Where Sinners Sleep

Christopher Vitale

The laughter did not stop for a while.

That was the thing about it. Once it started it just kept going, fed by itself the way good laughter does, and Evelyn stood in the garden with her hand still over her mouth and her eyes still wet and watched Kit and Coco argue about nothing and felt something unfamiliar settle in her chest.

Warmth.

Not the desperate manufactured kind she had spent years trying to find in books and borrowed moments. Real warmth. The accidental kind.

Kit looked at her and then looked at Coco and then back at Evelyn with something almost like amusement sitting openly on his face for the first time.

"She was just saying," he said to Coco, "that she does not know who I am. So I think this is probably the right time."

Coco raised her eyebrows. "You have had her in your house for over twelve hours and you have not told her your name?"

"There were circumstances."

"There are always circumstances with you." Coco turned to Evelyn with the expression of someone who had been waiting for this moment and intended to enjoy it. "Go on then. Tell her properly."

Kit looked at Evelyn.

"Christopher," he said. "Christopher Vitale."

The name landed differently than she expected. Not just a name. A weight behind it, something that carried history and consequence and the particular gravity of a name that had been important for a very long time. Vitale. She turned it over in her head without knowing why it felt like she should recognise it.

"And I," said Coco, stepping forward with her hand extended and her blue eyes bright, "am Coco. And before you ask, yes. That is actually my real name. Not a nickname. Not short for anything. My mother looked at me the day I was born and decided that was who I was going to be and honestly I think she was completely right."

Evelyn looked at them both. This blonde haired green eyed impossibly composed pair of siblings standing in a garden at the edge of the world with their dog and their penthouse and their complete and total certainty about who they were.

"Evelyn," she said. "Evelyn Sonnett."

Something moved across Kit's face when she said it. There and gone so quickly she almost missed it.

"Sonnett," Coco repeated, like she was trying it against the light. "That is a beautiful name."

"My mother chose it," Evelyn said, and the words came out simply, without the usual flinch.

---

Coco cooked the way she did everything else, with complete confidence and zero patience for anyone who suggested she do it differently. She had taken over the kitchen within minutes of them coming back inside and was simultaneously managing three things on the stove while talking at a speed that Evelyn was fairly certain should not have been physically possible.

Kit sat at the kitchen counter with a cup of coffee and watched his sister with the quiet tolerance of someone who had learned a very long time ago that interference was simply not worth it.

Evelyn sat beside him and did not quite know what to do with the fact that this was the most normal she had felt in longer than she could remember. Just sitting. Just existing. Nobody asking anything of her.

"The Vitale name," Coco said, stirring something without looking at it, "means something in this world. Has done for three generations." She said it the way she said most things, easily, like it was simply information. "Our grandfather built it. Started with real estate, moved into international trade, private investment. By the time our father inherited it, Vitale Enterprises was one of the most recognised business names in the country. The kind of name that appears in magazines. That sits on charity boards. That shakes hands with politicians and prime ministers and people who should probably ask more questions than they do." She glanced at Kit. "And then Kit inherited all of it at twenty two."

Evelyn looked at Kit.

Kit looked back at her with the expression of someone who was aware this was a significant amount of information to receive before lunch.

"So you are a businessman," Evelyn said carefully.

Coco stirred her pot.

Kit said nothing.

"Among other things," Coco said, pleasantly.

"What other things," Evelyn said.

"Well," Coco said, setting down her spoon and turning around with the easy composure of someone who had answered a version of this question before, "the legitimate side of the Vitale name is exactly what it looks like. Real estate, trade, investment. All completely above board. Audited, documented, respected." She picked up her spoon again. "And then there is the side of things that does not appear in the annual report."

Evelyn looked at Kit again.

Kit met her eyes steadily.

"There are other families," Coco continued, back to stirring. "The Valentinos, old blood, been in this city longer than anyone can properly verify. They run the south and they do not share well. The Morreauxs handle imports, very French, very dramatic, absolutely insufferable at any kind of social gathering, avoid them if you can. The Cassians are newer money but hungrier for it which makes them unpredictable in ways that are frankly exhausting." She tapped the spoon on the edge of the pot. "The Vitales sit above all of it. That is not arrogance. It is simply geography."

Evelyn sat with that for a moment.

"So when you say above all of it," she said slowly.

"I mean exactly that," Coco said cheerfully, and set a bowl down in front of her, fragrant and warm and more food than Evelyn had been given in a single sitting in longer than she wanted to think about. "Eat."

Evelyn looked at the bowl.

Then she looked at Christopher Vitale sitting beside her with his coffee cup and his snake ring and his scar and his calm green eyes, this man who was simultaneously one of the most respected businessmen in the country and something else entirely that nobody asked too many questions about.

"Eat," Coco said again, softer.

She ate.

It was the kind of meal that asked nothing of her. Coco talked and Kit listened and occasionally said something dry and brief that made Coco point her spoon at him in warning and Evelyn found herself following the rhythm of them the way you follow music, not needing to participate to feel included in it.

