The Devil's Chosen

Her Name

Her name was Aria Leone.

Twenty four years old. No criminal record. No known affiliations. No family beyond one uncle — Sergio Leone, sixty eight, retired, lived in the Navigli district in an apartment that cost less than Dante's car insurance. She worked at Romano's auto shop six days a week, sometimes seven. She had a best friend named Gianna Russo who posted too much on social media. She had lived in Milan for three years, previously in a small town outside Naples where she had grown up after her parents died.

Died.

The word sat in Marco's report like something left deliberately vague.

Dante read the single page twice. Sat back in his chair. Read it a third time.

Then he set it down on his desk with the careful precision of someone making sure their hands did not betray them and looked out the floor to ceiling windows of his Milan penthouse at the city below — grey and gold in the early morning light, already moving, already alive, already indifferent to everything happening inside this room.

Her parents died.

He knew what that sentence meant in a world like his. He had written that sentence about other people. He knew the weight it carried when the cause was absent from the record — when no illness was named, no accident described, just a date and a blank where the explanation should have been.

He knew because his own world produced exactly that kind of blank.

He picked up his coffee. Put it down without drinking it.

"How did they die," he said.

Marco was standing near the door in the particular way Marco stood near doors — like the door itself was the least interesting thing in the room and he was simply waiting for the room to become more interesting. He had been there for six minutes without speaking. He was good at that.

"The report doesn't specify," Marco said.

"Then get me a report that does."

A pause. Brief. The kind Marco allowed himself when something needed to be noted without being said aloud. "She's a civilian, Dante."

"I know what she is."

"Then I'm wondering why —"

"Get me the report, Marco."

Marco looked at him for exactly one second longer than necessary. Then — "Yes." And that was the end of that.

Dante turned back to the window.

Below, Milan continued without him. Taxis and commuters and the particular energy of a city that never asked permission for anything. He had loved this city from the first time his father had brought him here at fourteen — the way it moved, the way it dressed, the way it held its history underneath its modernity like a knife under a tailored jacket.

His father.

The thought arrived the way it always arrived now — without announcement, without softness. Aurelio Ricci had been dead for six weeks and the shape of his absence was still something Dante walked into in the dark, unexpected, like furniture rearranged in the night.

He had not cried at the funeral. He had stood at the grave in Sicily with the Sicilian sun burning the back of his neck and he had felt — nothing that had a clean name. Something large and formless and dangerous that he had folded up and put somewhere and closed the door on.

He was good at closing doors.

And then there was the will.

He moved away from the window. Sat back down at his desk. Opened the second folder — the one from his father's lawyer, Avvocato Ricci, no relation, a small careful man with a large careful mouth who had called four times this week and been answered once.

The condition was written in language so formal it took three readings to fully absorb its meaning.

The Ricci empire — the properties, the holdings, the accounts, the network of forty years of carefully constructed power — would transfer fully to Dante Valentino Ricci upon his marriage to or formal binding with a chosen partner.

Not any partner.

A chosen one.

Chosen by a process his father had apparently set in motion years ago. A name. A woman. Selected by criteria that Aurelio had kept entirely to himself and taken with him into the Sicilian earth.

The lawyer had a file. Dante had not yet opened the file. He had been — he admitted to himself in the privacy of his own mind where no one could see it — afraid of the file. Which was a feeling so foreign to his body that he had spent six weeks calling it something else.

He called it caution. He called it strategy. He called it waiting for the right moment.

He opened the file.

Three pages. A photograph clipped to the inside cover.

He read the first page.

Stopped.

Read it again.

Looked at the photograph.

His coffee had gone completely cold by the time he set the file back down on his desk. His face was perfectly still. Everything about him was perfectly still in the way of something that has absorbed a shock too large for immediate reaction.

The photograph showed a young woman. Dark hair pulled back. Brown eyes looking directly at the camera with the particular directness of someone who finds having their photograph taken mildly inconvenient.

A small scar above her right eyebrow.

He had seen that scar last night. In a hallway. In the dim light of a single overhead bulb.

He had told Marco to find out her name.

