Chapter 10
A quarter inch. Then half. Then a full turn. Patient, careful, the way a man turns a doorknob when he doesn’t want the door to know he’s opening it.
Bruno was already off the rug. Four feet from the door, low, shoulders forward, weight on the front pads. The low sound in his chest rose once and stopped.
He was silent now. His lips had drawn back from the long white teeth. His ears lay flat against his skull. He was not the family dog anymore. He was what the family dog had always been underneath, through all those quiet years of waiting.
The door opened inward.
Vincenzo Moretti stepped into the queen’s room in his white dinner jacket. In his right hand he held a small black pistol with a silencer screwed to the barrel, carried up the west stair inside a folded silk handkerchief. His face wore no expression at all. He had finally put the smile down.
He saw the four-poster empty, the wool blanket thrown back at one corner. A pencil drawing of a lion in Bruno’s shape on the marble side table.
He saw Elena.
She stood in the far corner between wardrobe and window, her back not quite touching the wall, both hands rising slowly to shoulder height, palms toward him. Her mouth was a thin, still line.
He saw the dog. Between himself and the bathroom door on the left-hand wall, broad, low, silent. Amber eyes unblinking.
“Elena,” Vincenzo said, almost politely. “Move. I don’t want to hurt you, *cara.* Only the child.”
“Then you’ll have to shoot me first, Signore.”
Vincenzo raised the pistol.
“Then I will.”
The dog moved.
Sixty-five kilos of black muscle crossed the room in the time it took Vincenzo’s finger to begin its second squeeze. Bruno’s jaws closed, not on the throat, not on the chest, but on the wrist of the hand that held the gun. Years of never needing to bite had done nothing to soften the mechanics of that jaw. The bones inside Vincenzo’s cuff made a small wet sound.
The pistol discharged. The suppressor spat one soft, dry cough. The bullet went up and punched a clean round hole through the ceiling plaster. A crystal drop on the small Murano light shivered on its wire, and dust drifted down in a slow gray column.
Vincenzo screamed. A high sound, not the sound of a man who had ever expected to make it. His arm bent wrong at the wrist. Bruno set his weight and hauled him down: knees to the rug, then shoulder, then hip. The pistol fell from the ruined hand and skidded across the parquet.
Elena did not think. Three steps, four. She was on it before it stopped sliding, her fingers closing around the grip, warm from his palm and much lighter than she had expected. She stood with it in both hands and pointed it down at the man who had come to kill her daughter.
She had never fired a gun in her life. Miguel’s service pistol had lived three years in her dresser’s top drawer, wrapped in an old cotton shirt, and she had never once taken it out. Now her hands shook so hard the barrel drew a small circle in the air.
Vincenzo lay on his side. Bruno had not opened his jaws. The dog’s amber eyes rolled once toward Elena and back to the throat of the man he had chosen, for now, not to kill.
Footsteps in the corridor. Fast.
Dante filled the doorway. He took in the room in one long look. His uncle folded on the rug with a dog on his arm. Elena in the corner with a silenced pistol and shaking hands. The ceiling dust settling on the coverlet.
He did not draw his father’s Colt. He walked in past the foot of the four-poster and stopped an arm’s length from her.
“Elena. Give me the gun.”
“He tried to kill her.”
“I know.”
Her whole face broke. Tears ran down her cheeks in two long unbroken lines. She made no sound.
“I know, Elena. And you stopped him. Now let me finish.”
She looked at him. She looked down at the pistol. Then she turned it slowly, barrel away from Vincenzo, and held it out.
Dante took it. He thumbed the safety on and set it on the marble table beside the pencil lion. He did not tuck it into his waistband. He did not use it. He touched the bead in his ear.
“Tommy. Come up. Bring three men.”
Then he crossed to Vincenzo and crouched at a safe distance, one knee up, and looked into his uncle’s face.
“Nephew,” Vincenzo ground out between his teeth, sweat standing along his hairline. “Nephew, please.”
Dante studied him a long moment. Bruno’s jaws hadn’t loosened.
“Uncle. My father said something to me the week before he died. He said, ‘Watch Vince at the sixth toast.'”
Vincenzo’s face changed.
“I thought,” Dante said, “he meant your temper.”
Behind the closed bathroom door, in the dark between the marble tub and the porcelain sink, Sophie Vasquez sat on cold tile with her eyes squeezed shut and the star pillow pressed to her chest. Her lips were moving.
*Forty-two.*
She whispered it.
*Forty-three.*
May you like
Skipping. *Forty-seven. Forty-eight. Forty-nine. Fifty.*
She did not stop. She did not open her eyes. She had promised.
