Page 55 of Blood Orange Christmas
I hold his eyes. “If I hadn’t tasted it, the Moretti patriarch would have died.”
No one breathes for a beat. The sentence draws blood and gives it back. Dante turns to Luca. “Quiet team,” he says. “Pull the other cases of this vintage, both the ones in dry storage and the ones that never left the cellar. Harrison, get Camilla to cross-check the delivery route against the driver we saw near the guest entrance. Rocco, I want a body on every door between here and the chapel. No one touches a glass without two pairs of eyes and a mother’s prayer.”
“And Paolo?” Luca asks, flat.
“Paolo is out,” Dante says, the words clean as a cut. “He breathes on the wrong corridor, his windpipe learns a new trick.”
Luca nods once. He doesn’t smile. He’s already moving.
I wipe my tongue again and again, even though the ghost is gone. Rage tastes like metal if you let it sit. I swallow air and stand up straight. “We need to mark the glass,” I say. “The one meant for him.”
Dante’s eyes narrow. “We scrap the toast, Serena. We pour nothing. We give water and call it holy.”
“No,” I say, and I shake my head hard enough that my hair pulls at the pins. “We use this to our advantage to bring the mole forward.”
He stares at me. He doesn’t argue. He’s already there, in the map of the room, in the way men like to watch their work. “What do you need?” he asks.
“A glass from the head setting,” I say. “And you will have it, not the patriarch. Then we stage the pour. We control every bottle and every hand. We let whoever wants a funeral come to the funeral.”
“And if they don’t bite?” Harrison asks.
“Then the patriarch lives, and our trap lives to snare something worse,” Dante answers. “And the only thing I regret is not wasting more of their time.”
We move like a kitchen when the tickets print heavy. Harrison reseals what needs to be resealed and labels what needs to sleep separately. Luca takes the tagged poisons to a safe that once held payroll and now will hold evidence and the kind of piece I hope I never see loaded. Rocco assigns two men I trust—one used to be a paramedic, the other’s hands are too steady not to have stitched things—to shadow the head table with empty trays and the soft feet saints wish for. Camilla prints a call sheet for service tomorrow that puts familiar faces where strangers expect strangers. Gabriella wipes down my tasting plate like she’s lifting fingerprints, then looks at me and gives me the tiniest “brava” anyone has ever earned.
Dante doesn’t leave my side until we’ve done the upstairs storage room twice. Gabriella brings me the glass service has chosen for the toast—long-stemmed flutes with a delicate lip, etched with a pattern you only see when the light puts its hands on it. I turn the head chair’s flute over and study the foot. There’s a tiny notch where a previous mark left a ghost. Some old maître d’ once needed to know which glass was which. “China pencil,” I say. “White.”
Gabriella passes it to me like a surgeon passes a scalpel. I roll the flute in my fingers and draw a small X under the foot, tucked into the notch so the line lives in a valley no eye will catch from above. Then, with the tip of my own paring knife—one I trust because it belongs to me and to no one else—I scratch a second X inside the first, tiny enough that only a man who washes this glass every night would find it.
Dante watches my hand, not to correct it, but to know the mark the way he knows every camera angle on the ridge. His knuckles are still split. I want to lift them to my mouth and make the sting worth it. Later.
“Tomorrow,” I say, letting the glass breathe air, “you pour from the bottles I pull. Harrison stands behind the patriarch’s chair. Rocco places two guards in the shadow of the arch so anyone who reaches without a reason loses the arm that reached. Paolo learns nothing unless the time is right. Camilla watches the doors for men who pretend to be boys sent for more ice. We let the room think we’re giving it a night. We take a thief instead.”
“And if they planted a hand inside service?” Harrison asks, pragmatic as a ledger that collects debt and interest.
“Then service will eat at my table tonight,” I say. “We feed them soup and bread and keep them too full to run.” I put the flute back in its ring, the tiny mark hiding like a saint in plain sight. “I don’t like being watched in my own kitchen.”
Dante looks at me. He’s not smiling. His face carries too much for that. But there’s something like pride in the way his eyes go softer by a degree. “You were always better at a knife than anyone who thought knives belonged to men,” he says.
I don’t say thank you. I’m too tired for polite, and the compliment is a shared weapon we don’t have to polish in public. “I’ll prep the sweets station myself tomorrow,” I say instead. “No one else touches the citrus oil. No one else holds the sugar. If someone wants to write a message in the steam, they can try to spell through my hands.”
“Done,” he says.
We walk back through the service corridor, the saints with their quiet eyes watching like they know the line we’re drawing. The greenhouse glass hums under the wind. The vines outside are sleeping with one ear open. Kitchen air meets me like it knows my shoulders by name. I wash my hands again even though I didn’t touch much, just to wash away the thought of tin. The lemon zest I grated for tomorrow’s cloud cream smells bright, honest, like a small sun. I breathe it in. My pulse eases.
“Eat,” Gabriella orders, shoving a small bowl at me with saffron rice and a spoon. “You can’t be smart hungry.”
I obey because the last woman who ignored Gabriella ended up saltier than her stock. Dante eats half the bowl, then gives it back to me with a look that says he saw what I did and will not move until I’ve done it for myself too. I finish it. The rice sits right. The world steadies.
Camilla appears with printouts like a magician’s scarf. She flips one toward Harrison. “Cart log in the dry corridor shows a weight change at 00:19 and 00:27,” she says. “Same cart ID. Same door badge. The badge belongs to a temp who worked lunch and clocked out at nine. Badge used later by a left hand, not his.”
“Paolo?” Luca asks, because he is done pretending the obvious is fog.
Camilla’s mouth twitches. “If it was Paolo, he finally learned to shrink two inches and shave his knuckles.”
“Borrowed badge,” Harrison says. “Cloned or stolen. Either way, the hand knew which door bites and which one kisses.”
“We’ll bite back,” Dante says.
