The Devil's Chosen

Tonight

She changed her clothes.

She told herself it was because she had been in her work clothes all day and not because she was going to see him. She told herself that three times while standing in front of her wardrobe with her hands on the door and her eyes moving across the limited options with the particular focus of someone pretending not to care very much about something they cared about completely.

She put on dark jeans. A simple black top. Her boots. Her jacket.

She looked in the mirror once. Looked away.

Gianna called at seven fifteen.

Where are you going.

Aria had not told Gianna she was going anywhere. She stared at her phone.

How do you know I'm going anywhere.

Because you just posted a story on your close friends and you are wearing your good boots.

My good boots are the same as my regular boots.

Aria. Your good boots have the silver buckle. Your regular boots do not. Where are you going and with whom and I need full details or I am coming over.

I have a meeting.

Nobody has a meeting at eight o clock on a Saturday night.

I do.

Silence. Then — Is it him.

Aria said nothing.

Gianna made a sound that was equal parts delight and concern and something that in a different person might have been called wisdom. The man from the bar.

It's not what you think.

It is exactly what I think. Aria —

Gianna.

Be careful.

The same words Sergio had used. Aria looked at herself in the mirror for a moment. At the silver buckle boots and the black top and the face that was doing its best to look like someone who was simply going to a meeting.

I'm always careful, she said.

You are never careful. You are fearless which is a completely different thing and significantly more dangerous. Gianna paused. Text me when you get there and when you leave. Both. Or I will assume the worst and act accordingly.

What does accordingly mean.

It means I will find out where you are going and I will show up and it will be embarrassing for everyone involved but mostly for you.

Fine, Aria said. Fine.

She hung up. Looked at her phone. Looked at the address he had sent forty minutes ago. A different address from last time. Not the Brera penthouse. Something in the city center. A restaurant. Private dining.

She drove herself.

The restaurant was the kind of place that did not have its name on the outside because if you needed to know the name to find it you were not the kind of person it was designed for. The door was dark wood and heavy and a man opened it before she touched it which meant someone had been watching for her arrival.

She was not sure whether to be unsettled by that or not. She filed it and moved forward.

Inside it was low lit and warm and almost entirely empty. Three other tables occupied. Each with their own bubble of privacy, their own careful distances. The kind of place where conversations did not travel.

He was already there.

Of course he was already there. She understood instinctively that Dante Ricci was always already there — that arriving after someone was a vulnerability he did not permit himself.

He stood when she walked in.

She noticed that immediately. He stood. Not slowly, not as an afterthought. He was on his feet before she had fully crossed the room and something about that automatic gesture — so instinctive it clearly came from somewhere deep and old — did something small and inconvenient to her chest that she immediately dismissed.

He looked at her the way he always looked at her. That complete, unhurried assessment that took in everything in approximately one second and filed it somewhere she would never have access to.

His eyes moved to the silver buckle boots.

She sat down before he could pull out her chair. He noticed. Said nothing.

You reached out, he said.

I talked to Sergio.

Something shifted in his expression. He waited.

She looked at him across the table. In the low warm light of this room that was designed for secrets he looked different than he had in the penthouse. Less architectural somehow. More — present. The kind of presence that had weight and warmth underneath the cold surface and she was becoming irritatingly good at noticing the underneath.

He confirmed it, she said. My parents were killed. My father was a journalist. He had found something. Connected to a Sicilian family. Connected to — she held his gaze. Your world.

He was very still.

He knew, she said. Sergio knew since the beginning and he never told me.

I'm sorry, Dante said.

She looked at him. The two words were simple and direct and completely without performance. No elaborate sympathy. No careful qualification. Just — I'm sorry. Like he meant it. Like he understood that sorry was insufficient and said it anyway because it was the honest thing.

She had not expected that.

She picked up her water glass. Drank. Set it down.

You said last time, she said, that there was a longer conversation. I'm here for the longer conversation.

He looked at her for a moment. Then he reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and placed a photograph on the table between them.

She looked at it.

A man. Fifties. Silver haired. The kind of face that was constructed to appear trustworthy — open eyes, easy smile, the particular warmth of someone who had spent decades practicing warmth as a professional skill. Standing outside a building she didn't recognize in a city she couldn't immediately place.

