Chapter 5 - A Handful of Sugar
The doctor arrived forty minutes later, brought down the cliff path by two guards with drawn submachine guns.
He was a thin, nervous man named Castiglione who clearly had twenty years of experience sewing up men whose names he never recorded in a ledger. He took one look at Matteo, made the sign of the cross, and turned immediately to Luca’s shoulder.
"The study," Luca said, his voice once again the cold, flat instrument of the Don. "Not here."
Sophia didn't follow them into the main house.
She stayed on the dock until the men carried Matteo’s body away wrapped in a heavy wool blanket. She watched them wash the stone flags with buckets of lake water until the red ran out into the gray waves and vanished.
Then she walked back up the cliff path to the bakehouse.
Her hands were still shaking. Her sweater was ruined, the front stiffening with dried copper-smelling crust, but she didn't take it off. She walked to the marble slab, picked up the bench scraper, and began to work the dough she had left resting under a damp linen cloth before the shooting started.
It had over-proved.
The bubbles were too large, the gluten structure slack and delicate, ready to collapse into a sour, gummy puddle if she mishandled it.
"Don't you dare," she muttered to the dough, her voice echoing in the empty stone room. "Don't you bloody dare fail on me now."
She worked with a fierce, rhythmic desperation: folding the dough over itself, tucking the edges in, dusting the marble with rice flour to keep it from sticking. She built the tension back into the surface until it rounded into two high, smooth boules, their skins tight as drumheads.
She stoked the wood fire in the brick oven, shoving split birch logs deep into the hearth until the chimney began to draw with a low, hungry roar.
By seven in the evening, the bakehouse smelled of scorched wood, sweet yeast, and caramelizing crust.
The door opened.
Sophia didn't look up from the peel. She was sliding the second loaf onto the red-hot firebricks, her face flushed red from the heat of the hearth, sweat sticking her hair to her forehead.
"You should be in your room," Luca said from the threshold.
He had been sewn up. A fresh white bandage was taped securely over his left shoulder, visible through the opening of a clean black linen shirt he hadn't bothered to button completely. His skin was pale under the mountain dark, the gray exhaustion back in his features.
Sophia pushed the bread deep into the oven, pulled the peel back with a practiced snap of her wrists, and slid the cast-iron door shut.
"I live in the real world, Luca," she said, leaning against the long wooden handle of the peel. "In the real world, when you have an adrenaline crash, your blood sugar plummets and you make stupid decisions. Have you eaten?"
Luca leaned against the doorframe, his massive frame blocking the draft entirely. "Castiglione gave me an injection."
"Castiglione is a vet who sews up criminals," she retorted, wiping her forehead with the back of her forearm. "He doesn't know anything about nutrition. Sit down."
Luca hesitated.
For three seconds, the Don of Northern Italy—a man who controlled shipping docks from Genoa to Trieste and had three hundred men under his command—stood in the doorway of an old scullery looking like an uncertain schoolboy being ordered to the corner.
Then, with a slow, heavy sigh that seemed to deflate two inches of his chest, he moved to the small pine bench by the window and sat down.
The bench groaned under his weight, but held.
Sophia took a clean linen cloth, reached into the small warming oven beside the hearth, and pulled out a round, golden-brown loaf she had baked an hour earlier. It was an English farmhouse loaf—crusty, split across the top like a walnut shell, singing with that tiny, crackling music that hot bread makes as it hits the cool room air.
She set it on a wooden board between them, took a heavy French chef's knife, and cut two thick, ragged slabs.
The steam that rose smelled of toasted grain, butter, and clean salt.
She pushed one slab toward him on a sheet of greaseproof paper. "Eat."
Luca looked at the bread. He didn't pick it up.
"It has no poison," she said dryly. "Though given the afternoon we’ve had, a little arsenic might improve the flavor."
Luca picked up the slice. His fingers, still dark with the purple bruising from the dock, dwarfed the bread completely.
He took a bite.
He chewed slowly, his amber eyes dropping to the table. His jaw worked, the thick muscle jumping beneath the scar, and then his shoulders dropped.
Really dropped.
Not the fractional shift he had made in the foyer, but the complete, total release of a man who had been holding a boulder over his head for fifteen years and had finally been told he could put it down.
"It is... like hers," he said, his voice barely more than a murmur against the roar of the chimney.
"No, it isn't," Sophia said, cutting herself a piece. "Your mother made focaccia with olive oil and soft wheat. This is hard northern rye with milk stout and butter. It’s northern English bread, Luca. It’s made for people who have to stand in the rain for twelve hours and don't have time to feel sorry for themselves."
