That’s how long it’s been since I last crossed these streets without looking over my shoulder.
Home doesn’t look smaller.
It looks sharper.
And as we pull closer, I know with a certainty that settles deep in my bones that whatever this is, whatever Giovanni and I are becoming, it’s no longer something I can pretend I’m untouched by.
The war didn’t pause while I was gone.
It just learned how to wait.
Giovanni
The car humsbeneath me as we leave the compound, the city rising ahead in a familiar sprawl of steel and intention, and I should already be focused on the chessboard I’m about to step back onto.
Instead, my mind betrays me.
Breakfast.
The table. The sunlight. The way my wife looked at me as she blew my mind and my cock like she was daring herself as much as she was daring me.
I adjust my position subtly, jaw tightening as I replay the memory of the mix of dark amusement and savage hunger that had culminated in the best release of my life.
Recollections that have no place in a moving vehicle surrounded by men trained to notice everything.
Things between Lucia and me have never followed a straight line.
From the moment she tore into my driver on a Queens sidewalk like she had nothing to lose, convention had been a casualty.
Unconventional doesn’t even begin to cover it.
A man in my position is supposed to marry for alliance, for leverage, for optics.
Instead, I married a woman who challenges me at breakfast and kneels because she chooses to, not because she’s told.
I exhale slowly, reminded of what I’ve known from the start. The ferocity of my emotions when it comes to Luciaisdangerous at best.
Absolutely lethal at their worst.
But then, isn’t everything worth having a supremely risky venture?
“Paolo.” The driver glances at me in the mirror.
“Let me know when we’re five minutes out,” I say.
He nods. “Sì, Don Moretti.”
I press the divider and the glass slides up smoothly, sealing me into quiet. Then I pull my phone from my pocket and make the first call.
It rings once.
“Giovanni.” The voice on the other end is sharp, alert. One of mine. Loyal. Smart enough to stay alive.
“Talk to me,” I say. “What’s the word after last night?”
A pause. Papers shifting and a breath taken. He’s not stalling for time, he’s taking a moment to deliver news that I know will commence seismic shifts.
“You made waves.”
