Nunzio goes out as fast as he can without tripping up, and Luca turns his ice-beams on me. I’m about to be put on blast.
Attack is the best form of defense, they say.
“Don’t,” I snap. “Don’t you dare talk to them like that. These people are just doing the best they can with their lives, husband of mine, and you don’t get to threaten them. If you want someone to taste your fucking food so bad, pass it over. Better me than you, right?”
Luca pushes back his chair and stalks close to me, but I don’t move. I can’t. If I give in now, he won’t ever take me seriously. And right now, I am fucking serious as the bullet that killed my mother. “No,” I say again, as he opens his mouth. “You don’t get to be an asshole to them. Take it out on me if you like, but you show them some respect.”
He glares so hard I should be dead if telekinesis was a thing. Luca is sizing me up, wondering if I’ll back down.
I don’t.
“What do you care?” he asks. “About them, I mean. You don’t know them.”
“I do know them,” I say, because it’s true. I’ve lived my whole life with people like Nunzio and his wife, people who get paid shit money to act like their employers are better than them just because they’re rich. “The mark of greatness is to treat everyone as an equal, Luca. That’s something you need to learn. Fuscone would have contempt for the staff, I bet. You want to be like Fuscone?”
That fucking gets him, right in the gut. I see hatred pass over his face, but it’s directed at Fuscone, not at me.
Luca retreats, and as he goes, I sit once more, my knees wobbling. Two more seconds and I would have caved or passed out or something. The man has willpower out the wazoo.
He sits in his own seat again, flicking out the napkin and placing it in his own lap. “For the record,” he says to me, “I don’t care if someone’s trying to poison me. But I do care if you come to harm.”
“How chivalrous, baby,” I say, flicking out my own napkin.
“It’s not chivalry. It’s business.”
“Of course.” I smile brightly. “How could I forget?” I’ll give him a pass on that one. If he feels the need to get in a low blow, I’ll let him. He’s earned it.
Luca looks at the array of cutlery beside the plates. “And Finch,” he adds casually, “if you ever contradict me in pubic again like that, we are going to have a problem.” He stares at me long enough to see me drop my eyes.
“Understood, husband.”
Chapter Fourteen
LUCA
I’ll say this for Howard Fincher Donovan the Third: he’s intriguing.
He’s also correct. I shouldn’t go around threatening innocent people like some low-level thug. That’s how the Sam Fuscones of this world operate, just as Finch said. But I’m better than that, or at least I want to be. Tino Morelli would never have acted like I did just now. Tino has a sense of decorum not common among my kind these days. We are violent men who wield our power like cudgels; sometimes we just wield actual cudgels.
Violence and unpredictability are how I’ve built respect. Or fear, at least, which has always been my goal, based on Machiavelli’s advice: better to be feared than loved. Now I’m starting to wonder how useful fear really is. It certainly doesn’t guarantee loyalty. I’ve seen it many times: people say or do anything to save their own hide.
But not Finch, strangely enough. He’s told me in his inimitable way that he’d prefer not to die painfully, and he’s literally laughed in the face of it, but I’ve never seen him really lose himself under threat of death like other men seem to do. Perhaps he feels like there’s not much of him left to lose.
I’m familiar with that feeling myself, having compartmentalized my whole life so ruthlessly that only the core of me is left. I thought I was all I needed.
I watch Finch helping himself to the platter of antipasto, and I wonder whether it was courage or recklessness that made him stand up in defense of Nunzio. I’m not sure which I’m more comfortable with. And perhaps it was both. Perhaps the not-so-still waters of my new husband run much deeper than I suspected.
I pick up a fork and spear a slice of salami for myself before it’s all gone.
“Not that one,” Finch says around the food in his own mouth.
“Hm?” I ask.
“Not that fork.” He gives me a conspiratorial smile. “I know. There are so many fucking forks and knives and weird things I don’t even know the name of. I get confused, too. But that’s the wrong fork. Use the one on the outside there, with the two points. There you go, that’s the one. Sharp little fucker, but it’s mostly just for moving stuff onto your plate.”
I pick up the small two-tined fork on the extreme left. “This isn’t for dessert?”
“No, baby. The one you were using is the dessert fork.”
“Does it matter?” I ask, irritated. “They all do the same thing. Transport food to mouth.”
Finch leans back in his chair and smiles at me. This is our formal wedding dinner, and he’s dressed in ripped jeans and a faded old tee, but he can’t hide that moneyed glow. He could still be in those goddamn booty shorts and be more comfortable and relaxed in this setting than I am. “It doesn’t matter, baby,” he says. “Not to me.” There’s an underlying meaning there. I almost feel like he’s testing me.
I look at him while I think it over. “It matters
