★LUCIANO★
I told myself, on the way there, that it didn't matter what she was like.
It wasn't relevant. The arrangement wasn't about compatibility or disposition or whether two people could stand to be in the same room—it was about a name on a contract and a network I needed and a war that had gone on long enough. What she was like was totally beside the point.
I told myself that in the car. I told myself that walking into the restaurant. I was still telling myself that when I took my seat in Enzo's private room—different venue from the last meeting, neutral ground, lawyers present, the formal machinery of alliance-making laid out across a table dressed like it was a dinner party.
I sat with my back to the wall, checked the room, noted the exits, and waited.
Dante Belli came in first. Up close he was a composed man. Controlled in the way of someone who had spent decades making sure nothing showed. He looked at me.
We didn't speak. The lawyers did enough talking for the whole room.
Then she came in behind him.
I saw yellow first.
Bright, shiny yellow—not a woman who had gotten dressed without thinking, not someone who'd reached for whatever was closest. Someone who had chosen that color on purpose for this meeting, which meant she'd thought about what she wanted to say before she said anything at all.
I looked at her face.
She was looking around the room systematically, taking it in. She moved through the space like she was collecting information. She noted the lawyers, the table setting, the exits probably, and then she got to me.
She smiled.
Not the performance of a smile. The kind you give someone when you've been introduced at a normal dinner and you're pleased enough to meet them.
Like we were two ordinary people. Like this was an ordinary room.
I didn't smile back. I looked at the table.
The meeting ran formally, carefully, with the specific language of men who are used to saying large things in small words. Terms, timelines, conditions. Dante across the table with his hands folded and his face giving nothing. Me beside Marco, who was being professionally neutral in the way that meant he was watching everything.
She sat beside her father and answered the questions directed at her directly. No performance of uncertainty, no deference beyond what was appropriate. When the lawyer asked if she understood the terms, she said yes and she meant it. When the timeline was laid out she asked one clarifying question. The kind that showed she'd been listening to every word.
I noticed that. I didn't mean to notice it, but I did anyway.
The meeting wound down. Chairs moved and people stood. The lawyers gathered their papers and left.
I was standing, reaching for my jacket, when she appeared at my peripheral vision. I turned.
She was closer than I expected. She looked up at me—she was shorter than me by enough that she had to look up, which she did without any apparent self-consciousness—and she asked:
"Do you have a garden?"
I looked at her, a little stunned by her question.
"At your house," she said. "If you have a garden. I just like to know."
I had approximately no response prepared for that question. Of everything I had anticipated from this meeting, a question about my garden was not on the list.
"There's a yard," I answered.
She nodded slowly. "Good," she said, then followed her father out.
I stood there for a moment. Marco appeared beside me.
"Well," he said.
"Don't."
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You were about to say several things."
"I was going to say she seems-"
"Marco." I hissed.
He stopped. But I could hear the thing he wasn't saying, which was worse than him saying it. I put my jacket on and walked out and didn't look back at the door she'd gone through.
In the car I sat with the window down despite the cold and thought about the meeting with the clean detachment I applied to operational assessments.
Then her.
I ran back through it the way I run back through things I need to understand. The yellow dress. The way she looked at the room. The smile she gave me like I was a person she was simply meeting, like the weight of what we were sitting down to do hadn't reached her face at all.
The garden question.
I couldn't locate it—couldn't find the angle of it. Was it nerves, displaced into a strange question? A test of some kind? Simple curiosity?
I looked out at the city moving past the window.
I didn't know what to do with a person like that. I was used to rooms where everything meant something calculated. Where the smile had a purpose and the question had an angle and nothing was simply what it appeared to be.
That smile had appeared to be just a smile.
I told myself that was a performance. That everyone performed, especially in rooms like that one, especially with stakes like these. I told myself she was her father's daughter and Dante Belli hadn't survived forty years in this business by being straightforward.
I told myself the unsettled feeling was just the strangeness of the situation.
I was wrong about that too.