He had told Marco to find out her name and the name had come back as Aria Leone and he had read it and set it down and now he was looking at a photograph in a file his dead father had prepared years ago — years, before last night, before the bar, before the hallway — and the name on the file was the same name.

The same name.

He sat with that for a long moment.

Then he closed the file.

Stood up.

Walked to the window again.

The city below still did not ask his permission for anything.

"Marco," he said.

Marco materialized in the doorway. He had not gone far.

"Tell Avvocato Ricci I will meet with him this afternoon."

"Yes."

"And the Romano auto shop in the Porta Romana district."

"What about it."

Dante looked at the city. At the grey and gold of it. At the indifferent, beautiful, knife-under-the-jacket of it.

"Find out everything about it," he said. "Who owns it. Who works there. The layout. The hours."

Another pause. Longer this time. "Dante."

"I know."

"She doesn't know anything about —"

"I said I know, Marco."

The silence between them held the weight of twenty years of knowing each other in the worst possible circumstances. Marco had been with Dante since they were both boys in Sicily learning what the world actually was underneath what it presented itself as. There were things Marco could say to him that no one else alive could say.

"Whatever you're thinking," Marco said quietly, "think about it slowly."

Dante said nothing.

Marco took that as the answer it was and left.

Romano's auto shop smelled like oil and metal and something underneath both of those things that might have been coffee from a machine that had been making terrible coffee since approximately 2009.

Aria had the hood of a Fiat up and her head halfway inside it and she was having a conversation with the engine the way she always had conversations with engines — direct, honest, without any particular expectation that the engine would cooperate but willing to try.

"I know," she said to it. "I know. You're tired. We're all tired. Work with me."

"You're talking to the car again."

This was Tomas — Romano's other mechanic, fifty something, perpetually skeptical, had once told Aria that the fact she was better at this job than him was either a miracle or an insult and he had not yet decided which.

"The car talks back," Aria said without lifting her head. "You just have to listen."

"What's it saying."

"That someone has been ignoring the timing belt for approximately two years and is now surprised by the consequences."

"Sounds like my ex wife."

"Tomas."

"Aria."

She straightened up. Wiped her hands on the cloth she kept in her back pocket. The morning had been steady — three jobs already, another two waiting, the particular rhythm of a busy shop that she had learned to move inside like water moving inside a pipe. Purposeful. Without resistance.

She liked work. Had always liked it. There was an honesty to it that she trusted. You put the effort in and the thing either worked or it didn't and either way you knew where you stood.

People were considerably less reliable.

Her phone buzzed.

Gianna: did you dream about him

Aria: no

Gianna: liar

Aria: I dreamed about the lamb actually it was very good

Gianna: you are the least romantic person alive and I say this with love

Aria: thank you

Gianna: he was looking at you

Aria stared at the message. Put her phone back in her pocket. Picked up her wrench.

He was looking at you.

She knew. She had felt it the way you feel sun on the back of your neck — not seen, just known. Warm and present and something you did not necessarily ask for.

In the hallway he had been close enough that she could have counted the seconds of silence between them. She had counted four. She had kept her breathing even and her face neutral and her feet very deliberately still because something in her had understood instinctively that this was a man for whom movement was information and she was not in the business of giving away information for free.

You didn't move.

She climbed back under the hood.

I'm not most people.

She had said it simply. Matter of fact. Not as a challenge — she had not been trying to impress him or provoke him. It was simply true. She wasn't most people. She had known that since she was nine years old and the world had rearranged itself and she had had to decide, alone in a way that children should not be alone, who she was going to be in the aftermath.

She had decided to be someone who did not move.

She tightened a bolt.

The door of the shop opened behind her. She heard Tomas's footsteps stop. Heard the particular quality of his silence that meant something had changed in the room.

She did not look up.

"We're closed for walk-ins until noon," she said. "If you have an appointment —"

"I don't," said a voice, "have an appointment."

Low. Calibrated. The voice of someone who had decided long ago exactly how much force each thing required.

She knew that voice.

She straightened up slowly. Turned around.

He was standing in the entrance of Romano's auto shop in a suit that cost more than the shop's monthly revenue, completely unbothered by the oil smell and the fluorescent lights and the general reality of being somewhere that was not designed for people like him.

