Page 52 of Masked Don

“I’m not bringing you in to be a weapon, or a message, or a thing he gets to look at. I’m bringing you in as exactly what you are: my right hand. The person who keeps my calendar and reads my correspondence and notices things in a room that I miss.” His voice drops. “You don’t have to do anything in there but be yourself. That’s the entire plan.”

“And if I say drive on right now? Take me home?”

“Then Carmine drives on.” No hesitation. None. “And Luca spends the rest of his life believing he can still make you hide.” His eyes hold mine. “Is that what you want him to believe?”

Something about the way he puts it does something to me, makes me square my shoulders, makes me realize that I am so tired of letting men like Luca Santini decide how I’m allowed to live.

“He called me fat in front of the whole room.”

“He did.”

“And blacklisted me so I couldn’t get a job.”

“Most of it.”

I look up at the big silver letters, unbuckle my seat belt, and nod. “Then let’s go ruin his morning.”

Approval, hot and immediate, flares in Enzo’s eyes, as if what I just said turned him on.

Then he’s out of the car and around to my door. He offers a hand I don’t need but take anyway. I’m about to walk into the one building in this city I swore I’d never set foot in, and I’m going to need every advantage I can get.

The lobby is all marble and ego; the Santini logo is inlaid in the floor, so you have to walk across his name to reach the elevators. I make a point of stepping right on it. I spot a thin, nervous man whom I recognize from Luca’s inner circle waiting near the elevator bank. He visibly pales as Enzo and I approach, as if he can tell how unbothered we are, how we’re walking right into the enemy’s house, like it’s ours.

We take the elevator up twenty floors. The thin man doesn’t speak and neither do we, and I spend the ride with my heart slamming against my rib cage, but with my face arranged into a perfectly polished blankness. Enzo stands beside me, radiating a calm so total, it starts to envelop me.

The conference room takes up a corner of the floor, glass on two sides, the whole gray city laid out below. I recognize Luca’s lawyer, Jack Ketch, who’s already there. He’s lean and gray and lawyerly as ever, telegraphing a different kind of danger than Enzo. A few other well-dressed men are in attendance.

At the head of the table is Luca. He turns as the door opens, a smile for Enzo already on his face. He’s older but exactly the same, the good looks, the green eyes, the expensive watch, and the smile that always made my skin crawl just a little. It’s a predator’s smile, a smile that’s always at its warmest and most disarming right before he strikes.

He rises halfway from his chair, his hand extended slightly, ready to get down to business with Enzo, when his eyes land on me. The smile dies on his face.

I watch it happen in real time, and I will treasure that moment, I think, for the rest of my natural life.

The confusion first, then recognition, ugly and total, then something close to fear, there and gone, as he tries to grasp what it means that the woman he humiliated at the Velvet Room just walked into his own conference room at Enzo Accardi’s shoulder, dressed like she belongs there, calm as they come.

“Stevie?” My name comes out of his mouth wrong, questioning, but Luca Santini doesn’t ask questions.

“Luca.” I say it with total cool. I let his name be nothing in my mouth. I let him see, in the flat, pleasant blankness of my face, that he doesn’t get a reaction from me anymore, that he hasn’t earned one in years. “I’m Mr. Accardi’s assistant. I’ll be sitting in.”

The silence is gorgeous. It stretches. Ketch’s eyes go from me to Luca and back, recalculating something.

Enzo lets it hang, lets Luca drown in it for one more second, before he pulls out the chair at the far end of the table, the one that somehow becomes the head of it the moment he touches it, though it’s Luca’s building, and gestures me into the one beside it.

“Luca,” Enzo says, pleasant as a knife going in. “You remember Miss Callahan. I believe the last time you saw her you were doing comedy.”

CHAPTER 17

ENZO

Luca recovers fast. Men like him always do. He has the smile back on his face by the time he sits, and he aims it at Stevie. “You could’ve told me you’d hired new help, Enzo. I’d have sent a fruit basket.”

She doesn’t even blink. Good.

I don’t look at her. Looking at her would tell Luca exactly where to aim. But I feel her beside me the way you feel a loaded gun in your own hand, quiet and certain, and something in my chest that has been clenched for a long time eases by one notch.

He thought he’d be sitting across from a frightened girl he used to own. He’s sitting across from the woman who walked out of my bed without a backward glance, and he has no idea what that means yet.

“Three weeks ago, Jack brought me your offer,” I say. “The waterfront, Sutphin, and three of my clubs, handed to you as a gift. I wanted you to hear it in plain words, Luca, because I think it sounds different out loud than it did in your head.”