Nanny For The Ruthless Mafia King

Chapter 4: The Things Left Unasked

She had been in the house for nine days when she understood that Damien Rossi was testing her.

Not obviously. Not with the blunt mechanisms of someone checking a list. He was testing her the way a current tests a hull, with consistent subtle pressure from a direction you were not quite expecting, to see what gave and what held.

The first test had been the flower bed. She had held.

The second test came on the morning of the ninth day, and it came disguised as an administrative matter.

She arrived in the kitchen at seven for Luca's breakfast and found a man sitting at the table who was not Luca and was not anyone she had met. He was about forty-five, grey at the temples, in an expensive casual shirt, and he was eating toast with the ease of someone who had been eating toast in this kitchen for years. He looked up when she entered and smiled with the warmth of someone who wanted something.

You must be the new nanny, he said. I'm Sal. Old family friend.

Aria evaluated this sentence for the three or four seconds she was allowed to evaluate something without it becoming a stare.

Aria, she said. Is Mr. Rossi expecting you?

Always, Sal said, which was not an answer.

She made Luca's breakfast. Luca arrived at seven exactly, saw Sal, and changed direction slightly, not retreating but adjusting his trajectory to put himself on Aria's side of the table rather than the side Sal occupied. Aria noted this without commenting on it. She set Luca's plate down across from her own chair and sat.

Sal watched Luca with the uncalibrated attention of someone who was not practiced with children, the kind of attention that assessed rather than engaged.

He speaks yet? Sal asked, of Luca, but to Aria, using the he of someone discussing a condition.

Aria said: Luca, I was thinking about the starling versus blackbird question. I think I'm going with blackbird. What do you think?

Luca did not speak. But he picked up the crayon he had brought to the table and pointed it, briefly but with intention, at the window, where a bird was currently visible on the garden wall.

Aria looked at it.

You're right, she said. It does look like a blackbird. Thank you.

She turned back to her breakfast and did not look at Sal.

Sal was quiet for a moment. Then he said, in a slightly different register: Damien mentioned he was trying a new placement. Must be interesting work.

I like it, she said pleasantly.

Working for people like the Rossis, I mean. Takes a certain kind of temperament.

She looked at him then, because that sentence required looking at.

I'm not sure what you mean, she said.

Sal smiled. Rhetorical. I just mean the lifestyle. The security, the schedules. Must feel a bit restrictive.

She considered her response for the exact amount of time it deserved.

I don't find it restrictive, she said. I find it organized. The parameters are clear and the work is meaningful. That's more than you can say for a lot of jobs.

He looked at her for a moment longer than felt casual.

Fair enough, he said.

He left before eight. She heard him and Damien speaking briefly in the hall, tone too low to parse, and then the front door.

When Damien appeared in the kitchen doorway three minutes later, he looked at Aria with the particular focused quality that she was beginning to understand meant he had already been briefed on the conversation by whatever means he had of being briefed on conversations that happened in his house.

Sal says you're diplomatic, Damien said.

Is that what he said? she asked.

He said you deflected well without tipping your hand.

She met his gaze.

He was probing, she said. I didn't see the point in engaging with it.

No. Damien looked at Luca, who was constructing something with his breakfast that was architectural rather than nutritional. What did you think of him?

Aria thought about this carefully.

I think he's someone who measures people for usefulness, she said, and children register as zero on that scale, which tells me something about his values.

Silence.

Then Damien said: He's not a family friend.

I didn't think he was.

He's a business associate. Occasionally useful. Less occasionally trustworthy.

She waited.

I brought him through the kitchen because I wanted to see how you handled an unscheduled variable, he said.

Aria sat with this for a moment. A test, then. Her instinct had been right.

And? she asked.

He looked at Luca again, at the breakfast architecture, at the small serious face above it.

And he said Luca ate his peas, Damien said quietly, in a tone that had nothing to do with Sal.

He turned and left.

Aria looked at Luca.

Luca looked back at her.

She said: I think the blackbird is back.

He turned to the window.

* * *

Elena called on Friday, which was not the designated call day but which Aria had been permitted by the household communication protocol because Elena had used the word urgent in a text and because Aria had taken the text to Marco and Marco had, after a phone call she was not party to, told her Friday was fine.

She took the call in the garden, out of habit.

Elena's voice had the quality it got when she had been doing research. Focused and slightly too casual, the way a person sounds when they are trying not to sound like they have been up until midnight investigating something.