She was halfway through the bowl when she felt it again. That warmth. Quiet and accidental and terrifying in the way that good things were always terrifying when you were not used to having them.

She looked down at her food.

She thought about a bowl on a floor in a small damp room.

She thought about how different a bowl could be.

"You have gone quiet," Coco said, not unkindly.

"I am just." Evelyn looked up. "This is very good."

Coco smiled at her. "I know."

Kit was looking at her in that way he had, that particular quality of attention that she was learning to recognise as him actually seeing something rather than just looking at it. She met his eyes briefly and looked away first and concentrated on her food.

The door opened.

All three of them looked up.

One of Kit's men stood in the doorway, broad and serious with the particular stillness of someone delivering news they did not want to deliver.

"Boss," he said.

Kit's expression did not change but something in his posture shifted, some almost invisible adjustment that Evelyn caught because she had spent twenty years learning to read rooms and the people in them.

"What," Kit said. Not a question. A permission.

"It is Eli," the man said. "He has been in an accident."

The bowl landed on the counter as Kit stood. One movement, completely fluid, the coffee forgotten.

"Where," he said.

"St. Catherine's. He is stable but"

Kit was already moving.

Coco had gone very still beside Evelyn. Her hands were flat on the counter and her blue eyes were wide and all the easy warmth of the last hour had drained out of her face leaving something younger and more frightened underneath.

Evelyn did the only thing that felt right.

She reached over and put her arms around Coco and held on.

Coco let her, which said something about how scared she was because Coco did not seem like someone who let things in easily.

"He will be alright," Evelyn said.

"I know," Coco said, and her voice was very controlled in the way that meant she was working hard to keep it that way. "I know he will. It is just." She stopped. "Eli does not have accidents, Evelyn. He is the best driver I have ever seen. He has been driving for Kit since he was seventeen and he has never once." She stopped again. "Something feels wrong."

Evelyn held her tighter and said nothing because sometimes there was nothing to say and the holding was the whole point.

---

Kit found Eli in a private room at the end of a corridor that his men had already secured before he arrived.

Eli was sitting up in the bed with his left arm in a temporary cast and a cut above his eyebrow that had been closed with three stitches and the general appearance of someone who had been through something significant and was aggressively pretending otherwise.

Kit stood in the doorway and looked at him.

The relief was real. He felt it fully and did not show it because that was not how they worked and Eli would not have wanted him to.

"Looks like your hands are going rusty," Kit said.

Eli looked at him flatly. "My hands are fine."

"The car disagrees."

"My hands," Eli said, "are the least concerning thing you should be thinking about right now." He shifted slightly and winced and then looked annoyed at himself for wincing. "Close the door."

Kit closed it.

He pulled the chair from the corner and sat down and waited.

Eli looked at him for a moment. Then he said, "When I left the Sonnett house this morning I made it three streets before I picked it up."

"Picked what up."

"A tail," Eli said. "Someone was following me. Good at it, not great, but good enough that most people would not have noticed." He paused. "I noticed."

Kit said nothing.

"I did not want to lead them back here," Eli continued. "So I drove. Took the long way out toward the industrial stretch past the river. Nothing and nobody out there unless you are specifically going." He looked at his cast. "They followed me the whole way. When I stopped they came from everywhere. Four cars. Eight men. Nobody I recognised, Kit. Nobody from the Valentinos or the Morreauxs or the Cassians. Nobody from any family we have ever dealt with."

Kit was very still.

"They did not want information," Eli said. "They did not try to negotiate. They just hit the car. Hard and deliberate and from all sides. Enough to total it but not enough to kill me, which means they knew exactly what result they wanted." He reached toward the bedside table with his good arm and picked up a folded piece of paper and held it out.

Kit took it.

He unfolded it.

Four words. Handwritten. Clean and deliberate.

Let go of the girl.

He read it twice.

Then he looked up at Eli.

"She was on a bench," he said slowly. "She had three dollars. She had nowhere to go. There is no reason, no conceivable reason, why anyone would"

"I know," Eli said.

"Who even knows she is here."

"I know," Eli said again, quietly.

Kit looked at the note.

Four words.

Someone had been watching closely enough to follow Eli across the city and put eight men in four cars into motion over a girl who had been sitting alone on a bench two nights ago with a discounted birthday cake and a single candle.

Which meant Evelyn Sonnett was not who she appeared to be.

Or someone very much did not want Kit to find out who she really was.

He folded the note and put it in his pocket and stood.

"Rest," he said.

"Kit"

"Rest, Eli." He moved to the door and stopped with his hand on the handle. "I will handle it."

He stood there for a moment looking at nothing.

Let go of the girl.

He thought about a mattress on a floor. A bowl. Words written in pencil on a wall by a girl who had to promise herself she would leave someday just to survive the night.

He thought about brown eyes and a birthday candle and a wish he had not been meant to hear.

He was not letting go of anything.

He opened the door and walked out.