Chapter 1 - THE FIG TREE AND THE PUPPY
“Can you keep him?”
The child asked it the way adults ask questions that have already been researched, negotiated, and lost twice before.
Lorenzo Duca did not answer at once. He was thirty-eight years old, he owned the northern half of a business nobody in Italy was foolish enough to name out loud, and he had not been spoken to without permission in eleven years. The girl in front of him had dark curls escaping a faded blue ribbon, one sock slid down around her ankle, and a puppy held against her chest like something she had already decided was worth the trouble.
Behind her, the garden door she should never have found stood open.
He had been sitting under the fig tree since before eight, a closed folder under one hand and a cup of coffee at his elbow that had gone cold an hour ago. Nobody interrupted him here. The guards knew it. The staff knew it. Men who controlled banks and ports and judges and guns knew it. The three-year-old did not.
He looked from the child to the animal. The puppy was little more than ribs wrapped in dirty golden fur, and it was shivering hard enough that the tremor reached Lorenzo through the flagstones.
“No.”
Mia absorbed the word without flinching. She looked down at the bundle in her arms, then back up at him.
“Why?”
“Because I don't keep dogs.”
“He doesn't have anybody.”
“I'll have someone at the gate find him a home.”
“They already said no.”
That explained the dust on her shoes and the long red scratch along one knee. She had worked her way across half the estate before she reached the one door nobody else dared open. Lorenzo reached for the folder, closing the conversation.
Mia stayed where she was.
“He's alone, too,” she said, very quietly.
Lorenzo looked up.
She was studying his face with the calm, unbearable attention only a small child can manage, the kind that has not yet learned it is dangerous. “Like you.”
For one suspended second, nothing in the garden moved. Not the leaves, not the water in the fountain, not the two guards standing at the far end of the wall who had both gone very still and were carefully not looking.
Lorenzo had been threatened by men with armies. He had been lied to by ministers, betrayed by partners, shot at twice, and poisoned once badly enough to spend a week in a private clinic under another name. None of them had managed what this child had just done with six quiet words. She had put her hand flat on the one part of him that everyone else had spent fifteen years learning to walk around.
May you like
Before he could answer, Mia crouched and set the puppy down on the stone between his shoes.
“Try,” she said.
