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“I remember where everyone stood.” I say it plainly, because it’s true. “It’s a thing I can do.”

“A thing you can do,” Carmine echoes, an eyebrow lifted.

“Well, it’s a skill foster care gave me, and waitressing paid me for. Luca’s world just sharpened it. When you’re around men like his friends, you learn to remember who gets too drunk, who gets too handsy, who’s lying about where he was last night. Put enough of that together and you start to see who’s scared of whom.”

Enzo sits back. Something is kindling behind his eyes, not surprise, exactly, more like recognition. “Go on,” he says. “How about the masquerade five years ago? How much do you actually remember?”

“All of it.” I close my eyes and let it come to the front of my mind, the night I’ve spent years trying to forget in every way, except this one. “Luca stood up to do his little routine about me. The microphone. The fat jokes.” My voice is even; it’s an old wound, so it doesn’t bleed like it used to. “And a lot of people in the room laughed, but not all of them, Enzo. That’s the thing I’ve never told anyone because no one ever asked. Not everyone laughed.”

I open my eyes. “There were maybe forty men in that room who mattered. When Luca went after me, I watched them. About half laughed. They were the loud ones, the ones desperate to get on Luca’s good side. They’d laugh at any idiotic thing he said.”

Enzo and Carmine listen in silence, both leaning forward just a bit. I have to admit, it feels nice to put such a horrible memory to good use.

“But there were these guys near the bar who didn’t laugh, like three or four men who went still. They looked at Luca making cracks about my body, and even behind the masks, I could tell they weren’t at all amused. They didn’t care enough to put a stop to it, but I do remember that when you came to my side, I looked at those guys and they seemed almost relieved.”

Carmine has frozen in his seat.

“Those men,” I say. “I bet they’re not Luca’s. Not really. He always had men who hated him and couldn’t get free of him, because he’d tied them into his businesses. They don’t respect him. I don’t know their names, but I bet they’d be good targets if you wanted to break up Luca’s support.”

“Describe them,” Enzo says quietly, “the four at the bar.”

I close my eyes and I go back to that night. Instead of just a bad memory, it’s a map. I give him all the details I can, builds, hair color, the heavy gold ring one of the men wore. Carmine writes it all down, and he writes fast. When I open my eyes, he’s looking at me in a way he never has before.

“The man with the ring,” Carmine says. “Was he wearing it on his left hand or right hand?”

“Right. It was gold, worn, old crest, not Italian, I think, or not only. I figured he was left-handed, though; he held his glass in his left hand the whole night and shook hands with his right only when he had to.” I catch the look on Carmine’s face. “What?”

He shakes his head, then comes back to the moment and speaks. “That’s Emilio Vasari,” he says, to Enzo, not to me. “Right-handed men don’t drink with their left unless they were taught to keep the gun hand free. It’s old-country training. His father ran with…” He stops. “She’s just described a made man’s tell without knowing what it was.”

“I know it was something,” I say. “I didn’t know what. I just filed it away because it was different. When details are weird, they’re usually important.”

“Vasari hates Luca,” Carmine says, half to himself. “Has for years. Luca cheated his family out of their share of the Red Hook piers and dared him to do something about it. Vasari didn’t. Everybody figured he was scared.”

“Or patient,” Enzo says.

Carmine sets down his pen and looks at me for a long moment. Carmine, the man I’d been certain considered me mainly a complication, as nice to me as he might’ve been, is now looking at me like I’m an equal. It’s strange. But I like it.

“Boss,” he says, still looking at me. “I owe the lady an apology. I had her figured for…” He chooses his words carefully, and to his credit, he says it to my face. “For someone you’d picked up, a soft spot, a liability we’d have to work around.”

He nods once, slowly, like it’s a formal thing. “I was wrong. She’s not a liability. She’s an asset we haven’t been using.” Then to me he says directly: “That’s the highest compliment I know how to give about a person, Miss Callahan. If I say it twice a decade, that’s a lot. You’ll forgive me for taking so much damn time to get there.”

“You’re forgiven,” I say with a wry smile. “You were half right, anyway. I am a complication.”

The corner of his mouth moves, the closest thing to a smile I’ve gotten out of the man. “The useful kind, those we keep.”

Enzo hasn’t said anything. When I look at him, he’s watching me with an expression I’m coming to know and still don’t have a word for, like I’m something he can’t believe he gets to have in the room.

Enzo leans forward. “Skills like this, reading men with just a glance, took me decades of training to learn. And you just showed me you’ve got the ability like it’s second nature to you.”

I find myself blushing just a little. “Well, not just second nature. I had to learn a lot of it.”

“Still,” Enzo says, “you just handed us the crack in Luca’s foundation. And you did it from the memory of one of the worst moments of your life.” He shakes his head slowly. “Just when I think I know what you are, you keep surprising me.”

“I’m the help, Enzo,” I say, doing my best to suppress a smile. “That’s what Genevieve called me on my first night here, anyway. And that’s what I was working as that night. Nobody ever thinks to hide anything from us, because, to men like that, we’re invisible. They think we don’t matter, that we vanish at the end of the night.”

Carmine smiles just a little. “Remind me never to underestimate you again, Stevie.”

“Don’t worry, I will.”