EPILOGUE
LUCIA
The year ends without ceremony.
There’s no gunfire or midnight reckoning. No public spectacle for men who once believed blood was the only language that mattered.
The clock simply runs out.
I know the exact moment it does because Giovanni is standing beside me when it happens, his hand warm and heavy at my back as the sun slides low over the estate, turning stone and sea and iron gates into something almost gentle. Somewhere beyond these walls, Salvatore Bellandi’s name ceases to matter. Not because of what is done to him, but because of what is not.
He’s contained. Neutralised. Rendered irrelevant.
Giovanni does not say a word when his phone buzzes once and then goes still in his palm. He doesn’t need to. The Dragoni empire does not announce its victories.
It absorbs them, folds them into the quiet machinery of loyalties repaid, renewed allegiances and security contracts and men who now understand exactly where the line is drawn.
La Fratellanza Nera is behaving, with Chicago thriving under new management that answers to us. Old enemies turn cautious and new ones think better of it.
Power settles with a rumble of departing thunder, leaving a warning of what it could reawaken if crossed.
I feel it in the way the estate breathes again, in the way Caterina hums while she cooks, in the way the men move with less edge and more certainty, as though the ground beneath them has finally stopped shifting.
And I feel it in my body.
It starts subtly, the way all irrevocable things do.
A strange aversion to wine I once loved. A bone-deep fatigue that sleep does not cure. A hunger that arrives without warning and refuses to be reasoned with.
Caterina notices before I do, the clever woman I’m beginning to believe is a witch.
She always does.
One morning, she places a bowl in front of me without comment, soft cheese, warm bread, figs drizzled with honey, and watches with sharp, knowing eyes as I eat like I have been starved for weeks. When I look up, flustered and vaguely embarrassed, she only hums and pats my hand.
“Eat,” she says. “You need it.”
Giovanni notices two days later.
He has always watched me as though the world might try to steal me when he blinks, but this time his gaze sharpens, lingers, turns inward.
He asks fewer questions than I expect. He simply starts walking closer, touching more often, his palm resting at my stomach in moments so casual they nearly undo me.
That night, when I finally tell him, it’s not dramatic.
No tears. No fear. Just the truth, spoken softly between us in the dark.
For a long moment, he says nothing.
Then he presses his forehead to mine, his breath uneven, his hands trembling despite every battle he has ever survived.
“Mine,” he murmurs, not in ownership, not in conquest, but in awe. “Both of you now.”
I laugh then, quietly, because of course that is how Giovanni Dragoni meets the future and the news of impending fatherhood. With reverence instead of restraint. With love sharpened into something fierce and unyielding.
The weeks that follow are almost deceptively calm.
Giovanni doesn’t loosen his grip on power, but he shifts it, rebalances it, builds redundancies that make betrayal expensive and loyalty profitable. Men who once tested him now bring him offerings instead.
