They Sent A Broke Waitress To Humiliate A Deaf Crime Boss — The Outcome Left The Entire Syndicate S...
Chapter 5
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He was funny. Not warmly funny, not the kind of man who laughed easily, but he had a bone-dry precision to the way he phrased things that landed like a clean cut. When she wrote that she'd been working doubles at Del Vecchio's for two years and still couldn't afford to move out of the South End, he wrote back:Del Vecchio's has been under-tipping its own staff since 1987. That is a documented institutional policy.He was observant to a degree that was almost unsettling. At one point he wrote:Your right shoulder is higher than your left. You've been carrying something heavy on that side for a long time.When she asked how he knew, he wrote:I watch. It's all I've ever had.And he was angry. Not at her, not at the situation, but there was a sustained, well-managed anger running beneath everything he wrote—a banked fire that had been burning for so long it had become structural. She recognized it; she had the same one.When they finally stood to leave, Declan didn't move toward the door immediately. He wrote one more thing on a clean page, tore it out, and set it on the table in front of her:I will walk out of this room with you. Briggs is watching the door. If you come out behind me, you are a server he used. If you come out beside me, you are someone he should not have touched. The choice is yours. I am not asking for anything in return.Tatum read it twice. She folded the paper and put it in her apron pocket next to the eviction notice."Okay," she said, which he couldn't hear, so she looked directly at him and nodded.He offered his arm. She took it.The door opened.The main dining room of Del Vecchio's had 43 tables on any given night, and the moment Tatum and Declan Morrow stepped out of the private hallway, 38 of them went silent. It happened in a wave, starting from the back bar, rippling forward. Glasses stopped midway to mouths. A server with a full tray stopped walking. The jazz track playing over the speakers felt suddenly and absurdly loud.Tatum kept her eyes on the front doors. She did not look at table seven. But in her peripheral vision, she saw Callum Briggs. He was standing—actually standing—one hand flat on the table and one still holding a fork, and the color had left his face with such completeness that even across the dining room she could see it. The easy, predatory smirk he'd been wearing all night was completely gone.What replaced it was something she had never expected to see on a man like Callum Briggs: fear.Declan walked her to the entrance with the unhurried, absolute certainty of a man who had never once in his adult life moved out of another person's path. They passed within four feet of table seven. He did not glance at Briggs. He did not acknowledge the man's existence in any form. He simply walked past him like a landmark he had long since stopped finding interesting.