Chapter 8 — The Church Bleeds
791 Words
She would remember it in fragments later.
Sound first: the crack of the first shot, and then the second, and then the world becoming very loud and very wrong all at once. Glass cascading from the windows above in a glittering waterfall. Screaming that started high and dropped to something lower and more animal as the guests understood what was happening and moved accordingly — with the practiced, terrible efficiency of people who had spent their lives in rooms where this was always a possibility.
Luca's hand around her wrist before she had processed the sound.
The stone floor against her knees, which she would feel for days afterward.
Then: the marble pillar. Cold against her shoulder. His body angled between her and the open church — positioned without apparent thought, as naturally as water finding level. She would think about this later, when she had the luxury of thinking. How he hadn't considered it. How it had simply been where he put himself.
She made the phone call. East corridor. The line went dead.
Return fire — Luca rising and dropping, twice, three times — and the sound of shouting somewhere near the transept and then the specific quality of silence that only follows gunfire, the silence of a held breath.
"Now," Luca said. "Stay low."
They ran.
The passage was exactly where he said — a wooden panel in the sacristy that swung outward on a hinge so ancient it groaned like something alive. The smell of stone and cold and time and the deep accumulated dark of five centuries underground.
She ran barefoot through it, her dress trailing, and the gunfire faded above them, and she was not crying, and she was not afraid. She was furious, which was better. Fury gave her something to hold.
They emerged into a courtyard she didn't recognize, into the open door of an armored car, into a world that continued being ordinary around them with the indifference of cities that have survived everything.
She sat in the back of the car with blood on her sleeve and her wedding shoes in her lap and looked at the man who had just saved her life.
He was on his phone already. Speaking in low, rapid Italian. His suit was still perfect. Not a single hair had moved.
He ended the call.
He looked at her. "The Bassi family," he said. "A conflict over shipping rights in Genova. This was their message."
"They shot up a church," she said. "To send a message."
"They lack subtlety," he said.
"Are people hurt?"
His jaw tightened. "One of my men. A graze. The Bassi people inside—" A pause. "They've been dealt with."
She heard everything those words contained. She chose to leave it there for now.
He reached across and took her arm without asking, tilting it toward the window light, examining the graze with careful, clinical hands. "It needs cleaning," he said. "There's a doctor at the villa."
"The villa," she repeated.
"Lake Como. You won't be going back to your apartment — it's not secure until—"
"I live there."
"You lived there," he said. Without cruelty. Without apology. As pure fact. "You live at the villa now."
She looked at him. At the complete, untroubled certainty of him. At the way he occupied space as if the question of whether he had the right to it had simply never occurred to him.
She thought about the conversation she'd planned — my terms, my conditions, what I agree to — and felt the distance between that conversation and this car.
"Tell me about the Bassi family," she said.
He looked at her.
"I live in your world now," she said. "I'd like to understand it."
A pause. Long enough that she thought he might refuse. Then: "The Bassis have controlled Ligurian shipping for forty years. They were partners with my father before—" He stopped briefly. "Before. When I rebuilt the syndicate, I didn't include them. They've wanted back in ever since."
"And the shooting today was about the shipping rights."
"On the surface."
"What's underneath the surface?"
He looked at her for a long moment. Outside, Milan gave way to the highway and the highway gave way to the green beginning of the north.
"They want to know if I can still be hurt," he said. "Today was a test."
She looked at the lake appearing in the distance, grey-green and indifferent and beautiful.
"And can you?" she asked.
He was quiet for exactly one second.
"Ask me again in a month," he said.
It was not the answer she expected. It was, she would think later, the most honest thing he had said to her so far.
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