Luca’s Pov Dinner at Gracewell’s

LUCA’S POV DINNER AT GRACEWELL’S

My brothers never wanted to see the place where my father died. I was different; I had to see it to believe it. Over a year ago, after the funeral, I drove alone to Cedar Hill. I had to make it real. When I first traced the perimeter of Gracewell’s Diner, edging closer to the awning, staring at the block of tarmac where my father had bled out, it all felt so wrong. Don Angelo Falcone, Chicago’s Angel-maker, had taken his last breath outside a rundown diner in a time-warped town, looking up at a stormy sky while sirens wailed uselessly in the distance. It was all so wrong .

Tonight, the diner looked the same. It was a flat, concrete square that emitted a level of depression I had since come to associate with Cedar Hill. Timeless – but not in a good way. Who would choose to live in a place like this? Where dreams are levelled into repetitive days that peter slowly into death. Cedar Hill, where the streets are dusty and the kids drift aimlessly through the park like zombies, waiting for an adventure that will never seize them.

I hated this place. This town. This diner. I hated the hideous sign that flashed beneath the streetlights. Gracewell. Gracewell . That word. That Goddamn word . I’d never again hear a word that did such violent things to my temper.

It was late when Nicolò and I arrived. I surveyed the parking lot. Two cars: a battered station wagon and an Audi with pink dice hanging from the mirror. The sign above the diner pulsed behind my eyes, like a beacon that seemed to say: kill, kill, kill . It made my fingers itch.

Nicolò stopped walking, realizing I had fallen out of step with him. He was halfway between me and the door. He cocked his head. ‘Are you coming?’

Nicolò always walked a little quicker than the rest of us, breathed a little faster, pulled the trigger a little sooner. Everything had to be now . The idea of waiting for anything, even revenge, made him tetchy.

‘Yes,’ I said, but I didn’t move. ‘ Aspetta un minuto .’

A lazy smirk transformed his face, and I watched my brother regress to the boy he once was – the one who used to follow me around with such adoration that it used to unsettle me. He was a lot less manageable now, and in a way, that made me glad. It’s a tricky thing, having someone look up to you when you don’t feel like you deserve it.

‘Are you scared, Luca?’

I offered him two fingers. ‘ Vaffanculo .’

I was scared, but not of what I would find inside that diner. I was scared of what it would do to my temper to be inside the place where Jack Gracewell spent his time. I was scared of what I would do if I saw him, of how fast my hand would move to the gun in my waistband without a thought for the witnesses in our midst. Killing might be a ruthless act, but it’s a delicate business. You have to be smart. You have to be controlled. I imagined the threads of my temper spooling out in front of me, and reined them in, breathing them deep into my chest where they would stay, bound up.

‘Let’s go,’ I said, closing the space between us in one long stride. I clapped my hand on his shoulder, hanging back by half a foot, keeping eyes on the lot as we left it behind us.

‘Crack a smile,’ said Nicolò as he pulled the door open for us.

I offered him a fleeting smirk. ‘Maybe I’ll just crack your head instead.’

We swept into the diner and stalled, side-by-side.

Step One: Scan for target. Not here. Two: Locate the exits. One, and possibly a second door in the kitchen, if the diner followed health and safety regulations, which I doubted. Three: Count potential witnesses. There were three girls at a table on our immediate right and two waitresses standing behind the till counter. Four: Assess the threat level. Low.

Nicolò gestured to a booth in the corner, covering strategy with practised casualness. ‘We may as well get comfortable.’

‘That seems like an impossibility.’

From our new vantage point inside the booth, I could see the entire back half of the diner as well as the exact spot outside where they told me my father had died. Nicolò had eyes on the front door and the remainder of the lot through the window behind me. We were covered.

He shifted his weight and tucked his arm behind his back, angling his gun into a more reachable position. It was an unconscious gesture. I pulled forward and did the same.

‘ Dio, quant’è deprimente questo posto .’

‘Tell me about it,’ said Nic, disgust vibrating in his voice. His shoulders were tensed, his attention trained on the door. He was grinding his knuckles across the table and I almost mistook it for the faraway roll of a phantom car. The lot was still empty. It was an active player in my periphery. If a rat skittered across it, I would notice it. Nicolò was being paranoid.

‘Can you relax?’ I said. ‘You’re riling me up.’

Adrenaline is necessary for swift and effective retaliation to danger, but too much can smother your defences and trip your thought processes.

Nicolò stopped chewing on the inside of his cheek and gritted out, ‘I haven’t said anything.’

‘Try and act natural.’

‘Natural, like the assassin I am? Or natural, like a yuppie who just moved here to take in the non-existent scenery in Cedar Hill and eat cheap food in this shithole?’