A ghost of a smile touched his lips. "You are very fierce for a woman who falls over her own luggage."
"I am multifaceted," she said, taking a bite. "I contain multitudes. Most of them are irritable."
They sat in silence for five minutes, the only sound the crackle of the birch logs in the hearth and the wind rising off the lake, whistling through the leaded glass of the clerestory windows.
Outside, the darkness was complete, swallowing the mountains, the water, and the terrace until the bakehouse felt like a small, warm raft drifting through an empty ocean.
"Bellandi sent them," Luca said suddenly.
Sophia didn't look up from her bread. "The boat?"
"Yes." Luca laid his hands flat on the table, his fingers splayed. "He knows the Commission meets in Milan on Thursday. He wanted to ensure there was no Moretti at the table to claim the northern franchise."
"And your sister said you needed a wife to claim it."
Luca’s eyes sharpened. He looked at her across the pine board, the warmth from the oven catching the amber in his irises. "Elena tells you too much."
"Elena is terrified you’re going to get yourself killed," Sophia said bluntly. "And from what I saw on that dock, she has a point. You were standing in the open, Luca. You didn't even take cover until they hit Matteo."
"I was drawing the fire," he said, as though explaining the rules of cricket to a child. "Matteo had the range-finder. If they were looking at me, they weren't looking at the boathouse where the fuel reserves are stored. If that dock goes up, half the terrace goes with it."
Sophia stared at him, her knife resting motionless on the board. "You used yourself as bait."
"I am the largest target," he said simply. "It is the only tactical advantage my size gives me."
The sentence was spoken with such flat, unvarnished matter-of-factness that it took Sophia’s breath away.
He didn't hate his body because it was ugly; he hated it because it was a tool that had been built for a single, violent purpose, and he was tired of holding the handle.
Slowly, without planning it, Sophia reached across the wooden board.
Her hand—small, pale, scarred by tiny sugar burns across the knuckles—covered his.
Luca went rigid.
His fingers didn't move. His breath stopped in his chest, his eyes dropping to where her skin touched his as though she had laid a hot coal across his knuckles.
"Do not," he whispered, his voice warning, dangerous.
"Do not what?"
"Pity me."
"I don't pity you, you great idiot," Sophia said, her thumb finding the rough seam of the scar on the back of his hand and pressing into it with a firm, steady pressure. "I think you’re absurd. I think your family is insane. And I think if you die before I figure out how to work that industrial proofer in the main kitchen, I will be extremely annoyed."
Luca looked up from her hand to her face.
The distance between them felt very small suddenly. The heat from the oven was at his back, but the heat in his eyes was something entirely different—something dark, ancient, and hungry.
"You should go back to England, Sophia," he murmured. "Tonight. I will have Marco drive you to the Swiss border. Bellandi will not look for you there."
"No," she said.
"Sophia—"
"I signed the paper, Luca. I stood in front of that terrified little priest and I took the ring." She held up her left hand, the heavy platinum band catching the red glow of the hearth. "In my family, when you make a contract, you finish the bake. You don't throw the dough out because the kitchen gets hot."
Luca leaned forward.
His massive chest crossed the small space between them, his shadow swallowing her completely. His right hand—the one that had held the pistol that killed a man three hours ago—came up and cupped the side of her neck.
His thumb rested just beneath her ear, right over the spot where her blood was pounding against the skin like a trapped bird.
His skin was rough, calloused, smelling of iron and soap, but his touch was so gentle it made her throat ache.
"You are a very foolish girl," he whispered, his face inches from hers.
"And you’re a very large target," she whispered back, her breath mingling with his. "You need someone to stand in front of you."
Luca’s eyes dropped to her lips.
For one suspended, breathless second, Sophia thought he was going to crush her mouth against his with all the violent, desperate hunger of a man who had lived twenty years in an iron cage.
Then, with an effort of will that she could actually see cord the muscles of his neck, he pulled back.
He stood up from the bench, the pine wood creaking in relief, and stepped toward the door.
"Tomorrow," he said, his back to her, his voice once again the cold, flat instrument of the Don. "We go to Milan. Buy a dress, Sophia. The Commission does not like English wool."
The door clicked shut behind him.
May you like
Sophia sat at the table for a long time, the warmth of his hand still burning on the side of her neck, while the second loaf of bread sang its tiny, crackling song in the dark.
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