"Then we have terms," Luca said.
"We have terms," said the old don, and held out his hand across fifty years of other people's blood, and Luca took it.
Chapter 22: Rocco's Refusal
The celebration was not large and it was not loud, but by the standards of that house it was a festival.
The principals had withdrawn to the library with brandy neither of them drank. In the dining room the staff were finally eating, sitting down in the chairs of the powerful like children in a museum after closing. Enzo had produced a bottle of something with no label and was pouring it into coffee cups. Giulia, allowed up far past her bedtime for reasons of state, was asleep in the corner armchair with her shoes off and a linen napkin over her like a blanket. Marco stood in the hall doorway with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled, eating a bowl of the fish stew standing up, the way he had probably eaten half his life, and he caught Mia looking and lifted the bowl an inch in her direction β a toast, a surrender, she wasn't sure. She lifted her empty hands back at him: cook's hands, witness's hands.
She was crossing the hall with a tray of glasses when the lights in the garden went out.
Not the house lights. The garden lights, the ones along the drive and the terrace wall, all at once, the way lights go out when a man who knows the grounds has found the box. In the dining room someone laughed, thinking it was the storm wiring. Marco set his bowl down on the hall table with extreme care, and the care itself was the alarm.
"Kitchen," he said to Mia, not loud. "Now. Take the kid."
She had Giulia up and moving before the first sound came β a sound she would afterward describe to no one, because there was no word in her vocabulary of kitchens for it: a flat, tearing crack from the direction of the terrace doors. Giulia woke fully and did not scream; children of that house, Mia understood in some cold back room of her mind, were raised past screaming early.
"Marco said go to the kitchen," Giulia whispered, clutching Mia's sleeve with a grip like a dock clamp, trotting to keep up without being told. "Is it the bad kind of lights-out? Like the storm?"
"Worse manners than the storm," Mia said, "but the same rules. Cold room if I say. You remember the rules."
"I remember the rules," Giulia said, offended even then, even in the dark with the house coming apart at its garden edge β and that small offended dignity carried them both through the dining room, past the wreckage of the celebration, past Enzo rising from the table with his chair going over behind him, past the waitress from the catering company standing frozen with a bottle in each hand like a statue of somebody's terrible evening.
The hall filled with movement, men coming from rooms where a moment ago there had been brandy and peace. She got Giulia through the kitchen door and into Mrs. Ricci's hands β Mrs. Ricci, who had materialized out of the pantry corridor with her keys already in her fist and her face arranged into something terrifyingly calm β and then Mia turned back, because Marco had told her kitchen, now, and she was going, she was, but Marco was still in the hall, at the wrong end of it, doing the arithmetic of other people's safety with his own body as the sum.
The second crack was closer. It came through the dining room, where the celebration table still stood loaded with the evidence of peace. Somewhere behind her a woman screamed once and was silenced by her own good sense; somewhere a man's voice was giving orders in a tone that expected to be obeyed in the dark. Mia registered all of it the way you register weather through a window while your hands are busy β noted, not felt. What she felt was Giulia's grip on her sleeve, and Marco's voice somewhere behind them, level and deliberate, moving people the way a shepherd moves sheep, toward doors, toward walls, toward anywhere that wasn't the middle of the room. Marco went down the way a felled thing goes down β not crumpling, but cut, sideways, one hand coming up to his side and coming away dark. He got himself turned. He got three steps toward the kitchen on his own before his knee understood what had happened and folded.
Mia did not decide anything. Her body had already gone. She crossed the hall floor low, the way she'd crossed hot kitchens a thousand times without thinking, and got her shoulder under his arm and her arm around his back, and his blood came through his shirt against her side, warm as dishwater. He was heavier than any stockpot she had ever lifted. He tried to say something β her name, an order, an apology, she never knew β and she said, "Don't. Walking," and dragged him the width of the hall and through the kitchen door, and Enzo was there and took half the weight, and between them they got Marco Moretti down onto the kitchen floor, onto the clean tiles, among the stoves of the room where he had once stood and called her someone's weapon.
"Phone," Enzo said. "Ricci has the doctor'sβ"
"Have her call. Then towels. The white ones, the cook's towels, the whole stack."
The bleeding was high on his side, under the ribs. Mia knew nothing about wounds except what any cook knows about pressure and time, and she used all of it. She wadded the first towel hard against the hole the night had made in him and put both her hands on it and leaned her weight in, the way you lean on dough that fights you, and Marco's whole body went rigid under her hands and his eyes came open and found her face.
"You," he said, with enormous effort and something like wonder. "Of course it's β you."
"Marco. Look at me. You're not doing anything stupid on my floor. I just mopped this floor."
"Bossy," he whispered. "Evenβ"
"Save it. Breathe slow. The doctor's coming and you're going to be embarrassed about all of this, and I'm going to let you be." His blood had soaked the towel through to her hands; she could feel the heat of it, the steady push of it against her palms, and she leaned harder and thought about Giulia asleep with a napkin for a blanket, and Danny at home doing coursework, and the old man in the library weeping over bread at the bottom of a bowl, and she thought: not tonight, not in this kitchen, not one more person at this table. Whatever was happening beyond the door could happen beyond the door. In here, she held the line with a cook's towel and her grandmother's stubbornness, and Marco Moretti's breathing, ragged and furious and alive, went on under her hands.