Chapter 6

The car smelled like cedar and salt. Blair sat very still in the passenger seat while her hands finally stopped shaking enough to fold in her lap, and neither of them said anything until the lighthouse road had given way to the ordinary dark of the coast highway.

"You didn't have to drive me yourself." It came out quieter than she meant it to.

"No," Alessandro agreed, eyes on the road. "I didn't."

He didn't offer anything else. Blair found, oddly, that she didn't need him to.

"Why does this matter to you?" she asked, after a while. "The debt's paid. You could've had your men drive me and gone home."

"I could have."

"But?"

"But someone put their hands on a person standing under my protection, in front of witnesses, after I'd already said the words out loud." He said it evenly, like reciting a law rather than an opinion. "If I let that go, I might as well stop using my name."

"Is that the only reason?"

For the first time since the point, something almost like amusement crossed his face, gone before it fully arrived.

"Ask me again when I have a better answer."

She didn't know what to do with that, so she didn't do anything with it at all — just watched the dark hedges slide past the window and let the question sit unanswered between them, which felt, somehow, more honest than if he'd tried to fill it.

* * *

Fiorella had the door open before the car had fully stopped, porch light throwing her shadow long down the front steps.

"Blair—" She was down the steps and had Blair's face in both hands before anyone had said a word. "What happened? You look—" Her eyes caught the darkening line already rising on Blair's wrist and her whole voice changed. "Who did this?"

"I'm fine, Mamma."

"You are not fine, you're bruised—"

Stefano appeared in the doorway behind her, and whatever he'd been about to say died the moment he registered exactly who was standing in his driveway.

"Don Lumiere."

"Signor Capri." Alessandro's voice had gone back to the flat, businesslike register from the office, though something in it had shifted just slightly, weighted differently now. "Your daughter was attacked tonight. She's unhurt beyond the wrist. I thought you should hear that from me directly rather than from her, since I doubt she'd have told you the whole truth on her own."

Blair didn't argue with that, because it was exactly true.

"Attacked." Stefano's voice had gone very careful. "By whom?"

"Andrew Esposito."

The silence that followed had a different shape than any of the ones that had come before it that night.

"That boy," Fiorella said slowly, like she was testing whether the words made sense arranged that way, "has had dinner at our table forty times."

"I'm aware that complicates things." Alessandro's gaze didn't leave Stefano's. "Which is why I intend to keep men on this house until I understand exactly what he is and what he wants, and why your kitchen window matched his handiwork more closely than mine."

"That's not necessary," Stefano started, pride finding its footing faster than his fear had.

"It wasn't a request." No heat in it. Just fact, the same way he'd said thirty days. "Your debt is settled, if that's your concern. This isn't about money anymore."

"Then what is it about?"

Alessandro looked at Blair for one long moment before he answered, and something about the way he did it made her chest go tight in a way that had nothing to do with fear.

"Making sure I don't have to have this conversation twice."

Fiorella recovered first, because Fiorella always recovered first. "Thank you," she said simply, and meant it enough that even Stefano didn't contradict her. "Truly. Come in, we'll—"

"I won't stay." He was already stepping back toward the car. "Someone will be posted at the end of the street by morning. If anything happens before then, or after, you call the number I'm about to give your husband, and you call it before you call anyone else."

He said something low to Stefano at the gate that Blair didn't catch, and her father's face, when he turned back toward the house, had the particular stillness of a man recalculating everything he thought he understood about his own life.

Fiorella pulled Blair inside to look at her wrist properly, fussing in the furious way of a mother who needed somewhere to put her fear, and it was several minutes before Blair thought to look back out the front window at all.

Alessandro's car was still there, idling at the curb, though he'd stepped out of it again — standing very still, looking back down the dark road they'd just driven up, toward something Blair couldn't see from the window.

She followed his gaze as far as the streetlight let her.

There, at the very edge of where the light gave out, a shape she almost didn't register as a person at all before it turned and was gone — not Andrew, too still for that, too patient, dressed the way the stranger from her birthday party had been dressed, watching the house the exact same way he'd once watched the courtyard.

By the time Blair blinked, there was nothing left on the road at all, and Alessandro was already getting back into his car like he hadn't seen anything worth staying for.

She wasn't sure, afterward, which frightened her more — that he had seen it, or that he'd chosen to leave anyway.