Claimed by the Detective and the Don

Chapter 3 — Conti's Territory

COLE

Sal Conti filled the doorway before I even saw the rest of him. He didn't hurry up those stairs and he didn't slow down either. He walked at the speed that mattered to him, the speed of a man who'd never once in his life needed to run toward trouble. Trouble came to him already finished.

He looked at the open door, at the hallway full of half-dressed people pretending they weren't listening, at me standing there with no shirt and a gun still loose in my hand. Then he looked past all of it, straight at Lenore, and something in his face went very quiet.

"Everybody back in their rooms," he said, not loud, not to me. Doors closed up and down the hall like he'd pulled a string attached to all of them.

He stepped inside Mae's room the way a man walks into his own kitchen. He didn't flinch at the blood. He crouched the way I had, looked the way I had, and when he stood back up his face hadn't moved an inch.

"Marsh." He said my name like he was setting it down somewhere he could keep an eye on it. "Didn't expect to find you on my floor at this hour."

"Wasn't planning on staying this long." I held his eyes. Neither of us blinked, which told me everything I needed to know about how this conversation was going to go.

"No. I imagine you weren't." His gaze flicked once, almost lazy, to the shirt Lenore was wearing (my shirt, the sleeves swallowing her hands) and back up to my face. He didn't say anything about it. He didn't need to. The silence did the work an accusation would have, and better.

I'd heard plenty about Salvatore Conti before I ever stood in a room with him. Heard he killed a man once with the same calm he used to order dinner. Heard he never raised his voice, not even the time a rival burned down one of his warehouses. Standing in front of him now for the first time, I believed all of it at once. There was nothing performed about the stillness. It was just what the man was made of.

"This is my building," he said. "My floor. My girl who got her throat opened five feet from another one of my girls." He let that sit a second, let me feel the weight he'd put on the word girls, the particular ownership of it. "That makes this my problem. Not the department's. Not yours."

"A woman's dead, Conti. That makes it everybody's problem."

"Does it." He said it flat, no question mark on it at all. "Funny. Didn't see the department show much interest in this part of town until a body landed somewhere they could write a headline about it." He glanced toward the window, toward the rain still coming down outside, easy as a man checking the weather. "You're not here on a badge, Marsh. We both know that. So let's not pretend this is official business."

He wasn't wrong, and that was the worst part. I had no jurisdiction over a death in a building owned by a man who paid better cops than me to look the other way. I had a woman in my shirt and a body on the floor and a hole in my chest where my badge should've meant something, and Conti could see all three things sitting right there on my face whether I wanted him to or not.

"I find whoever did this," I said, "I'm not walking away just because you tell me to."

Something shifted behind his eyes, small and cold, gone again almost before I caught it. "Nobody's telling you to walk away. I'm telling you this isn't your hunt to run." He stepped closer, not threatening exactly, just closing the distance the way men do when they want you to feel the size of them. "You go through me. Anything you find, anything you want to ask anybody in this building, including her—" his eyes cut to Lenore again, longer this time, "—you go through me first."

"And if I don't like that arrangement?"

"Then you'll dislike it from somewhere a lot less comfortable than where you're standing now." He said it pleasant, level, a man discussing the weather. That was what made it land harder than a shout. "I'm not your enemy tonight, detective. Tonight we want the same thing. Don't make me decide that's changed."

He held my eyes a beat longer, like he was waiting to see if I'd argue just for the pleasure of being told no twice. I didn't. There was no version of that fight I won standing half-naked in a dead girl's room.

Conti finally turned away from me, and that was when his whole posture changed. Whatever he'd been holding back for my benefit, he stopped holding it the second his eyes landed on Lenore. He crossed to her slow, and the look on his face wasn't grief exactly, but it wasn't anger either. It was something I hadn't seen on him yet in the five minutes I'd known him: need, plain and unguarded, the kind a man usually has the sense to hide.

He reached out and tucked a piece of hair back from her face, gentle, like she might break. "You're not hurt," he said. Not a question. He needed to hear himself say it true.

"I'm fine, Sal." Her voice had gone smaller than I'd heard it all night.

"You're not fine. You're standing in his shirt next to a dead woman who slept on the other side of that wall." He said it without raising his voice, without an ounce of the performance he'd shown me a minute ago. This was the real thing, whatever it was, and he wasn't hiding it from me anymore. Maybe he wanted me to see it. Maybe he didn't care either way.

His thumb moved once along her jaw, slow, possessive in a way that had nothing to do with violence but everything to do with ownership. He looked at her like a man checking a thing he loved for cracks. I'd seen jealous men before. I'd seen scared men, angry men, men in love. I hadn't seen all four wearing the same face at once until right now.

"Whoever did this," he said, still looking only at her, "made a very expensive mistake." A pause, small and deliberate. "I intend to make sure he understands exactly how expensive."

He didn't look at me when he said it. I understood the second half of that sentence just fine without him spelling it out, and from the way Lenore's eyes dropped to the floor instead of meeting either of ours, I understood something else, too. Whatever she knew about who that man had really come for, she wasn't ready to say it in front of either of us. Not yet.