Page 8 of Fastest Kill

"Kalimera." Dario stepped forward, hands open and visible, smiling with all the warmth and as many self-preservation instincts God gave a feral cat. "I'm Dario. Your daughter has told me almost nothing about you, which I'm sure was wise. I like your gun."

"It's a Beretta," Despina replied. "Don't move."

"Spina." The voice came from deeper inside the house, unhurried and dry. "Amore mio, put the gun down. He's a Colleoni."

Tore appeared in the hallway behind Despina, coffee in hand, reading glasses perched on his nose, looking like a retired professor and not a master thief who had been stealing priceless artifacts since before Frederica was born.

He was lean, with silver-streaked black curls, and still handsome in the way that some Italian men seemed to manage no matter what age they reached.

"A Colleoni who dresses like a stripper?" Despina demanded, but the gun dropped a fraction.

Tore sipped his coffee. "He's the middle one. You know, the Charmer. Dario." He said it the way another man might say 'ah, yes, the Monet' or 'that particular strain of influenza.' "I met his mother once. Terrifying woman. You can see Niccolò in him, though."

Something flickered across Dario's face at the mention of his father. It was gone in an instant, replaced by the Charmer's easy grin, but Frederica caught it. She tucked it away next to all the other small, real things she had been collecting about Dario Colleoni. To use against him if she needed to, she always told herself.

"Come in, both of you." Tore stepped back, pulling Despina with him by the waist and kissing her on the neck to distract her enough that the gun finally lowered. "You look like you haven't slept or eaten, and your mother has been cooking."

"I wasn't cooking for a Colleoni," Despina said, already heading toward the kitchen. "I was cooking for my daughter, who, by the way, was arrested and didn't call her own mother."

Frederica winced. Here it comes.

Despina's voice carried from the kitchen with the relentless force of mortar fire. "Instead, she calls a strange man in the middle of the night. Not me, who labored for thirty hours to give her life, who taught her to field-strip a rifle before she could ride a bicycle, who flew to Morocco when she got stabbed because she forgot to check her corners. No. She calls a man in a fucking silk shirt."

"It's a very nice shirt," Dario offered, sounding amused. "And I owed her a favor."

Frederica turned to glare at him. He was standing in the middle of her parents' hallway, taking in the controlled chaos of the Alesci household with an expression she couldn't quite read. It wasn't the Charmer's grin he liked to put on like a mask. It was something quieter and more curious.

His gaze moved over the framed photos on the wall, the display cabinet full of things that were absolutely stolen, the hand-painted tiles, and the small shrine to Saint Phanourios that Despina maintained because Tore always said that she needed a patron saint more than most. He, on the other hand, had a patron god with a statue in the garden, generally surrounded by burned candles, wine, and other offerings, depending on the job Tore was about to do.

Dario's expression landed somewhere between wonder and hunger, like a man pressing his face to a window, looking into a room he had never been invited into.

Frederica's pulse went erratic, and she blamed it on too much booze and not enough food.

Tore was watching Dario, too. Her father missed nothing. He had survived four decades in a profession where carelessness got you killed or imprisoned, and he read people the way other men read newspapers.

"Gioia mia, why is there a Colleoni in my house?" Tore's voice was quiet, for her ears only. He had appeared beside her without making a sound, which was the most unsettling of his many unsettling skills.

"He bailed me out. He was in Istanbul."

"That's how," her father said. "I asked why."

She didn't have an answer for that. Not one she was willing to say out loud, and not one her father would believe even if she tried.

Tore studied her face for a long moment before nodding, which all but shouted, 'I see exactly what is happening here, and we will be discussing it later.'

She could hardly wait.

"Come through," Tore said to Dario. "Before Spina comes back with the gun."

He walked toward the kitchen, and Dario followed him, ducking slightly under the low doorframe. Frederica stood alone in the hallway for a moment, surrounded by the evidence of a lifetime of being loved loudly, chaotically, and without condition.

She could still feel the phantom warmth of Dario's shoulder against her cheek. She didn't remember falling asleep on the plane, but she did remember waking up and feeling the careful stillness of his body, as if he had been holding himself rigid to avoid disturbing her.

Nobody apart from her parents had ever been careful with her before. She didn't know what to do with it.

From the kitchen, she heard Despina's voice rise. "Sit. Eat. If you're going to court my daughter, you will do it on a full stomach."

"Mama, he is not courting me!" Frederica shouted back.