Page 59 of Blood Orange Christmas
Paolo does the innocence routine like he practiced in a mirror. He lifts his empty hands. “I don’t step foot in your kitchen anymore. Your own orders, remember?” He gives me a half smile, almost tender, like we share a joke from a better room. “The chef doesn’t like cousins underfoot.”
“Chef doesn’t like anyone on the wrong side of the door,” I say. My voice carries farther than it should. The patriarch’s gaze flicks to me. He doesn’t mind women speaking when they bring food and facts.
Dante tips the marked flute toward the head chair. “This was meant for you,” he tells the patriarch, unblinking. “We found a twin in a crate that was resealed upstairs after a trip it never should have taken. We found corks that had been pulled and replaced. We found a lock on the cellar split by someone who knew how to work without waking a house.”
“Big words,” Paolo says, smiling wider, the show now. “Locks break. Drivers make mistakes. Vintners mislabel. You know how people are, Dante. They disappoint.”
He isn’t wrong. He just thinks that absolves him.
Dante nods once to Camilla. She steps forward with the kind of grace that makes men underestimate the weight she carries. She taps her phone, and an image blooms against the far wall, reflected on the plaster between two saints—grainy but clean enough for the room to see. The olive press camera. The angle Dante insisted on after the vineyard. The separate line he had her run when the first tapes were erased.
The still is time-stamped at 03:14. A man at the service door in a dark coat, hood up against cold that doesn’t exist at three in the morning, a case at his feet. Next to him, turned half away from the lens the way men do who know cameras like to watch, is Paolo. The jawline is not a maybe. The scar at the ear is not a coincidence. He’s handing over something small and metal, shiny in the light. The driver lifts the case. The doorway yawns like a throat.
“I meet a dozen drivers a week,” Paolo says, too quick. “You ask me to make sure deliveries don’t get lost. To be your face when you need to be somewhere else.”
“Next image,” Dante says.
Camilla swipes. The case is on a trolley. The hallway is the one behind my pantry. The angle is low, the kind of camera an owner hides because he knows how to count. Paolo’s hand rests on the handle. The driver is gone. Paolo glances up, just once, and in that slice of a second, the hood falls back. There is no defense left in the room except lying.
The consigliere watches the wall with interest like a man at a rare play. The patriarch’s eye crinkles by half a degree. That is a death sentence wrapped in manners.
“Coincidence,” Paolo says, and his voice thins. “The kitchen needed flour at dawn. The case looks like flour to an idiot. This is nothing.”
“It was a dessert vintage,” Dante says, almost kind. “Wrapped to look like flour for an idiot.”
Luca moves two steps closer to Paolo and stops like he reached a line he drew himself.
Dante taps the flute stem against his palm, thoughtful. “Evidence is boring to some people,” he says. “I brought some anyway.”
He nods again, and Rocco—God bless stubborn men with big hands—steps out from behind the last row of chairs with a clear bag. Inside it, a short pry bar rests like a sin. Narrow. Old. The edges are polished by use. The handle is wrapped in leather, the wrap dark with oil from a palm that doesn’t sweat unless it wants to. Near the hilt, a nick cuts the metal—tiny, precise, like a wolf’s tooth taken out of a jaw and set into iron.
“I gave you this ten years ago,” Dante says, so mild it almost doesn’t sound like anything. “When we were still boys pretending our fathers had a better version of us hidden in their pockets. You liked tools that fit the hand.” He points to the nick. “You put that there with my knife the week we lost the warehouse on the canal. Thought it made it yours.”
Paolo’s mouth says nothing. His eyes say too much.
“We pulled fresh oak dust out of that nick this afternoon,” Dante continues. “Same tannin signature as the cellar door. We took the shavings from the floor by the broken bolt and matched them to the shavings in that bag. The bar was hidden under your spare tire.”
A murmur rolls the room. Even the loud cousins know what fresh oak smells like when it’s taken out of a door that didn’t want to open.
“There’s more,” Dante says, almost apologetic. “We found a brass stamp in your trunk. Looks like the vineyard’s crest. Close.” He holds up another bag. Inside, a small brass die catches the candlelight—a fancy letter R with a diagonal slash a hair’s width too long. “A counterfeit. It makes a crest that looks right until you hold it up next to the real one. We photographed every crate that came through this house after the vineyard. Camilla found three with the fake mark. The resealed case upstairs wore this. So did the bottle next to the dead man.”
He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t have to. Facts do their own work.
Paolo laughs then. It’s too bright. It goes brittle at the edges. He spreads his hands for the room like a priest about to bless a crowd he can’t stand. “And this—this is your proof? A tool from your childhood, a stamp a hundred men could have, a blurry picture in the dark? You want to lock these doors and call me Judas because you can’t keep your house clean?”
“Careful,” the consigliere says lazily. “He isn’t finished.”
Dante tips his head toward me. I feel the room’s gaze settle enough to make my skin want to take a step back. I don’t.
“The tasting,” Dante says. “She would have died for you tonight to keep your old heart beating.” He looks back to the patriarch. “She found the almond and the tin, twice. She marked the glass that would have killed you, and she put it where I could see the X without anyone else knowing the room had already been saved.”
Paolo’s eyes cut to me. There’s something mean in the glance now, a flick that says I wasn’t supposed to be in this story at all, certainly not with a pen in my hand.
“Chef,” he says, softening his tone like he’s going to sell me a shirt that doesn’t fit. “You’ve worked very hard this week. I’m sure the pressure?—”
“Don’t talk to her,” Dante says, and the way he says it makes the hair at the back of my neck lift. It’s not ownership. It’s protection with teeth.
Paolo drops the charm like a mask that got sweaty. He turns to the Moretti patriarch with his palms out again. “You hear this? He lets a cook mark your glass and calls that security. He brings you to a table and talks about truth like a priest. Meanwhile, the docks rot, the boys in Termoli starve, and our enemies fill their pockets. The old ways kept food in bowls. This man keeps speeches in books.”
