Chapter 8

Rosa found her in the church square two days later, breathless in the way of someone who'd been saving up gossip since sunrise.

"Nobody's seen Andrew since Sunday." She said it like a headline, dropping onto the bench beside Blair without being invited. "His mother came by ours yesterday asking if he'd said anything to me. She looked like she hadn't slept."

"Since Sunday." Blair kept her voice even with an effort that cost her more than it should have.

"Mm. You'd know better than me, wouldn't you." Rosa's eyes cut sideways, sharp under the gossip. "Word is you two had some kind of falling out. A real one."

"Something like that."

Rosa waited a beat, clearly hoping for more, and when nothing came she sighed and moved on to Renzo's latest theory about the missing church bell rope instead. Blair heard none of it. Somewhere under her ribs, a very old, very familiar dread had started counting days since Sunday right alongside her.

* * *

The receptionist above the harbor didn't check her name against a list this time. She just buzzed her straight through, which told Blair more about her own standing than anything Alessandro had said out loud.

He looked up from a folder he didn't bother closing.

"You could have called."

"I wanted to see your face when I asked this." She stayed standing, arms crossed, refusing the chair he hadn't offered anyway. "Where is Andrew?"

"I don't know."

"Don't."

"I'm not lying to you, Blair." Something in the flatness of it made her believe him more than she wanted to. "I haven't touched him. Not a hand, not a message, not a warning beyond the one I already gave him at the point. Ask yourself why a man in my position would leave a threat like that sitting unfinished."

"Because you decided it wasn't worth the trouble."

"Because the moment I move on him, I show my hand to whoever's standing behind him." He closed the folder now, finally, and gave her his full attention in the way that always made the room feel smaller. "And someone is standing behind him, Blair. A boy his age doesn't walk into a lit street after I've personally told him to leave town and simply not show his face out of fear. Fear makes people careless. He's being careful. That takes money, or muscle, or both, and it isn't coming from an Esposito shipping clerk's salary."

The floor felt very slightly less solid than it had a moment ago.

"Who?"

"I don't know yet." He said it like an admission that cost him something, which from a man like this, she suspected it did. "Which is the actual reason he's still breathing. I'd rather lose thirty more days finding out than win tonight and hand my enemies a name they didn't already know I had."

"So we just wait."

"You wait." A faint, humorless edge came into it. "I work."

Blair sat down without being invited this time, because her legs had quietly decided the conversation required it.

"I didn't want him hurt," she said, more to herself than him. "Even after everything. I didn't want—"

"I know." He said it simply, without performance, and for once didn't sound like a man reciting a law. "That's a very inconvenient thing to still feel about someone who put his hands on you. Most people in your position would rather I'd already handled it and never had to know the details."

"I'm not most people."

"No," Alessandro agreed, watching her with an attention that had nothing careless in it. "I'm beginning to notice that."

It wasn't warmth, exactly. Blair wasn't sure yet what to call the thing that passed between them instead. But it sat in the room a moment longer than either of them acknowledged before he stood, folder back in hand, conversation visibly over on his terms.

"Go home. Keep your usual routine, but keep the man at the end of the street where you can see him." He was already moving toward the door to see her out, the softness, if it had ever really been there, folding neatly back beneath the businesslike register. "And Blair — when I find out who's behind him, you're going to be the first to know. Not the last."

It should have felt like a promise. Standing on the harbor steps a moment later, watching his car disappear back toward whatever the rest of his day required of him, it felt instead like the opening line of a much larger problem than the one she'd walked in with — one that had apparently been circling long before she'd ever noticed it was there.