“In writing,” she said.
“Tomorrow.”
“Before service.”
He nodded too quickly and pushed two menus into her hands.
The dining room smelled of roasted garlic, expensive perfume, and the sharp sweetness of opened wine. Nora crossed it with her shoulders level, remembering the rule her grandfather had taught her without ever saying it kindly: frightened people should never move like frightened people.
Dante barely glanced up as she placed his menu.
“Sparkling water,” he said. “And fresh bread.”
His father examined her frayed cuff.
Then Salvatore muttered in the rough, old-fashioned Sicilian Nora had heard across her grandfather’s kitchen table throughout childhood. It was not the polished Italian Dante had been speaking. It carried the clipped endings, village expressions, and particular contempt of the mountain community Pietro Rossi had never stopped mourning.
“A worthless little sparrow serving stale bread to a rooster who thinks he owns the sun.”
Nora went still.
Her grandfather used to call her a sparrow when she was too small to reach the stove. Sometimes affectionately. Sometimes when anger made every tender thing in him turn sharp.
Exhaustion opened her mouth before caution could close it.
“A rooster can be forgiven for making noise,” she answered in the same dialect. “An old man should know better than to insult the person bringing his supper.”
Dante’s chair scraped backward.
“What did you say?”
One bodyguard moved. Another’s hand disappeared beneath his jacket. At the kitchen doors, Paul made a sound Nora would remember later, a small involuntary gasp.
“Sit down,” Salvatore said.
Dante stared at him.
“Now.”
Nora could feel the menu’s leather edge cutting into her palm. She wanted to apologize, but something stubborn and frightened held the words behind her teeth. She had spent her entire life making herself smaller; apparently, she had chosen the worst possible evening to stop.
Salvatore rested both hands on his cane.
“Look at me.”
She did.
He studied her mouth, her eyes, the cheap uniform she had mended herself. Then, in the language she had thought belonged only to a dead man and a cramped kitchen, he asked who had taught her to speak.