Page 63 of Blood Orange Christmas
A ghost of a smile finds her mouth. “He was going to kill you.”
“I know.”
“And I was not going to let that happen.”
“I know that too.” I bite back the impulse to add the apology that sits like a stone on my tongue. She doesn’t want words. She wants proof.
Footsteps scuff at the door. Luca passes by the open crack long enough to set a small paper bag at the end of our pew—food he lifted from a convent kitchen with a grin and a lie. He vanishes again without making the priest mad. Harrison murmurs into the dark to a man at the bottom of the hill about lanterns and lines. The nanny dozes sitting up, chin to chest, a good guard with an old spine.
I take the bag and find bread that tastes of wood and patience, a wedge of pecorino, two roasted chestnuts wrapped in paper like presents. I break the bread and hold half for Serena. She takes it and eats like a fighter—efficient, neat, grateful without talking about it. We share the cheese, the chestnuts. I set a small piece near Marco’s hand. He’ll pretend he isn’t hungry when he wakes and will eat it anyway.
“Walk me through it,” I say when the food is gone and the quiet grows a skin. “From where I stand to the end of the road where our boy can sleep with the window open.”
She leans back in the pew, shoulder still against mine. “First,” she says, slipping into her kitchen voice—the one that made men twice her size move a millimeter to the left so a room could live—“you stop feeding anyone you don’t trust. In business and at the table. No new faces in your house. No favors for cousins who won’t make eye contact. We cut the line to the drivers and we build our own. You pay double for good hands and fire anyone who laughs when the wrong man makes a joke.”
“Done,” I say, because this part is easy.
“Second, you give routes away.” She lifts a hand when I start to argue. “To men who won’t use them to launder their pride. To men with daughters and dogs and gardens. Let them make money. Let them take heat. You keep the locks and the ledgers and the lawyers. You keep the name. You get smaller and harder to touch. You become boring. You let the hungry boys fight over crumbs while you roast a fish and take your kid to see saints with lemon leaves on their sleeves.”
My laugh is a breath more than a sound. “You make it sound like a recipe.”
“It is.” She taps my chest, right over the ribs I’ve bruised too many times. “Third, you tell the truth. Not to everyone. To the people who sleep under your roof. To our son. To me. You don’t keep secrets that make us targets. You don’t disappear without calling. You don’t make promises you can’t afford. You say ‘I don’t know’ when you don’t. Then you find out.”
I hold her gaze. My first reflex is to sayI’ve always told you the truth, and that is not a sentence anyone in my position gets to sell twice. I swallow it and nod. “I can do that,” I say. “I will do that.”
“Fourth,” she says, a small smile in her voice now because she knows what she’s about to ask will sound like blasphemy in my world, “you take mornings. Not nights. You wake him up. You make coffee. You pack a snack for a walk that is not a surveillance run. You show him how to sharpen a knife without cutting the board. You drive him to water and let him throw rocks and miss. You teach him to say no to people who love him and mean it. You learn to make a sauce without tasting for salt with rage.”
I breathe it in. The picture hurts. It also heals. “Mornings,” I repeat, and the word tastes new.
She glances toward the altar. The priest lights another candle and leaves it with a nod that feels like a benediction and a warning.You get a second chance only if you change the first thing.
I look down at my son. He’s sprawled now, belly-up like a pup who knows the floor won’t move. His brave car has skidded an inch away from his hand. I set it back where it belongs and think about whatbelongsmeans when a house can be taken by sirens and cousins and men with papers.
On the far bench, Luca clears his throat softly. “Word from the ridge,” he says, voice low. “Blue lights pulled back to the main road. They’re going to pretend they were never at your gate. The consigliere sent a basket shaped like an apology. Camilla says the wolves are tired for the night.”
“Good,” I say. “Tomorrow, I call the old man.” I look at Serena. “I’ll give him a gift he didn’t see coming.”
“What gift?” she asks.
“Freedom,” I say. “From me.”
Her brows flick. “You trust him to take it?”
“I trust him to take a win that costs him nothing and makes him look like a king.” I let my voice go dry. “I will give up seats I never wanted, routes that taste like blood, boys who think I owe them my future because I paid for their past. In return, he will keep my name out of rooms where names go to be broken. If he hesitates, I remind him who didn’t drink from an X.”
“And if he says no?” she asks.
“Then we go farther,” I say. “North. Or out of Italy altogether. I have places that owe me favors that smell like pine, not smoke. I can be small in a bigger country.”
She considers that. “You can,” she says. “If you want to.”
I turn in the pew and take her in fully. She’s exhausted. She’s beautiful. There’s flour ghosting the cuff of her sleeve and blood—Paolo’s—on the heel of her hand where she didn’t catch it with a towel in time. Everything in me wants to pull her onto my lap and fall asleep in one piece for the first time in ten years. Everything in me knows sleep isn’t the point.
“Then teach me,” I say.
Three words. They land between us with the weight of a life.
Her mouth tilts, almost soft, almost cruel, the way she gets when she’s about to tell a line cook he’s been salting at the wrongtime his whole career. “I will,” she says. “But I start with a knife lesson, and you’re going to hate it.”