How's the job?

Good, Aria said.

Good like normal good or good like I've decided to stay in a hostage situation and I'm maintaining a positive attitude?

Good like I'm engaged and the work matters. How's Nonna's new prescription?

She's better. She said it was like being given new legs but for her heart, which I think means it's working. Aria. Who is Damien Rossi?

Aria was quiet for a moment.

My employer, she said.

Your employer is the head of the Rossi crime family, Elena said, without heat. I looked it up. They're one of the three major organized crime families in the region. He took over at twenty-six after his father was killed. He's considered by law enforcement to be extremely effective and extremely difficult to prosecute.

The line was quiet for three seconds.

Elena, Aria said.

I know. Confidentiality agreement. I'm not publishing anything. I'm your best friend and I need to know you're not about to get hurt.

I'm not getting hurt. The child needs me. The job is real.

The child, Elena said, is the son of a man who runs criminal operations across three counties.

The child, Aria said carefully, is four years old and has not spoken in three years and draws his dead mother's face from memory with extraordinary accuracy. He is the reason I'm here and he is the only part of this that I need you to focus on.

A pause.

Is he okay? Elena asked, differently now, the research tone gone, just Elena.

He's getting better, Aria said.

And the father?

Aria looked at the house.

Complex, she said.

Elena made a sound that communicated entire chapters of concern and friendship and the decision to trust Aria's judgment even when she disagreed with it.

Check in more than once a week, Elena said. I don't care about the protocol. Text me every day something brief. If you go quiet for more than two days I'm calling someone.

You'll call who?

I don't know yet. I'll figure it out. Text me.

All right, Aria said.

She ended the call and sat on the bench for a moment and looked at the garden.

She thought about what she had said: he is getting better. She thought about whether that was true or whether she was already too close to assess it objectively.

She thought it was true.

She thought she was also already too close.

She thought these two things were not, necessarily, in conflict.

* * *

The thing she was too close to became clearer that same evening.

It was after Luca was asleep and the house was in its quiet post-eight configuration, the faint sound of something happening in the study down the hall, the kind of sound that said someone was working. She had learned the house's nighttime grammar by now and she moved through it easily, going downstairs for the cup of tea she made herself every evening, the small private ritual that marked the transition from being on duty to being off.

She was at the kettle when she heard it.

Not sound, exactly. The opposite of sound: a quality of held breath that the whole house seemed to take on briefly, and then the very faint but unmistakable sound of something breaking in the study down the hall.

Not violence. A glass, she thought. A glass meeting a hard surface.

She stood at the kettle and did not move.

Then she heard it: one note on the piano. Just one. From above.

She did not go upstairs. She made her tea. She sat at the kitchen table and wrapped both hands around the mug and looked at the surface of the tea and thought about a man who played one note and stopped.

She thought about what Elena had found, and what it confirmed, and what it changed. It changed nothing about Luca. It changed nothing about her reason for being here. It changed nothing about the work.

It changed something about Damien.

Not the fact of him, which was already clear. But the space he occupied in her mind, which she had been carefully maintaining at a professional distance and which was, she now recognized with the clear-eyed honesty she preferred to pretend she didn't have, narrowing.

She thought: I need to be careful.

She thought: I know exactly what kind of man he is.

She thought: I know exactly what kind of man he is, and there is a four-year-old boy upstairs who draws his dead mother's face from memory, and his father stands outside his door at night without going in, and somewhere in this house a single note on a piano has just gone quiet.

She drank her tea.

She went back upstairs.

She lay in her bed in the dark and looked at the ceiling and listened to the house breathe.

She was almost asleep when she heard the footsteps on the stairs.

One flight up, slow.

Then the soft, distant sound of piano keys.

Not one note this time.

A phrase. Hesitant and then not hesitant. The same phrase she had heard on Thursday morning, but fuller now, something added to it, and she lay very still and listened to it move through the ceiling above her head and thought about what she had told Elena and thought: getting better means something different in every house, and in this house it means something she does not have a word for yet, but she is beginning to feel its shape.

The music stopped.

The house was silent.

In the morning she would find, on the kitchen table before she even came downstairs, a cup of coffee made precisely the way she made it, with the right amount of cream and no sugar, set at her usual place.

There was no one in the kitchen when she came down.

But the coffee was still warm.