God help me, I want to be worthy of that.
I turn the tap cold and let it run over my wrists, the shock clearing my thoughts. The plan I’ve been sharpening for years wars with a new ambition.
Ultrasound prints that sit in the pocket of my jacket, a tiny pulse that has taken over. The woman carrying that precious life curled up in my bed in the next room.
My war has been simple the last few years, my enemy specific: there is a man who took from me and gave my daughter a new name, made it his mission to take everything he could from me. And I intended to collect. Simple when the only thing that could burn was me.
Now there is Elena.
Now there is our child.
No.
I dry my hands and walk quietly back out to the room, careful not to disturb Elena. I grab the jacket and walk it to the closet with me, closing the door gently. I open the hidden safe that I haven’t opened since I got home. Not the one that holds money or jewelry. No, this one holds things far more valuable. An old St. Christopher medal Nico wore until, one day, he didn’t.
Caterina’s first license, though I wasn’t there to celebrate with her when she got it.
Vito’s tassel from his high school graduation, which was quite a feat because no one ever expected him to make it that far. I missed that, too.
A faded Polaroid of Lucia on my shoulders at the Christmas feast when she was just six. I pull out the sleeve of prints and add them to the safe before closing it securely.
I can’t be two men. I can’t be the blade and the safe haven at the same time. I learned that lesson the hard way.
I won’t miss anything else.
So: adjustments.
Tomorrow, Giovanni gets new rules.
What I can control, I will. Elena’s building. The gates, the cameras. We’ve been ghosts around her out of respect. We’ll still be ghosts, but we won’t leave any gaps. There are no more marshals protecting her, but they did their job well enough.
Now, we’ll do a better one.
And Dixon…Nick Dixon. My hands curl again, the urge to finish what I started an ache that has lived in me so long it feels like a limb.
But I have to let it go. I have to chop off the limb for everyone’s sake. No blowback can land on Elena. On us.
Through the wall, I hear the soft shift of the sheet and a small sigh that undoes me. I picture her asleep in my bed, hair spilled across my pillow like ink, a little mark I may have left on her breast, because she trusted me to take her apart and put her back together. I could worship at the altar of that trust for the rest of my life.
“Forever,” I mouth, and the man in the mirror doesn’t flinch. It’s not a vow I make lightly. I only ever said it once and meant it. I mean it now.
I kill the light and pad back through the dark. The curtains are still drawn, but the light is fading. Silver reflecting from the pool slips into the room and splashes across the bed.
I stand at the side of it and let my eyes adjust. She’s on her side, facing my pillow, one hand under her cheek, the other splayed where my chest was. As if calling me back.
She’ll wake soon and be off, but for now, she’s with me.
I slide under the sheet carefully and fit myself around her without waking her, arm under her head, palm over the flat of her lower belly as if I can feel the little peanut growing inside.
She stirs, finds my wrist in her sleep, and pulls it tighter to her. A sound of contentment leaves her, small and satisfied. I close my eyes and breathe her in: jasmine from the walk, the last sweetness of apple and cinnamon, the warm skin-scent that is only Elena. The noise in my head quiets.
I press my mouth to her hair. “I’ve got you,” I whisper, a promise to her, to the child, to the better man I intend to be. To the better man my children and wife deserved. “Sleep.”
Later, there will be calls and codes and the careful dismantling of a plan that is years in the making. There will be brothers to brief and sons to talk down, a thousand moving parts to fix.
Tonight there is this bed, this woman, this heartbeat that made a tyrant yield. And a decision I never thought I’d make.
Chapter Twenty Eight
