Volume Four: Kiss Under the Red Light
• • •
The car was still rocking gently on its suspension, engine ticking as it cooled, when Dante kissed her, and Mara would spend a long time afterward trying to decide whether she had started the argument that led to it, or simply lost control of one she hadn't meant to win.
"You could have been killed," he said, for the third time, his voice low and furious in the particular, contained way that frightened her more than shouting ever could.
"You could have been killed," she said back, "which is exactly why I did what I did, so perhaps save the lecture until after you've thanked me."
"I don't need you taking bullets meant for me."
"I didn't take a bullet, Dante, I moved a chair and blacked out a room, which is considerably less dramatic than what you're describing, and considerably more useful than standing there waiting to see whether the man on the balcony had good aim."
He's not angry that I acted, she thought, even as her own voice climbed to match his. He's angry that it worked, and that it means he needs me exactly as much as I keep telling myself he doesn't.
That argument, and the kiss that ended it, both belonged to the end of a night that had started three hours earlier in considerably more elegant surroundings. First, she had to explain how either of them had ended up at an auction that sold nothing so honest as art.
• • •
The auction house occupied the top two floors of a converted textile mill on the river side of the old refinery district, all exposed brick and soft gold light, and the item on the block that evening was never announced from any podium, because the real currency being traded moved through side conversations, sealed envelopes, and the studied indifference of men who wanted the room to believe they had no interest in anything at all.
"Ferris Calloway," Dante said quietly, nodding toward a silver haired man in a charcoal suit near the bar, "brokers information for Meridian. If anyone in this room knows who authorised your brother's transfer, it's him."
"And we're approaching him how, exactly."
"As a couple," Dante said, and did not look at her when he said it, which told her he had anticipated exactly the reaction that crossed her face. "Calloway doesn't speak to strangers who look like they want something from him. He speaks to money that looks bored. Two people clearly enjoying themselves attract far less suspicion than one person working."
"You want me on your arm."
"I want you alive at the end of the night," Dante said. "The arm is incidental."
Liar, she thought, though she couldn't have said, in that moment, whether the accusation was aimed at him or at the sudden, unhelpful warmth low in her own chest.
She played the part better than she expected to enjoy playing it. Her hand fit into the crook of his arm as though it had done so a hundred times before, and she laughed at something he murmured near her ear that wasn't especially funny, purely for the benefit of the room, and found, uncomfortably, that the performance required less acting than it should have.
They were three sentences into a conversation with Calloway, Dante's tone all lazy money and no urgency at all, when Mara's eye caught a shape on the balcony above the auction floor that did not belong to the party.
A man, still, deliberate, angled toward the crowd below with the particular stillness of someone waiting for a single clear shot rather than watching a room.
She did not react visibly. Ten years of contracts had taught her that much, at least. Instead she reached up and adjusted the collar of Dante's jacket, an intimate, unremarkable gesture to anyone watching, and let her fingers tap twice against his collarbone in the old signal pattern she'd used with contract partners who couldn't risk speaking aloud.
Two taps. Threat above. One direction only.
Dante's body did not so much as flinch, but he shifted a half step to the left, angling them both behind a marble pillar with a smoothness that looked, to anyone in the room, like a man simply repositioning to admire a different painting.
The shot, when it came, took a chip out of the pillar exactly where his head had been a second and a half earlier.
The room did not descend into chaos, because a room full of people who trafficked in secrets for a living had learned, long ago, the specific art of pretending not to notice gunfire. Waiters kept moving. Conversations kept their volume. Only a handful of security men reached for concealed weapons, and Mara understood, in the half second before she acted, that if this turned into an open exchange of fire in a room this crowded, neither she nor Dante would walk out of it.
She pulled her phone free, already running the auction house's public wifi network she'd mapped without meaning to the moment they'd walked in, and pushed a script into the building's lighting rig before Dante had finished pulling her fully behind cover.
The room dropped into red.
Every light in the auction floor shifted at once, the elegant gold washing out into a deep, disorienting crimson that killed night vision, killed clean sightlines, killed the shooter's ability to distinguish one moving shape from a dozen others now scrambling for the exits in a controlled, expensive sort of panic.
"Move," she said, and did not wait to see whether Dante obeyed before she was already pulling him toward the service stair, weaving between overturned chairs and abandoned champagne glasses that caught the red light like something spilled and still wet.
They made the car three streets away before either of them said another word.
• • •
"You could have been killed," Dante said, the moment the door closed behind them, and that was where the argument that would end in a kiss actually began, both of them still running hot with the particular, ugly adrenaline that always arrived after danger had passed rather than during it.
"You could have been killed," Mara said back, "which is exactly why I did what I did, so perhaps save the lecture until after you've thanked me."
"I don't need you taking bullets meant for me."