‘Natural like a little brother who’s going to get his teeth kicked in if he doesn’t drop the mindless sarcasm and respect his elder.’

‘Can you be more specific?’

‘Be pleasant.’ I smirked at him. ‘Be more like me.’

‘ Ha ,’ he droned, crushing his knuckles along the table-top.

‘ Calmati, fratello .’

I flicked my gaze past his shoulder. The waitresses were staring at us. I tried to ignore it.

I could sense Nicolò’s impatience, as real as if it was colouring the air between us. ‘He’s not here, Luca.’

‘Valentino told us to case the place.’

‘Do you think Gracewell’s under one of these tables? This is a waste of our time.’

‘I’ve noted your opinion,’ I told him. ‘I’m going to file it in my mental box of “things Nicolò whines about to annoy me”.’

‘Don’t call me whiney.’

‘You’re too impatient,’ I told him. Like I was always telling him. ‘Not everything can be instantaneous.’

He leant towards me, his fingers scraping across the tables so I was drawn to the deep bruises on his knuckles. Pazzo . Our father always told us to keep our knuckles clean. If you’re going to get injured, make sure it’s somewhere you can conceal . When I was thirteen, Libero Marino cornered me in a back alley and split my lip open. I couldn’t look my father in the eye for a week after that.

‘Doesn’t this bother you?’ Nic asked me. ‘Being here? In the place where it happened.’

‘How could it not?’ I admitted. ‘But I’m not ruled by my emotions.’

Nicolò pulled away from me and his expression turned sour. ‘Good for you, Luca. You’re better than the rest of us.’

My temper flared. If only he knew how badly I wanted to trash this place, to smash the light fixtures and topple the tables and destroy all the money in the till. I wanted to send Jack Gracewell a message – a real one, not some theatrical threat of honey. Felice liked his games. This wasn’t a game to me. I straightened, subtly twisting the gun in my waistband so it would stop digging into me.

‘Maybe you should have let Dom come tonight instead of me.’ Nicolò was sulking.

A mirthless laugh escaped me. ‘Dom focuses on something for the first ten seconds, and then a girl comes along and his attention goes with her.’ I flicked my gaze around the diner again – five women, four of whom were around his age. The waitress at the till was attractive – if you liked small blonde things, which he did because he wasn’t picky. ‘He’d have zoned out by now,’ I told Nic.

He shrugged. ‘Gino, then?’

We both smirked and the tension seemed to vanish. Reconnaissance was not Gino’s forte. Subtlety was certainly not in his vocabulary.

‘I hate this place,’ Nicolò said.

I cracked my knuckles – the sound of clicking bone rising between us. ‘I know.’

He shifted his gaze out the window, following mine. ‘I don’t want to know where it happened,’ he said quietly. ‘It will make it too real, and I don’t want to think about it.’

I dipped my chin. I removed my glare from the parking lot. ‘I won’t tell you then.’ I was never going to tell him.

I regarded him warily; the grim look on his face, the blaze behind his eyes – our father’s eyes – and yet, in many ways, he was still a boy to me, and I couldn’t quell the instinct, even now, to protect him from what happened. Which was ridiculous, considering he had just drowned someone. He chose that over a bullet. Sometimes I wondered whether he did it because he had to or because he wanted to. It bothered me that I didn’t know.

‘Any word on Gracewell’s Number Two?’ he asked, keeping his voice low.

‘We won’t get to Eric Cain so easily,’ I said, even quieter. ‘We’ve got a tip on another of his distributors, though. Ray something. I’m waiting for Paulie to get back to me.’

‘Good.’ Nicolò set his jaw. ‘Let me be the—’

We were interrupted – two trained assassins, so engrossed in our own world had failed to notice the waitress standing less than two feet away from us. She rushed her words together. ‘Hi, my name is Sophie and I’ll be your server this evening.’

She stuck her hands out – tiny hands – and passed a menu to each of us. Nicolò acted like he had been pistol-whipped in the side of the head. I watched amusedly as his mouth dropped open. I gave her a cursory once-over. Not that she was looking at me anyway. I dismissed her as a threat. She was no one. Though she seemed to be equally – confusingly – enamoured by Nicolò. She had big eyes – blue? Grey? I only noticed because she was blinking far too much. Nicolò made her nervous.

‘Sophie,’ said Nicolò. What the hell was he doing to his voice? He was speaking English now, all honeyed, and it partly made me want to laugh and partly made me want to slap him. ‘I think we met the other night.’

Ah . So here was the girl he wouldn’t shut up about yesterday. And I had thought she didn’t exist. That she was Nicolò’s romanticized memory of a cat.

