Page 55 of The Silent Hour

I stared at Tato. The lines around his eyes had deepened since I was small. His thumb had stopped moving over my knuckles. Just the same lesson he'd spent my entire life teaching me in a hundred different forms, in this kitchen and in cars and at the edges of rooms at parties where I was the youngest person by twenty years.

I nodded. "Okay."

Mama returned to her varenyky as if we hadn't just mapped the architecture of betrayal over a pot of something that smelled like every Sunday of my childhood. She picked up a round of dough, pressed a thumb into its center, and began to fold.

"So," she said, not looking up, "are you staying for lunch?"

I looked at the mountain of food surrounding her. The onion still half-chopped on the board. The bowl of filling. The neat rows of finished dumplings lined up like small pale moons.

"No, Mama. I came all this way to watch you cook and then go eat a fucking sandwich."

Tato's laugh came out sharp and sudden.

Mama pointed the knife at me without turning her head. "Watch your mouth."

"Wonder where I learned it."

She looked at me then. Eyes narrow. I smiled sweetly.

The kitchen settled back into the smell of dough and butter and the soft knock of the knife finding the board again, but all the things I just learned sat in my head.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

ETHAN

THE CONFERENCE ROOM gleamed like a cathedral built for the law. Black marble. Leather chairs. Shelves lined with case law. A bronze Lady Justice presided over it all, her scales catching the morning sunlight spilling through the windows.

Knox leaned back in his chair, one shoe hooked over the opposite knee, his sharp gaze fixed on me. Rafa sat across from him, arms folded. Serena had already stacked two folders neatly in front of herself. Eric and Katerina Romanov occupied the far side of the table, Caleb Myers beside them with the Cortez indictment open on his laptop.

Not everyone at the Marcelli Group sat at this table. Every employee knew the kind of clients we sometimes represented. Men and women whose names weren't merely printed in indictments but whispered in back rooms.

Knowing what we did didn't mean everyone had the stomach to participate in it. Rafa had once put it more succinctly. "You don't put house cats in a tiger fight."

Katerina Romanov was thirty-six, one of our senior associates and married to Laurel. She was a strategist through and through, with dark hair framing striking eyes that seemed permanently unimpressed by bullshit.

Caleb Myers was thirty-two, brilliant, autistic, and blunt enough to occasionally make grown attorneys question their life choices. He also saw patterns the rest of us missed. When Ruiz's financials had nearly buried us beneath contradictory numbers, Caleb had found the discrepancy everyone else overlooked.

Which was why he was here now. Ruiz was still consuming half the firm's manpower, and now Dominic Cortez loomed.

Rafa broke the silence first. "If we take this, we invite every enemy he's made into our orbit. Rivals. Families. Prosecutors who've spent years waiting for him to bleed."

Knox's mouth tilted. "Or we prove, once again, that the Marcelli Group doesn't cower because a client's name makes people uncomfortable. We've handled dangerous men before."

Eric flattened one palm against the table. "This isn't about prestige."

"No," I agreed. "It's about exposure."

Caleb spoke without looking up from his screen. "Count Seven is weak."

The room quieted. Serena turned toward him. "The arms conspiracy?"

"Yes." He enlarged a section of the indictment. "They rely heavily on an informant statement to establish the connection. The physical evidence described here doesn't independently support the breadth of the allegation."

He tapped the screen. "That's a pressure point."

Serena leaned closer. "Enough to matter?"

"Enough to investigate."