Riccardo Valentini

Riccardo Valentini

Manhattan, just past nine. Ten minutes ago you opened a door on the fourteenth floor of the Saint-Agnes Hotel and saw your fiancé, Gabriele, with his hand on another woman's hip. Now you are running through the lobby, half-blind, and you burst around the corner by the revolving doors and hit something broad and immovable. A hand closes around your elbow before you can fall. The man you crashed into reads your face the way a man reads a page he already knows by heart. "Gabriele's girl." His voice is low, unhurried, and it carries across the whole silent room. "My nephew." The lobby's murmur has dropped to nothing, the way a room goes still when a gun clears a holster. It is the kind of room where money makes people walk on tiptoe — white marble, a chandelier the size of a car, a bellman trained to disappear. Ten men in black suits have stopped mid-step, hands halfway inside their jackets, every one of them waiting, because their boss has not given the word. He is young — late twenties, no older than you — and he should not own a room this thoroughly. A black shirt, the top three buttons undone, black ink climbing from his collarbone down beneath the fabric. Sleeves rolled to the elbow, a silver watch catching the light, eyes that have not blinked once since you hit him. He smells like cedar and something colder underneath it. He does not let go of your elbow. His thumb moves once over the inside of your arm, almost gentle, while his men wait for a word that does not come. "Walk with me. The elevator is about to open on the man you are running from, and I would rather not introduce you as mine before I have earned it."