Chapter 4: Lot Fourteen

Ruby POV

“Ruby?” Cesare stopped dead in the doorway with one hand still on the frame. “What are you doing here?”

I had pushed the routing slip into my coat pocket as the door swung open, and the October drawer still stood an inch open behind my hip.

“I couldn’t sleep.” I gave him a tired smile. “I thought I’d clear my desk before Papà’s lunch. What about you? I thought you had a work emergency.”

“I did.” He came two steps into the room, rubbing the back of his neck. “A client in Genoa. Some delay on a container, so I came in to check the manifest.”

He was still in last night’s shirt, creased across the front, with the collar bent up on one side. When he came closer, I smelled vanilla and warm amber on him, the perfume I had bought my sister for her birthday in November.

My throat closed. I breathed through my mouth and kept smiling at him.

His eyes went past my shoulder to the claims cabinet and the open drawer.

“You’re in claims?”

“Chasing my commission figures for December.” I rolled my eyes toward the cabinet. “Papà never puts them where they’re meant to go.”

He nodded slowly, still looking at the drawer.

I touched my jaw and winced. “My tooth’s been throbbing since last night. What’s your dentist called? The one you’re always going to?”

He laughed, but it came half a second late. “I’ll find you the number.”

His phone buzzed in his trouser pocket. He left it there. It buzzed a second time, and he still did not take it out.

“Thank you.” I kissed his cheek on my way past him to the door and held my breath until I was out in the corridor.

I walked toward the stairs without hurrying. Behind me I heard the creak of the cabinet drawer sliding open the rest of the way.

Papà’s office door stood open at the top of the stairs. I would have walked straight past it, except that a sheet of paper lay on his desk under the green glass paperweight that had been Mamma’s, and I knew the photo stapled to its corner.

It was the gatehouse of the Ferrante cold store, with its loading office window and its steel gate.

I stepped inside and slid the page out from under the paperweight. It was a notice from the port authority about lot fourteen, the old Ferrante cold store, Molo Nord, to be sold at public auction at ten o’clock on the second of January. Lovato Freight was listed underneath as a registered bidder.

Across the top of the page, in round handwriting with little open circles over the i’s, my sister had written a note in blue ink.

Ours! Cesare will handle it. Don’t go over 190 x

I read the number twice, then slid the page back under the paperweight exactly where it had been and went down the stairs to my car.

The port authority hall at ten o’clock the next morning smelled of wet coats and radiator dust. About thirty people sat on folding chairs in uneven rows, most of them dock men in work jackets with their caps on their knees. A clerk with a microphone stood behind a table at the front with a list of lots and a wooden gavel.

The window hung at the edge of my vision while I stood at the registration desk.

[Time limit: 12 days, 14 hours]

“Name?” the woman at the desk asked without looking up.

“Ruby Lovato.”

“Company?”

“Myself.”

She looked up then, wrote it down, and slid a white paddle across the desk to me with the number 31 printed on it in black.

Cesare was sitting in the front row with a paddle resting on his knee. My sister sat beside him in a camel coat I had never seen before, with her hair pinned up and her gloved hand resting on his arm. Two rows behind them sat Enzo Galli from the yard across the water, chewing a toothpick with his eyes half closed.

I took a chair at the end of the third row.

Vittoria turned to whisper to Cesare, and her eyes passed over me. Then they came back. Her hand slid off his arm, and she nudged him. He turned in his seat, saw the paddle in my lap, and his mouth opened a little. I nodded to him politely and looked back toward the front.

Lot fourteen came up at twenty past ten.

“Former Ferrante cold store, Molo Nord, sold as seen. Roof requires work, compressors not operational. Opening at one hundred thousand.”

Enzo lifted his paddle, and then Cesare. The clerk called the climb in a flat voice, five thousand at a time. When Cesare’s paddle went up at one hundred and forty-five, Enzo took the toothpick out of his mouth, shook his head, and folded his arms.

I raised my paddle.

“One hundred and fifty, to number thirty-one.”

Cesare’s paddle went up straight away, and every time mine answered it, his rose again. I kept my eyes on the clerk and away from the front row.

“One hundred and seventy-five, Lovato Freight.”

“One hundred and eighty, thirty-one.”

“One hundred and eighty-five, Lovato Freight.”

Vittoria had her hand on Cesare’s sleeve again. She was whispering to him, fast, and he shook his head at whatever she said.

I lifted my paddle.

“One hundred and ninety, thirty-one.”

Cesare held his paddle in his lap. His knuckles were white around the handle. He looked at my sister, and she stared straight ahead at the clerk with her chin up and her lips pressed together.

“One hundred and ninety, going once,” the clerk said. “Lovato Freight?”

Cesare lifted his paddle. “One hundred and ninety-five.”

I looked at my sister. Her hands stayed folded in her lap, and they never went near his sleeve. He had gone over her number, and she had let him.

“Two hundred,” I said, loud enough for the back row.

The hall went quiet. Cesare turned and looked straight at me across the rows of chairs.

“Two hundred, going once. Going twice.”

His paddle stayed down.

The gavel cracked against the table. “Sold, to number thirty-one, Signorina Lovato.”

Somebody at the back whistled. Enzo Galli laughed out loud and clapped twice, slowly.

My knees were shaking when I walked up to the front table. I signed the memorandum of sale in my own name while the clerk ran my bank card for the deposit. Twenty thousand euros went out of my savings account, everything the wedding deposits had left me, and the rest would be due in twenty-eight days.

As the pen left the paper, a pale window opened over the clerk’s head.

[Goal complete: Secure a building in your own name.]

[Reward: Storage]

[Unlocks on entry.]

I folded my copy of the contract into my coat and walked out into the corridor.

Cesare caught me by the elbow before I reached the street door. His fingers dug into my arm through the wool. Behind him the hall doors were still swinging as people drifted out with their coffees and their caps. A woman in a red scarf stopped dead in the doorway, and a dock man nudged the friend beside him and pointed at us with his chin.

“What the hell are you doing?” He kept his voice low, but it shook. “That building was for us, Ruby. For both of us. For the family. I had a plan.”

“I know you did.”

Vittoria came out through the hall doors and stopped a few steps behind him with her gloves in one hand.

I took hold of the ring on my left hand and worked it over my knuckle. It was tighter than I remembered, and it scraped the skin as it came off. Then I threw it at his chest.

It bounced off the front of his coat with a small, bright click and fell to the tiles. It rolled in a slow curve across the corridor and came to rest against the toe of my sister’s boot.

“Give it to her,” I said. “It’ll save you buying another one.”

Somebody behind us sucked in a breath. An old man by the coffee machine stopped with his cup halfway to his mouth.

Cesare’s face went white, then dark red from the collar up. He looked at the ring, then at Vittoria, then back at me. When he leaned in, his breath was hot against my ear.

“You’re going to regret this, Ruby.”

He let go of my arm, turned, and walked out through the street door without looking back. It swung shut behind him on its heavy spring.