"I didn't take a bullet, Dante, I moved a chair and blacked out a room, which is considerably less dramatic than what you're describing, and considerably more useful than standing there waiting to see whether the man on the balcony had good aim."
"That is not the point."
"Then what is the point," she snapped, twisting in her seat to face him fully, "because from where I'm sitting, the point seems to be that you'd rather absorb every risk in this city personally than admit someone else is capable of carrying part of it."
"The point," Dante said, low, and something in his voice had gone rougher than she'd heard it before, less controlled, "is that I have spent three days telling myself you are a problem to be managed and an asset to be protected, and every single time you do something like what you did tonight, I find that description gets harder to believe."
Don't ask what he means by that, she told herself, even as her mouth had already opened. "And what description would you use instead."
He didn't answer with words.
The kiss, when it came, was not gentle, not at first, more a continuation of the argument than an escape from it, his hand sliding into her hair with the same controlled intensity he brought to everything else, and Mara kissed him back with an intensity that startled her more than it should have, some part of her insisting this was simply the adrenaline finding somewhere to go, and a quieter, more honest part already aware that the adrenaline had very little to do with it at all.
This is a mistake, she thought, even as her hand fisted in the front of his shirt rather than pushing him away. This is exactly the kind of mistake that gets people like me killed.
She kissed him anyway, until the car's driver cleared his throat once, discreetly, from behind the partition, and they broke apart at nearly the same moment, both of them breathing harder than the kiss alone should have accounted for.
"That won't happen again," Dante said, straightening his jacket with more precision than the task required, not looking at her.
"No," Mara agreed, and did not entirely believe herself either, "it won't."
Neither of them moved to increase the distance between them for the rest of the drive.
• • •
It was well past midnight, back in the borrowed quiet of the study, adrenaline finally bleeding out of both of them in slow, uneven waves, that Mara noticed the mark on Dante's wrist while helping him out of his jacket, a small, precise incision along the inside of his forearm that had scarred over cleanly enough to be mistaken for an old injury by anyone who wasn't specifically looking for it.
"What is that," she said, catching his wrist before he could pull his sleeve back down.
"An old wound."
"That's not an old wound, that's a subdermal insertion site," she said, already reaching for the small scanner she kept in her go bag, the one she'd built herself out of a modified proximity reader, because paranoia, in her line of work, was simply another word for professional competence. "How long have you had this."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Dante."
He was quiet for a long moment, and when he finally answered, his voice had lost the controlled ease it usually carried. "Since I was nineteen. My father insisted every heir to the family carry one, in case of kidnapping. I was told it only ever transmitted to internal Moretti security."
The scanner in Mara's hand disagreed.
"It's transmitting somewhere else," she said, watching the readout resolve into a route she did not recognise, buried under three layers of obfuscation that had clearly been added long after whatever original, simpler system Dante believed he was still carrying. "Somewhere labelled, and I want you to understand this is exactly as unsettling as it sounds, 'Elena's Room.'"
Dante went very still.
"That's not possible," he said. "Elena has been dead for six years."
"Someone's still using her name as a destination address," Mara said, "which means either somebody kept her old systems running long after she died, or somebody built a new system and deliberately named it after her, and I genuinely could not tell you which of those options is worse."
She watched something in Dante's face close over, the same careful, controlled distance she'd first met in the alley three days before, the mask sliding back into place over whatever the kiss in the car had briefly, involuntarily, let show.
"There is something about my sister's death that I have not told you," he said, quiet, and for the first time since she'd met him, he did not look like a man in complete command of the room he stood in.
"I gathered that much on my own," Mara said. "I'd rather you tell me the rest before I find it the way I found everything else in this house, which is to say, the hard way, usually while someone is trying to kill one of us."
Dante looked at her for a long moment, some private calculation crossing his face, weighing what little was left to protect against what he had already, irreversibly, allowed her to see.
"Not tonight," he said, finally, and there was something almost like a plea buried under the flatness of it. "Give me until tomorrow. I need to know how much of what I'm about to tell you is still true before I say it out loud."
That's not a no, Mara thought, filing the observation away with the same wary care she gave every other piece of intelligence in this house, and it's not quite a yes either, but it's the first time he's asked me for something instead of simply deciding it for both of us.
"Tomorrow, then," she said. "But Dante. Whatever's in that room. Whatever Elena's name is still attached to. If it touches Theo, I need to know it, even if it costs you something to say it."
"I know," he said, quiet, and looked, for just a moment, less like the man who ran an empire built on other people's fear, and more like someone standing at the edge of a decision he had been avoiding for six long years.
Outside the study window, the rain that had followed them through three nights running had finally stopped, leaving the garden below washed clean and silver under the security lights, and Mara sat very still in the quiet that followed, aware that somewhere in this house, in a room named after a dead woman, the next piece of the truth was waiting, patient, indifferent to whether either of them was ready for it.