fantasy twists, unbidden, to the ache he keeps leaving behind. My fingers circle my clit, slow at first, building pressure that makes my breath hitch. The sensation is sharp, electric, the water sluicing over my hand like a lover's tongue, warm and unrelenting. I dip two fingers inside myself, curling them against that sensitive ridge, thrusting shallowly as my thumb grinds my clit. A low moan escapes me, swallowed by the rush of the shower, myfree hand bracing higher on the wall, nails scraping tile. "Fuck you," I whisper to the steam, imagining his cock instead—thick, demanding, the way it filled me on the prep table just hours ago. My hips rock forward, chasing the friction, the coil in my belly tightening as slick arousal mixes with the water trailing down my legs. It's not enough. It's never enough when anger fuels it, turning pleasure into something fiercer, more punishing.