Who is this, she said.

His name is Carlo Vespi, Dante said. He has operated in the Italian underworld for thirty years. Legitimate businesses on the surface. Considerably less legitimate operations underneath. He is currently — He paused. One of the primary threats to my empire.

She looked up from the photograph.

And you think he ordered my parents deaths.

I think it is very possible. Your father's investigation was into financial operations that Vespi had been running through northern Italy for years. If your father had published what he found —

Vespi would have been exposed.

And destroyed. Dante's voice was even. Precise. A man like Vespi does not survive that kind of exposure. He had every reason to make sure the investigation ended.

She looked at the photograph again. At the easy smile. At the practiced warmth.

Something moved through her that had no clean name. Not anger exactly — not yet. Something colder and more patient than anger. Something that had been waiting fifteen years for a face to attach itself to.

Where is he now, she said.

Rome, Dante said. He operates primarily out of Rome. Which is where the answers about your parents are buried. And which is — He stopped.

Which is where you need to go, she said.

Yes.

And you want me involved.

He was quiet for a moment. She appreciated that he didn't rush to answer. That he sat with the question the way it deserved to be sat with.

What I want, he said carefully, is to be honest with you about something.

She waited.

There is a condition, he said, connected to my father's will. A requirement that I — He paused. That I find a specific partner. Before I can claim full inheritance of the empire. He looked at her. The name in the file is yours.

The restaurant was very quiet.

She stared at him.

Your father, she said slowly. Your father chose me.

Before you were born, Dante said. He made arrangements. Conditions. I don't fully understand yet why he chose you specifically. But I believe it is connected to your parents. To what your father knew. To whatever he had found.

She sat back in her chair.

She thought about a dead man who had apparently reached across time and pointed at her. She thought about a condition written in formal language. She thought about Sergio's hands wrapped around his coffee cup like it was the only solid thing in the room.

She thought about the fact that Dante Ricci had come to find her. Had come to the shop. Had told her about her parents. Had been honest about his reasons.

He could have lied. He could have told her anything. He could have used the information about her parents as leverage and not told her the leverage existed.

He hadn't.

Why are you telling me this, she said. The condition. You didn't have to tell me that. You could have —

I don't operate that way, he said.

She looked at him.

I don't use people without their knowledge, he said. Whatever this is — whatever my father set in motion — you have the right to know what it is before you decide what to do with it.

What are my options, she said.

Walk away, he said. Go back to your life. I find another way to deal with the inheritance condition. The investigation into your parents continues without you — I give you whatever information I find and you do with it what you want. You never see me again.

She looked at him steadily. And the other option.

You stay, he said. You let me help you find out what happened to your parents. You come to Rome. We find the answers together. And we deal with my father's condition —

Together, she said.

Together, he said.

The word sat between them in the warm low light of a restaurant designed for secrets and it had weight to it and edges and a before and after.

She looked at him for a long moment.

He looked back.

He did not push. Did not lean forward. Did not do any of the things that men who wanted something from her usually did. He simply sat with the question and let her sit with it and gave her the space to think without filling it.

She thought about her parents.

She thought about Carlo Vespi's easy smile.

She thought about fifteen years of a closed door and what it had cost her to keep it shut.

She thought about a scar above her right eyebrow she had always had and never known the story of.

She picked up the menu.

I'll think about it over dinner, she said.

Something in his expression moved. Small. Almost invisible. But she was getting better at reading the almost invisible things.

Of course, he said.

She looked at the menu. Then looked up over the top of it.

For the record, she said. I am not your father's condition. I am not anyone's condition. Whatever I decide — I decide because I choose to. Not because a dead man wrote my name in a file.

He looked at her.

Understood, he said quietly.

She went back to the menu.

Her hands were steady.

Her heart was doing something complicated that she chose not to examine too closely in present company.

Outside Rome waited with its ancient streets and its buried secrets and a man named Carlo Vespi who had an easy smile and thirty years of blood underneath it.

And across the table from her sat the most dangerous man in Milan looking at her like she was the most interesting problem he had ever been given and could not decide yet whether that was a good thing or the beginning of something he was not prepared for.

She thought it might be both.

She ordered the lamb.