She was cradling herself. I could almost feel her nerves. Maybe she could sense the danger in us. Most girls fall over themselves first, wilfully oblivious to the guns and the knives and the murders. Dom used to do certain ‘house calls’ in the middle of his dates – leaving the girl in the car, parked somewhere along a back alley, while he ducked out to do an ‘errand for his grandmother’. He revelled in the thrill of it, in the feeling of blood underneath his fingernails and his gun, still warm, pressing against his back as he made out with her afterwards. Valentino almost kneecapped him when he found out.

Usually people don’t know to run away from us. I like to make it clear within the first few minutes of meeting someone, so there can be no confusion afterwards, no unnecessary danger. Nicolò doesn’t. He lives in a fantasyland where he is a hero vanquishing evil from the world.

We are not the heroes. We are the villains.

Maybe the waitress could see that. Maybe she was smart.

When I refocused on Nicolò he had his hands in the air. He was purring. I was dangerously close to throwing the saltshaker at him. ‘No harm, no foul. But are you always so defensive?’

‘That depends, are you always so… assaulty?’ I glanced up at her. She was smiling crookedly.

‘ Non lo so ,’ said Nicolò. We exchanged a look and a mutinous laugh escaped me.

‘That’s a loaded question,’ he said to her, leaning his body across the table. My fingers inched dangerously close to the saltshaker. If I concussed him I could have saved us all from this insufferable blip in his existence. But then, she’d probably rat me out and I’d have to spend the night in a cell. I interlocked my fingers on my menu and instead divided my attention between the back of the diner, the parking lot and the front door, picking up Nicolò’s slack.

He continued so sweetly it was unrecognisable, ‘I am sorry about the whole thing, Sophie. I just wanted to ask you some-thing. But then you stopped running so abruptly and…’

‘There was a cat, and I didn’t want to trample it.’

‘Ah, I see.’

I rolled my eyes.

‘But then you went ahead and tried to trample me, so I’m not sure it was worth it,’ she returned. I suppose she was trying to scowl but she couldn’t twist her mouth properly and her dimples revealed her amusement. So she wasn’t scared. And she definitely wasn’t smart.

I zoned out for a while. I was thinking about Valentino and whether he would flay Nicolò for this distraction later. Whether I would even tell him. He would expect me to. He might read it on my face. He was good at that – character assessment, lie detection. We both were, but he was better.

‘Were you running away from me?’ Nicolò was asking.

‘Nope, definitely not.’ I saw her gulp, my eyes drawn to the paleness of her throat as it bobbed.

‘Oh, really?’ Nicolò was smiling now. He seemed to have forgotten our position in the place where our father was murdered, and more importantly, our mission to find the person who had caused it in the first place.

‘I prefer to think of it as casual hobbling,’ she said. I pressed my lips together to keep from smiling. At least she was self-effacing.

‘I’d call it frantic sprinting.’ Nicolò seemed to have completely forgotten my existence. There was only her now, and I was starting to reconsider my saltshaker restraint.

‘Semantics.’

‘I’m sorry if I hurt you,’ said Nicolò. He sounded sincere. He sounded like he cared, and for the first time I wondered just what had transpired between them that night outside our house, and how she had wrapped him around her finger already. ‘I’m Nic, by the way, and this is my brother, Luca.’

She offered me a smile. Practised. Distracted. ‘Welcome to Gracewell’s.’

I thought about being nice. And then I thought about removing her from Nicolò’s little web of charm and destruction before she got so far in, Valentino would feel the need to get involved.

‘That was boring for me,’ I said. ‘But it’s nice to know you’re planning on being somewhat professional this evening, Sophie.’

She blanched. I almost laughed but that would ruin the effect of my death stare. And my concentration. I gestured back and forth with my finger, first at Nic, then at her, to let them know I was ready to desist being a third-wheel in their meet-cute. ‘Are you ready to focus now, Nicolò?’

‘Chill out, Luca.’

I raised my eyebrows. He knew better than this. ‘My brother, l’ipocrita .’

He swatted his hand in my direction. ’ Stai zitto! ’

I considered throwing myself across the table and choking him out to teach him a lesson but I managed to check my temper. If I let it flare up then I would be no better than Gino. And I had come here tonight to be precisely that – better at this than Gino. So far, Nicolò was being decidedly worse than Dom. Leering, flirting, pining. Idiota . So it had fallen to me to salvage the entire point of our presence in this veritable hellhole.

‘Have you worked here long, Sophie?’ I dragged a hand through my hair, so I could study her better.

She seemed to freeze then, and her face screwed up. She was staring, almost like she was trying to incinerate me with her eyes.

‘Well?’ I pressed.

‘Luca,’ Nicolò rumbled. ‘Can you not do this—’

Where else but here? ‘Let her answer.’

