Page 48 of Blood Orange Christmas
She grins because that’s a good sentence and it takes the kitchen’s shoulders down an inch.
Luca leans against the walk-in with his foot braced and his wrists crossed, the way he does when he’d like a cigarette and a joke and plans to have neither. He lifts the little bag with the driver’s glove and the folded paper inside. I take it without looking at it here. Later, with Harrison, with the door shut and the light on, we will open it and decide whether to breathe fire or water.
“Paolo?” he asks.
“Gone,” I say. “Not back.”
He nods and cuts his eyes toward the hall like he wants to see if the wall grew ears. It did.
I finally look at Serena. I don’t go closer. My house knows when a step will become an argument. Her gaze is low and bright, the way steel is bright when it’s just left the stone. I know what she saw. I know what lived on my face in the pantry when I put my hand on Paolo’s neck. It’s the look I wore in Milan when I did things we don’t talk about if we want to keep a room.
“You all right?” I ask, because I have to ask her something I can fix.
She tilts her head. The move is small. It lifts the scar on her wrist into the light. “Your face,” she says quietly, not for the room. “It went back to where I left it.”
I don’t blink. James Dean would look away here. I don’t. “I put it where it belongs.”
“And where do we belong when you’re wearing it?” she asks.
The kitchen keeps moving. The stew keeps ticking down. The saints keep lifting their hands at nothing. The villa pretends it isn’t listening. Luca picks a crumb off the edge of the pass and eats it like it’s his job.
“On my left,” I say. “Behind my right. In front of me if I start to lie.”
Her mouth does a thing that isn’t a smile. She nods once like the words cost less than she predicted and more than she wanted. Then she turns back to her pots because someone has to feed this house while it decides whether to be a home or a battleground and she’s better at stirring than I am at praying.
I move to the security room because there are tapes to be checked and men to be reminded that cameras are not decorations. The monitors throw light on my hands as I walk in. Two screens cycle the courtyard without argument. One shows the lower yard. The fourth—the one that should show me the vineyard path—rolls to black and then to a blank blue that isn’t a signal and isn’t a failure. It’s a choice. The feed labels are clean. The time codes are missing teeth.
Harrison arrives behind me like a shadow with a ledger. He doesn’t need to tell me what I’m seeing but he says it anyway, because facts matter when feelings are burning. “The vineyard tape is wiped. The same window that read NO FILE an hour ago. Not glitch-wiped. Hand-wiped. Whoever did it didn’t touch the other feeds. They knew which room they wanted in the dark.”
“Paolo had the driver at the pantry door when the corner cam stuttered,” I say. “Luca has the glove. Camilla has the route. The wine guy ‘slipped’ at the barrel this afternoon with a message in his bottle telling me the dinner is the weapon. The cellar door was forced last night while we were counting saints. The knife Serena uses is missing from her roll.” I put my hands on the metal edge of the console and feel the cold bleed into my fingers. “We’re not being robbed. We’re being asked a question.”
Harrison flips the ledger open to a list he wrote before I knew I needed it. “You want everyone at Christmas Eve to answer it,” he says. “At one table.”
“I want them to think they did,” I say. “And then I want the right man to stand up into a room that isn’t ready to forgive him.”
“We seat Paolo’s empty chair next to the man who ordered him here,” Harrison says, following my shape without raising hisvoice. “We leave a glass of Barolo at his place and pour water when he reaches. We let him understand where he stands.”
“Luca keeps him off the property,” I say. “If Paolo decides to be brave, the gate will teach him manners.”
“And Serena?” Harrison asks, not looking up, because he knows better than to stare at a man’s wound and ask how it feels.
“She stays in the only honest room in this house,” I say. “She stirs and salts and keeps us alive.”
He doesn’t say the thing we both know—that the honest room was where the knife went missing.
I stand a long minute and listen to my house. It’s a sound you either understand or you don’t. The walls carry the weight of footsteps. The floorboards teach me which shoes belong to whom. The radiators knock a language older than half the men in Moretti’s line. Under all of that, I hear Serena’s spoon scrape the bottom of a pot and I think about how a bowl of stew sits truer than a treaty.
When I come back into the corridor, the light is different. The hour shifted while I was counting doors. The vines outside the glass are black lines against a dark wool sky. The fountain is a mouth that won’t stop telling the night what it’s already heard.
I look back into the kitchen, just to fix myself on the one thing in this house that keeps its promises. Serena stands at the pass with her head lifted and her hand steady. She has her knife in the other hand—not the lemonwood, the second-first, the one she trusts when her favorite betrays her. Her eyes come to me and hold.
She watches me. She sees the look I learned in Milan, the one that makes men forget they had mothers. It’s on my face because I put it there, because sometimes, I need to show a room that mercy costs extra and the bill came due a long time ago. She doesn’t flinch. She takes it in like she takes heat, squares her shoulders, and feeds my house.
I don’t move toward her. I don’t speak. I turn and walk into my war again, cold, merciless, alone.
20
SERENA
