Chapter 74: 74

SILAS'S POV

After Imogen fell asleep I sat in the chair by the window with a drink and did not move for a while.

The bedroom door was open and I could see the edge of the bed from where I was sitting. She was still, her breathing had evened out about twenty minutes ago and I had been here since, watching the rise and fall of her chest and turning things over in my head.

I picked up my phone from the side table.

Three missed calls from my mother. All from the past two days.

I stared at the screen for a moment then pressed call, She picked up on the second ring.

"So you are alive," she said.

Her voice was the same as it always was. Warm and dry and carrying that particular tone she had perfected over the years, the one that managed to sound relieved and unimpressed at the same time. I had never met another woman who could do both things simultaneously the way my mother could.

"I am alive," I said quietly, keeping my voice low so I did not wake Imogen.

"You could not call me back for two days to tell me that?"

"I have been busy."

"You are always busy," she said. "You were busy when you were young. You came home from school busy. I used to worry you would be too busy to eat."

"I always ate," I said.

"Because I made you sit down." A pause. "How is Rome?"

"Fine."

"Fine?" she repeated, like the word disappointed her personally. "My son is in one of the most beautiful cities in the world and all he can tell me is fine."

I leaned back in the chair and looked out at the city below. Rome did not care who you were or what you were doing in it. It just kept going.

"Rome is Rome," I said.

My mother made a sound that told me she was not satisfied with that answer either. Then she said, more carefully, "Sylvia tells me you have been different lately."

I kept my eyes on the window. "Different how."

"She says you seem distracted." A brief pause. "She also says you seem less angry than usual, which she considers suspicious."

"Sylvia considers everything suspicious."

"She is my daughter. She learned it from me." Another pause, longer this time. "Silas."

"What."

"Is there someone?"

The question landed quietly and I did not answer it right away. I turned my glass slowly in my hand and watched the whiskey move and thought about Imogen asleep in the next room with her hair spread across the pillow and her face softer in sleep than it ever was when she was awake and alert and watching everything around her with those brown eyes that did not miss a single thing.

"That is not a simple question," I said finally.

My mother was quiet for a moment. When she spoke again her voice was different. A little bit softer.

"It never is," she said. "Not when it is the real kind."

I said nothing.

"Is she good to you?" my mother asked.

I thought about that. "She is good," I said. "She is very good."

"Then do not ruin it," my mother said simply. "You have a habit of treating the things you want most like problems to be managed. Do not do that with her."

I opened my mouth and closed it again.

"I mean it, Silas," she said. "I know how you think. I know how you plan things. Just make sure that when this is over, whatever it is you are doing over there, that she is still standing beside you and not wondering why she trusted you."

The words sat in the room with me for a long moment. "Go to sleep, Mother," I said.

"I sleep fine," she replied. "It is you I worry about." A beat. "Call me tomorrow."

"I will."

"You said that two days ago."

"Tomorrow.”

She made a soft sound and then the line went quiet.

I sat with the phone in my hand for a moment before I set it down on the side table and looked back out at the city.

Do not ruin it.

My mother had a way of finding the exact center of a thing and pressing on it without apology. She had been doing it since I was a boy and I had never once found a way to be annoyed by it the way I probably should have been.

I finished my drink and set the glass down and leaned forward with my elbows on my knees and thought.

The plan was moving faster than I had originally intended. I had built the whole thing to run at a particular pace, calculated and controlled every piece moving on a timeline I had mapped out long before Imogen ever landed in Rome.

But she had been accelerating things without realising it. Every decision she made, every move against Perry, every moment she stepped forward instead of back, had been pushing the timeline ahead of where I had positioned it.

She was sharper than I calculated.

I had known she was intelligent. I had done enough research before any of this to know that Perry Cullen's wife was the real engine behind everything that man had built and taken credit for. I had known she was capable and I had accounted for that.

What I had not accounted for was the specific quality of her intelligence. She was not just capable, she was dangerous.

I had been making decisions lately that had nothing to do with the plan. These were just things I had done because I wanted to do them.

I did not hear Pete come in.

That was the thing about him. Plenty years of working together and I still could not hear him cross a room. He appeared at the edge of my vision like he had simply appeared there and waited until I looked at him before he spoke.

"Boss," he said quietly.

"Talk," I said without turning around.

He moved closer and kept his voice low out of consideration for the open bedroom door. Pete had always been quietly considerate in ways that had nothing to do with softness. It was simply efficient as noise created complications.

"Perry made contact tonight," he said. "About two hours ago."

"With who."

"Dante."

I turned to look at him then. Pete's face was its usual unreadable thing but he held my eyes and waited.

Dante was not a name that surprised me. He was exactly the kind of resource a man like Perry would reach for when he ran out of legitimate options. A fixer with connections in places that did not show up in any directory, someone who could find information that was not supposed to be findable and deliver it without asking questions about what it was going to be used for.

I had known about Dante for years and I had been waiting to see whether Perry was desperate enough to go to him.

Apparently he was.

"What did Perry ask for?" I said.

"Everything on you," Pete said. "Businesses. Operations. Enemies. Anything buried."

I nodded slowly. "Dante's response?"

"He took the job," Pete said. "With reservations. He told Perry it was a different kind of target. Perry told him he did not care."

I almost smiled at that.

Perry Cullen had just paid a man to dig into Silas Moretti. Perry Cullen, who  had nothing left in his arsenal except desperation and wounded pride, had decided that the correct next move was to hire someone to come looking for my pressure points.

It would have been almost admirable if it were not so predictable.

"Let it run," I said.

Pete blinked. Just slightly. "Boss?"

"Let Dante look," I said. "Let Perry think he is building something. I want to see exactly how far he is willing to go before I close the door on him." I picked up my empty glass and turned it in my hand. "A man shows you everything when he thinks he is winning. Perry has nothing right now and he knows it and that is going to make him reckless. Reckless men make mistakes."

Pete was quiet for a moment. "And when he makes the mistake?"

"Then we finish it," I said simply.

Pete nodded once and moved back toward the door without another word.