‘No, I haven’t worked here for long,’ she replied. Too quickly. ‘It’s just a stupid summer job.’

She shifted her gaze. She was lying. But why?

Nicolò was staring at me.

I ignored him. ‘Do you like it?’

She shrugged. ‘As much as anyone can, I guess.’

‘And what about your coworkers? Do you like them?’

‘ Smettila! ’ Nicolò hissed.

‘Does it matter if I like them?’

‘You tell me,’ I said.

‘Yes, they’re nice, mostly,’ she replied, her tone growing icy. ‘Why? Are you doing a police survey or something?’

Quite the opposite, in fact . I smiled at her – practised, distracted.

‘Sophie.’ Nicolò was doing his Romeo voice again. ‘Don’t worry about my brother. As you can see, he’s completely socially inept.’

She turned from us, and I grabbed Nicolò by his collar, pulling him towards me. I flipped back to Italian. ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’

‘What?’ he blinked.

‘Have you forgotten why we’re here?’

He shrugged me off him. ‘I was just talking to her.’

‘You’re not here to sleep with some random local,’ I reminded him, trying to ignore the image of Valentino’s face if he found out about this. It was week one and Nicolò was already losing focus.

Nicolò’s brows furrowed and I recognized the tantrum warring inside him. ‘She’s not just some local .’

I rolled my eyes. ‘We do not have time for this, Nicolò.’

I watched him bite off a curse. ‘It’s not like we’re busy .’

‘Do you want to get Gracewell or do you want to obsess over some girl you won’t remember in a month?’

He waved away the question. ‘Nobody says I can’t have my own life while we’re here.’

I thumped my fist on the table and the cutlery rattled. ‘ I’m saying it, right now ,’ I growled. ‘Girls and guns don’t mix.’

‘Dom mixes them all the time!’

‘That’s because he’s a moron. And keep your voice down. I feel like I’m babysitting you.’

Nicolò’s face soured. He pulled back and slumped against his seat, arms folded. ‘I’m not a child anymore.’

Yes you are, brother . ‘Just keep focused,’ I relented, weary now. It was hard to forget where we were, and the atmosphere was getting heavy. Annoying as she was, the waitress had proved a palatable distraction to the darkness in our midst. ‘And don’t ever disrespect me like that again to impress a girl,’ I added.

Nicolò lowered his chin. ‘I won’t,’ he said. ‘You were just weirding her out.’

My eyes flickered outside again and I felt the reminder like a prick in my chest. ‘Sometimes it can’t be helped.’

And then she was back, blinking too much and fumbling in her apron. ‘What can I get you?’

I opened my menu again. I did not want to eat here. ‘A coffee. Black. Strong.’

Nicolò ordered a steak sandwich.

‘Is that everything?’ she asked.

They were practically pouring themselves into each other’s eyes and I could sense, so clearly, where this would end up if Nicolò didn’t put his tongue back in his mouth. ‘ Cazzo , that is all!’ I hissed, startling them both.

She turned on me with a scowl plastered so deeply on her face it was almost comical. ‘I’m sorry, but is my presence in the place where I work offending you? Because you don’t have to stay here.’

I offered her a contemptuous stare. She held it. I felt a dim semblance of respect.

‘Just don’t spit in my coffee,’ I said.

When she came back with Nicolò’s food and my coffee, she didn’t look at me again. I eyed the drink suspiciously. Would she have spit in it? She did seem like the type, but I didn’t care at that point. I had a night of work left to do, and if Paulie came through for us, another person to track down. Jack Gracewell might not have been here tonight and we might not have gotten any information about his whereabouts, but there was still time, and there were still others.

Nicolò did a bad job of not staring at the waitress while he ate. My attention wandered around the peeling walls, the outdated artwork, the hideous rubber plants.

My phone rang: Paulie. I flashed the screen to Nicolò.

‘He’s got someone,’ I said, sliding out of my seat. ‘I’ll take this.’

‘Luca,’ Nicolò called after me. ‘Give me five minutes. I’ll come with you. I want to do it.’

He always wanted to do it.

I knew why he was stalling – to say goodbye to the waitress. I glanced at the till. She was propped against the counter, her nose stuck inside a ledger, the end of her pen resting in her mouth. Her eyebrows were screwed together and she was concentrating so hard I probably could have robbed her and she wouldn’t have noticed. Fine. I got it, I really did. If he wanted one last moment with her, then let him have it. We had bigger things to worry about and in the grand scheme of things she wasn’t going to be a problem.

I indicated towards her. ‘We’re here to work, remember? End the flirtation tonight, before it gets messy. I’ll wait outside.’

I turned from him and stalked to the door.

‘OK,’ he said to my back. ‘I will.’