Page 60 of Blood Orange Christmas
“Old ways?” the patriarch repeats. He sounds amused. “You have them in your pocket? Show me one.”
“The old ways are dead,” Paolo snaps. His heels plant. His chin lifts. He looks like a boy trying on a father’s fury. “And he’s too soft to be Don. He locks doors and plays detective while outsiders swap our routes for pictures on their walls. He should have spilled blood years ago. Instead he collects cousins like souvenirs and kisses women who don’t belong to this room.”
Luca takes another small step. The line between them hums.
“Sit down,” Dante says. He doesn’t move. His glass doesn’t shake. He could be asking for salt. “We’re finished.”
“No,” Paolo says, and his hand goes to the small of his back like a bad habit. For a beat, I thinkgunand my stomach turns to ice. He doesn’t draw a pistol. He pulls steel.
It’s my knife.
I know it the way you know your own handwriting. The spine has a hairline scratch where a dishwasher dropped it six months ago. The heel is polished to a soft shine from a thousand hours rocked through onions and herbs and winter roots. The handle is worn to my grip. He lifts it into candlelight like a man showing a relic.
“Put that down,” I say, and my voice leaves the place where it lives in my chest. It comes out low and clear. The room hears it.
Paolo smiles because he thinks he just won something. “What?” he says. “This? The chef’s favorite? Everyone knows she cooks with lemon. Everyone knows she works clean.” He twirls it in his hand like a toy he bought in a market. “Everyone knows she tells the man with the crown where to stand.”
Harrison shifts one step. Dante doesn’t. The patriarch’s eyes shine like glass taken off a cold shelf and run under warm water. The consigliere lifts a hand a half-inch and three Moretti cousins unclip safety straps they shouldn’t have unclipped in a house that feeds them.
Paolo’s voice rises. It goes tinny. He moves because he’s already lost his footing where the facts live, and now he needs noise, he needs momentum, he needs a new story to shove into the room. “The old ways are dead,” he repeats, too loud now, the pitch wrong. “And he is too weak to carry what was given to him.”
“My house isn’t your mouthpiece,” Dante says, soft enough to make the room lean in again.
Paolo breaks then. It isn’t a big break. It’s the small one that matters. The kind that lets light in and bad air out. His eyes go bright, then flat. He flips the blade in his hand, point forward, stance shifting like he’s about to cut rope, not people.
He looks at Dante once. He looks at the Moretti patriarch twice. And then he looks at me.
“Don’t,” Dante says, and the word cracks something in the air.
Paolo lunges at him.
24
SERENA
Time stretches like sugar on the boil. Paolo’s body angles and the knife flashes—my knife, bright and hungry, aimed for Dante’s ribs. I don’t think. The pass shelf is at my left, the small copper pot of finishing oil still shimmering from the last plate. I grab it by the handle with a towel and throw.
The arc is perfect. Hot citrus oil fans like a wing. It hits Paolo full in the face and chest. He screams—a high, shocked animal sound—and staggers, clawing at his eyes, knife jerking wide. The oil slides under his collar, over his expensive silk, down his wrists. His skin blisters in real time. He stumbles backward into a chair, kicks it into a cousin’s knees, knocks a goblet into a starburst of glass.
Luca draws and fires once, fast. The shot goes wide and cracks a saint on the wall right through the halo. Paolo bolts, half-blind, burning, howling, shouldering past a cluster of pearls and panic. The room tears in two—half the Morettis leap up to follow, the others freeze and calculate. The patriarch doesn’t move. His eyes are old marble in candlelight.
Dante is already in front of me, hands on my shoulders, checking for blood, for air, for holes. “Are you hit?” His voice is low and razor-steady. Only his eyes give him away.
“I’m shaking,” I say, because honesty comes easier when you’ve just thrown fire, “but I’m fine.”
“You just saved my?—”
“No.” My throat takes the word and sets it down clean. “I gave us all a fighting chance.”
He nods once—the only thank you that works in a room like this—and pivots, pistol up, sighted. Paolo ricochets off the jamb, knife still in his fist, hair smoking, mouth open on a curse. For one beat, he turns back toward us like he still believes momentum can be a plan. Dante squeezes the trigger twice. The first shot lifts Paolo at the shoulder. The second takes him in the center mass, just below the sternum. He folds in on himself, drops my knife, and hits the marble with an ugly, final sound, hot oil and cologne and blood blooming under him like a ruined feast.
Silence falls with weight. Then a cousin yells. Two more reach for guns they do not get to use because Luca and Harrison are already on them with open hands and closed facts. “Don’t,” Luca says, bored, which makes it worse. “We’re all out of miracles.”
The patriarch rises at last. He looks down at Paolo’s body the way a farmer looks at a broken fence—irritated, not surprised. His eyes lift to Dante. A small, deliberate nod passes between them. Not affection. Not absolution. Permission.
And then the sound that means a world is about to change—sirens, thin at first, then swelling, growing teeth as they climb the drive. The radios on our guards crackle with language thatisn’t ours. Camilla’s phones flash cold blue. “Blue lights at the gate,” she says, and there’s a hard edge under her sugar. “They’re not here by accident. Someone gave them a map.”
Not just a Moretti’s private vengeance, then. A mole with a badge on speed dial. The room tightens again, but in a different way. The cousins go very still. The consigliere’s smile shows two more teeth. You can keep knives out of a dining room. You can’t keep the state from wanting a taste.
