I nod, but it stings more than I expected. Someone close to Matteo died, someone he cared about, and he didn’t tell me. He’s been carrying this grief for days while I tried to crack jokes and coax smiles out of him, completely in the dark.
Why didn’t he let me in?
I thought we were past the walls. Past the pretense. He told me about his stepfather and the burns on his back. About killing a man at sixteen to protect his mother. Those weren’t easy things to share, and he trusted me with them.
So why not this?
My fingers curl in my lap, nails pressing crescents into my palms. I don’t want to spiral. I don’t want to be the girl who assumes the worst just because a man pulls away. But I’ve been that girl before. With Viktor. I watched the warmth drain out of him day by day, convinced myself I was imagining things, told myself everything was fine.
It wasn’t fine. It was the beginning of a nightmare.
Matteo isn’t Viktor. The rational part of my brain knows that. But there’s another part of me—the part that watched the Viktor I knew disappear inch by inch and told myself I was overreacting—and that part is screaming.
When we leave the clinic, I help Ma into the car and close her door with a careful click. My hands are steady. My smile is in place. I’ve gotten good at keeping the cracks from showing.
But as I slide behind the wheel, something cold settles in my stomach.
I’m not going to look the other way. I’m not going to convince myself that distance is normal, that silence is just how men grieve, that everything will magically fix itself if I’m patient enough. That’s what I did with Viktor. I gave him the benefit of the doubt until it was too late.
My thumb finds the engagement ring, spinning it once around my finger. The diamond catches light from the windshield. I need to know why Matteo is shutting me out. I need to understand what happened with Santino. And if he can hide something this big from me, something that’s clearly eating him alive, I need to know what else he’s keeping locked behind those walls.
Because I’m falling for him. Hard. And if this is going to shatter, I’d rather see it coming this time.
32
MATTEO
The private room is packed.Every leader, every capo, every man who matters in the Andretti organization is crammed into this space, and not one of them looks happy.
I keep my back against the wall. Arms crossed. Face blank.
The empty chair next to Lorenzo is the loudest thing in the room.
He hasn’t spoken yet. Fifteen minutes of capos arguing, of Dario wearing a path in the carpet with his pacing, and the don just sits there. Shoulders curved inward. Dark circles under his eyes. His fingers rest on the arm of his chair, completely still.
I’ve never seen him look old before.
My fist clenches every time I glance at that empty seat. Santino sat there for as long as I can remember.
The memory hits me again. The crack of the gunshot. The way Santino’s body jerked before it dropped. The split-second where I could see the exit wound before I started shooting back.
If I’d been faster. If I’d gone in ahead.
I force my jaw to unclench. Thinking like that is useless. I know it’s useless. But knowing doesn’t make the loop stop playing in my head.
“We should hit them now,” one of the capos is saying. Moretti, I think. Red-faced and loud. “Every day we wait, Kozlov thinks we’re weak.”
“And if we move too fast, we walk into another trap.” That’s Benedetto. Older. Careful. “Look what happened to Santino.”
The name lands like a grenade. The room goes quiet for half a second before the arguing starts up again, louder this time.
Dario stops pacing. His hands are fisted at his sides, and I can see the tension coiled in his shoulders from across the room. He wants blood. We all do.
But wanting and getting are different things.
Lorenzo finally stands.
The room falls silent. Every man straightens and turns toward the don.