Dark eyes. That jaw. The scar on his forearm catching the light.

Behind him — the door.

No Marco today. No other men. Just him.

Aria looked at him for a long moment.

Then she looked at Tomas, who was standing very still with the expression of a man watching something he could not categorize.

"Tomas," she said calmly. "Lunch."

"It's ten thirty."

"Early lunch."

Tomas looked at her. Looked at the man in the doorway. Made the calculation. "I'll be back at twelve," he said, and left with the speed of someone exercising exceptional judgment.

The shop settled into quiet.

Aria wiped her hands on her cloth again. Slowly. She was buying herself three seconds and she was not ashamed of that.

Then she looked at him.

"You looked me up," she said. It was not a question.

Something moved in his expression. Almost approval. "Yes."

"And then you came here."

"Yes."

"Why."

He looked at her the way he had looked at her in the hallway — like she was something he was still in the process of calculating. Like the calculation kept coming back different from what he expected and he was not sure yet whether that was a problem.

"I have something to discuss with you," he said.

"We don't know each other."

"No."

"Then I can't imagine what we have to discuss."

"Sit down and I'll tell you."

She looked at him.

She almost laughed — not from amusement exactly, but from the sheer audacity of it. The complete and total absence of any uncertainty in the way he had said those four words. Sit down and I'll tell you. As though she were already sitting. As though the sitting were simply a formality the universe was in the process of completing.

"This is my shop," she said pleasantly. "I don't sit down in my own shop because someone I don't know tells me to."

Silence.

He looked at her for a long moment with those dark eyes that missed nothing and she looked back with the same steadiness she had been practicing since she was nine years old and she did not move and did not look away and did not give him a single millimeter.

Then he did something she did not expect.

He almost smiled.

Not fully. Not warmly. Just — the corner of his mouth, for approximately one second, shifted. Like something in him had found something and filed it somewhere and closed the folder.

"My name is Dante Ricci," he said.

The name landed in the room.

She had heard the name. Everyone in Milan had heard the name. You didn't live in this city and not hear it, the same way you didn't live in Rome and not know the Vatican existed. It was simply part of the landscape. Present. Permanent. Not discussed in any detail by anyone who valued their continued good health.

She kept her face completely still.

"Aria Leone," she said.

"I know."

"Then we've introduced ourselves." She turned back to the Fiat. "If you want to make an appointment —"

"Your parents," he said.

She stopped.

Everything in her stopped. The hand on the wrench. The breath moving through her. The careful machinery of her composure that she ran on the way other people ran on coffee and habit.

She turned back around.

His face was unreadable. But he was watching her with a focus so complete and so careful that it felt like something physical.

"What," she said, "about my parents."

The shop was very quiet.

He looked at her for a long moment — a moment that had weight to it, that had edges — and when he spoke his voice was lower than it had been. Careful in a new way.

"There are things you don't know," he said. "About how they died. About why."

The fluorescent light overhead hummed.

Her hand was still on the wrench.

"And you do," she said.

He did not answer immediately. Which was its own answer.

"I think," he said slowly, "that we need to talk. Not here."

"I'm not going anywhere with you."

"I'm not asking you to trust me."

"Good. Because I don't."

"I'm asking you," he said, "to consider that the information I have is information you have spent fifteen years without. And that walking away from this conversation means walking away from it permanently."

The words fell into the space between them and sat there.

She stared at him.

He stared back.

The Fiat's engine ticked as it cooled.

Aria set the wrench down on the workbench. Slowly. Without looking away from him.

"I finish at six," she said.

Something shifted in his eyes. Small. Gone before she could name it.

"I'll send a car."

"I'll drive myself." She picked up her cloth. "Where."

He told her. She repeated the address once in her head to memorize it and nodded once and turned back to the car.

She heard him leave. The door opened and settled closed and his footsteps — deliberate, unhurried — faded into the Milan morning.

She stood with both hands on the edge of the Fiat's hood and breathed.

In through her nose.

Out through her mouth.

You just breathe, piccola. The world doesn't get quieter. But you do.

Her hands were perfectly steady.

Her heart was not.

She told herself it was just a conversation.

She had been wrong about things before.

She had never been wrong about something that mattered this much.