Chapter 7
His finger came to rest on Alessandro’s unguarded, sunlit smile — a smile no surveillance camera had ever caught in fifteen years.
“But look at this. He’s just acquired something to lose.”
The message arrived at the estate through channels no one suspected — Rosa, twenty years in the Moretti household, her son drowning in a $60,000 gambling debt that, it turned out, belonged to Victorio Romano. He had been holding it over her for months like a blade. This weekend, for the first time in fifteen years, Moretti will go out without his security route.
Because that weekend, Emma had tugged Alessandro’s sleeve after dinner. “The Christmas lights are on early this year, at the square by Street Leonard’s. Everyone in my class has already seen them. Everyone.” A tragic pause. “Except me.”
“One evening, as an ordinary man,” Alessandro told a worried Sophia. “I owe her that. I owe myself that.”
Before leaving his room that Saturday, he slipped the wooden bracelet onto his wrist, murmuring half-joking the instruction Emma had taught him. Hold it tight when you’re scared.
He had no idea how much he was about to need it.
The square glittered with a thousand lights. Emma laughed, a peppermint stick in her hand, her breath making little clouds in the cold. And for the first time in fifteen years, Alessandro Moretti was not scanning the crowd for threats. He was just a man under Christmas lights, watching a child laugh.
May you like
It was the only four minutes of carelessness he had allowed himself in a decade and a half.
Four minutes was more than enough.
