She shuts up.

I pick my thumbnail with the point. There’s a little blood under the nail. Not from today. Probably from when Adriano and I worked over Nicci Fattore. I wish I’d cut Parker, sliced his eyelid, or taken a finger. But I did tongue his virgin bride and Adri pissed in his face. We have plenty of time to make the ugly fuck pay.

I can feel the brat watching me. I count the seconds until she asks another stupid question. One, two, three—

“What are you going to do to me?” Her voice is clear but there’s a little wobble at the edges. She’s a minute from tears, max. “Can you please tell me where I am?”

“Stop talking.”

“Please just… Why is this happening?”

“Tesorina, I don’t know why you think I carry a knife, but keep talking and I’ll bleed you all over the carpet.”

Her mouth snaps closed, and she starts whimpering into her hands like a bunny. I like when girls cry, but she’s not doing it properly. She’s sniffling like a five-year-old who lost her teddy bear.

I groan at the molded ceiling. “Fucking hell, can you quit your whining?”

She looks up at me. She’s even paler now—and she didn’t have a lot of color to lose. She looks half-dead. But then maybe she’ll be entirely dead by the end of the night. That’s Morelli’s call.

“How many people died?”

I frown. “The fuck do you mean?”

“The explosions. How many people died? Do you know?”

I lower my knife. I could tell her that her whole family’s dead, but looking at her grey complexion, the news might kill her, and then I’d be in the shit. “No one died, Tits.”

“But… the explosions?”

“C4 down in the sewers. So, I guess some NYC plumbing died. You gonna cry about it?”

January stares into the middle distance. “Everyone’s safe?”

“Yup. You’re the only person who got fucked over in this arrangement.”

“Oh.”

I expect her to start bawling, but she just blinks rapidly. “So, are you really a doctor?”

I stare at her. For a girl with unicorn stickers on the back of her phone, I wasn’t expecting this much backchat. “Does it matter if I’m really a doctor?”

“I… No. I just don’t know what to call you.”

I grab the front of my jeans. “You can use Father Monastero, if you want. That got me hard.”

She flinches. “I don’t…”

I laugh. “Or you can keep playing innocent, lurida sgualdrina. That gets me hard too.”

“I’m not a whore.” Her eyes widen and she claps a hand to her mouth.

For a second, I don’t understand, then it clicks. “You speak Italian?”

She shakes her head.

“You speak Italian,” I repeat more to myself. “Capisci cosa ti sto dicendo, vero?”

She keeps shaking her head, but I can see the comprehension in her eyes. I swear under my breath. How could we have missed this? She’s Anglo. Her whole family is Anglo. Mentally scanning our plans, her speaking Italian doesn’t change anything, but how did we miss it? “Who taught you Italian?”