Page 58 of Blood Orange Christmas
There’s a ripple of polite laughter. The kind you throw a host like confetti when you want to pocket the silver and leave early. I let it fall and die.
“In houses like ours,” I continue, “we pretend the toast is about peace. About family and luck and clean slates.” I take the marked flute into my hand. It feels like what it is, crystal and a trap. “We toast to the year we want, not the one we’ve earned.”
A few heads tilt. The patriarch’s eyes sharpen, not enough to cut, but enough to warn. I smile back. It’s a small thing. It shows teeth.
Behind me, Harrison nods once to Gabriella. She sets the tray. I pour. Myself first, from a bottle Serena and I counted three times. Then the patriarch, from the twin. Then the heirs. Then the loud men who think being earlier to a glass is the same as being early to a war. The good Recioto moves like honey that paid for a gym membership. It smells like dark cherry and kept promises. It is clean. The poison we found lives in a safe where it can’t hurt anyone but the man who put it there.
As I pour, I watch the edges. A Moretti cousin cranes for a better view of the head glass. The consigliere’s gaze dips once to the stemware, then returns to my face. A server clears a plate that doesn’t exist. Luca’s eyes cut that way, and the server remembers the plate belongs to a ghost and sets it down again where the ghost started.
Glasses land where they belong. Rocco slides into the shadow by the doors. Camilla adjusts the dimmer a breath so the room gets softer and anyone with a camera in a cufflink gets a smear instead of a picture. Harrison shifts half a step. The patriarch could lean back and land in his shadow. Gabriella holds her tray like she’s holding a secret she has no intention of telling.
I lift my glass. The marked X kisses my palm through linen and air and the knowledge of it. I feel the room lean toward me—not because they like me, but because rituals hold men up when they’re tired, and this one is older than most of their sins.
“I raise this glass,” I say, and my voice goes lower so they have to work a little. Men listen harder to words they chase. “Not to peace?—”
Someone laughs too loudly, a cousin who thinks he knows where this goes. The patriarch doesn’t look at him and the laugh dies of shame on the plate.
“But to truth.”
The word lands like a key in a lock that pretended it didn’t have a keyhole. Every head lifts a fraction. Every smile gets teeth.
I don’t drink. I hold the glass at a height that says I could, that says I won’t, that says a hundred nights’ worth of things men like these understand.
Across the room, Luca meets my eye. The look he gives me is a stone I’ve thrown a thousand times. He turns. The doors click. Then they thud. The sound is final in the way winter can be—no anger, no hurry, just the weight of a season that doesn’t ask permission.
Several guests glance back in the polite way polite men do when they want to know if they’re trapped. They are. Polite men turn impolite quickly.
“Sit,” I say gently, smiling past the lion on my cuff to the oldest man in the room. “We’re not finished.”
23
SERENA
The doors are already locked when it hits the room—the sound of chairs skidding, the metallic click of bad decisions. I’m at the pass with a towel over my shoulder and a ladle in my hand, tasting the last shimmer of glaze off a warm pan, and the wave of noise rolls through the hall like heat. Shouts. A woman’s sharp inhale. A man laughing the wrong way.
“Stay with the line,” I tell Gabriella, but I’m moving before she can answer. I push through the door into the dining room, the heat of the kitchen giving way to candlelight and eyes like knives.
The Morettis stand as one organism—half of them loud, half of them silent, all of them dangerous. A few hands settle under jackets. One cousin is already holding steel like he wants applause. The patriarch doesn’t blink. He just leans his chin into one hand and watches Dante the way a cat watches a bird that thinks it invented the sky.
Dante stands at the head of the table with a flute in his hand and the kind of stillness you can only buy with scars. He wears the jacket like it came with the house. He’s calm in a way that makesother men nervous, voice steady and easy as if he’s describing the weather and not the part where someone tried to kill a king.
“The wine was poisoned,” he says, and the words land flat and simple. “A dessert vintage reserved for your final toast.” He tips the glass in his hand just enough to carry the room. “The same vintage we found in the vineyard beside a dead man with a message rolled into its throat.”
“La cena è l’arma,” the consigliere says softly, eyes amused, mouth not. The dinner is the weapon.
“Brava,” Dante answers, as if they’re trading recipes. “Someone close enough to my kitchen to touch what comes to your table tried to make that message true.”
A wave of noise rises. The young ones posture. The old ones choose which faces to trust. Luca stands by the doors with his hands loose, his posture casual, his eyes counting veins. Harrison is a shadow at the patriarch’s shoulder, ledger folded into his bones. Camilla drifts like smoke along the wall, two clear-bagged phones bright in her hands, expression so polite you’d never guess she could shut off a city block with one thumb.
Paolo stands slowly from the far left, near the sideboard—the seat of a man who thinks he can see the kitchen without being seen by the kitchen. He smooths his lapel, tips his head like a bow he didn’t earn. He looks good because he always looks good. The polish is right. The shoes shine. But his eyes are wrong—bright the way a street is when rain hits oil.
“Cugino,” he says, soft and wounded, as if the word alone should be enough to close doors and stop clocks. “You lock your guests in and make accusations. At Christmas. You’ll scare the saints.”
Dante doesn’t look at him yet. He looks at the room. “No one drinks,” he says, and the way he says it makes even the loud cousins put their glasses down without getting to be clever about it.
“You’re suggesting one of us did this?” the consigliere asks, pleasant, precise.
“I’m suggesting one of mine did,” Dante says. His gaze moves like a blade you could shave with. He finally lets it rest on Paolo. “Which narrows the field.”
