“Maybe an animal?”
“Highly doubtful.”He picked up his gun, checked the chamber.
The next moment happened in silence.Just the rain against the windows, the distant hum of thunder, the faint sound of breath shared between two people standing too close to the edge.
He reached for my hand.“Stay behind me.”
32
ENRICO
Motion pinged red along the north fence; the hall cameras pulsed once and went blind.No sirens.No trip on the outer alarms.Whoever was here had done their homework—and wanted me to know it.Her fingers tightened around mine, cool and steady.She wore my shirt and nothing else, the hem skimming her thighs, the curve of her mouth set in a line that wasn’t fear.It was resolve.The kind you forge the first time the world tries to break you and fails.
We moved together through the corridor.At the landing, I lifted the glass panel on a recessed box and tapped the house schematic.A heat signature sat at the north fence line, cooling.Stationary now.Someone had stood there long enough to leave warmth and then slipped out of sight.I angled my body to place myself between Mia and the gallery.“Behind me.”She didn’t argue.She never argued when it counted.
We cleared the first bend.The chandelier over the gallery breathed a nervous flicker and steadied.My palm rested on the holster at my back, the weapon an extension of a promise I’d made in blood the night I took my father’s chair: my name would be an umbrella, not a blade, to the people under my roof.
The console on the wall murmured again.East lawn: clean.South gate: quiet.North fence: dead.
“Street-side?”I asked.
“Dark,” Luca answered.“But the cam two blocks down caught a sedan idling at 2:09.No plates.Out of frame by 2:12.We’re pulling the footage.”
We reached the gallery door together.I opened the door with my left hand and stepped sideways.The gallery unfurled in shadow and glass—floor-to-ceiling cases, oil portraits from a hundred years of men who shared the same features as me and wished they didn’t, marble caught in half-light.At the far end, a window drizzled rain down its pane.
Mia stepped in behind me.The air changed when she did.Not softer.Sharper.I knew with exact precision where she stopped (two steps back, slightly to my right), how her shoulder would brush my arm if I moved an inch.The temptation to put her in a room and seal the door rose and then died.
My gaze cut the room into grids.Left.Right.Center.High.Low.I fed the pieces into that part of my brain my father trained like a hunting dog: the bit that cares only for angles and lines and what doesn’t belong.
I found it on the third pass—small enough to miss, bold enough to mock.
Near the end of the gallery, in the space beneath the portrait of my father and his brothers, someone placed a single framed photograph on the console table.Not ours.Not from our archives.Thin frame, cheap gilt, the kind you buy in shops where grief travels quickly and pride wears its Sunday suit.
My father stared out from the photo, younger by years than I’d ever known him.Beside him, a man leaned in—a profile I’d recognize in a crowd of a thousand: Gallo, senior.Their heads were close, their smiles real.Behind them the old Via del Leone property blurred to pleasant light and stone.
The photograph had been taken before I was born.Before the first debt.Before the first ledger stamped with a seal I’d find years later, folded into a paper bird on my wife’s balcony.
There was a paper triangle pinned in the corner of the frame, like a fold come undone—the remnant of a crane wing.Beneath the glass, tucked against the matting, a strip of paper ran along the bottom margin.Ten words in ink I could feel in my teeth.
He promised me a kingdom.You built it on his grave.
Mia’s breath hitched—a small, sharp sound, quickly caged.
The handwriting was precise, elegant, a near-match for the scrawl on the crane—but younger hand, tighter loops.Not the old man.The son.
“Don’t touch,” I said as Mia reached.
She withdrew her hand an inch, eyes on me rather than the frame.“What does it mean?”
“It means we’re done pretending this is business.”I studied the stroke on the capitalH, the way the tail of thegcut back across the word like it wanted to sever it.“This is personal.It always was.”
“That photo,” she said, voice steadier now, "is a threat disguised as nostalgia.”
“It is.”I let my gaze climb from the frame to the portrait above.My father stood with his brothers in painted light, hands tucked like he had nothing to hide.Marco slipped into the gallery like a shadow that knew the furniture.He clocked the frame in a breath.His mouth went hard.
“North fence was a feint,” he said.“We found a bit of copper wire woven into the thermal.”
Marco glanced to Mia, then back to me.His question was in the look.How much do we show her?
