Enzo Valenti was looking at my future wife like she belonged to him.
I needed to know why.
Eventually, Enzo made his way to me. The crowd parted for him without being asked.
I watched him approach. Kept my face neutral, my body relaxed, my hands loose at my sides. The don does not fidget. The don does not betray nerves. My father had drilled that into me since before I was old enough to understand what it meant.
"Dante." Enzo stopped a precisely calibrated distance from me—close enough to seem intimate, far enough to avoid threat. His handshake was firm, his eye contact steady, his smile carrying exactly the right weight of sympathy. "My deepest condolences. Your father was a great man."
The words were perfect. So was the delivery. If I hadn't seen the way he'd looked at Gemma thirty seconds ago, I might have believed he meant them.
"Thank you for coming, Enzo." I matched his grip, his tone, his performance. Two predators circling each other in formal dress. "I know my father valued your family's respect."
The lie tasted like copper on my tongue.
I thought about the ledger locked in my desk at home. Those monthly payments stretching back twenty years. MV. The initials that might stand for Massimo Valenti—Enzo's father, dead since 2015, but alive and well when the payments started. What had my father been buying from the Valentis for two decades? What had made him stop?
Final payment. It's done.
Six weeks later, heart attack.
I couldn't prove anything. Not yet. But standing here, shaking this man's hand, feeling the cold calculation behind his sympathetic mask—I knew. The way you know a storm is coming before the first drop falls. The way you know someone is lying even when every word they say is technically true.
Enzo Valenti had something to do with my father's death.
I just needed to figure out what.
"Chicago won't be the same without him," Enzo continued, releasing my hand. His pale eyes studied my face with the detached interest of a scientist examining a specimen. "I hope the transition has been smooth. These things can be . . . complicated."
"The family is united." I let the implication land: don't test us. "We appreciate everyone's support during this difficult time."
"Of course." His smile didn't waver. "Though I understand congratulations are in order as well. The Moretti girl. I forget her name."
His gaze drifted across the room. I didn't need to follow it to know he was looking at Gemma.
"The alliance will be beneficial for everyone," I said. Bland. Careful. Giving him nothing.
"Indeed." Enzo's voice dropped into something more intimate, more conspiratorial. Like we were old friends sharing secrets. "I know the family quite well, you know. Tomasso and I go back decades. Business, social events, the usual entanglements. I've watched the children grow."
The children. He meant her. The way he said it made my jaw tighten.
"And Gemma—" He paused, savoring something I couldn't see. "I've watched her grow up. Such a sweet girl. So quiet. So..." Another pause, deliberate as a knife stroke. "Eager to please."
My skin crawled.
There it was. The thing he was dangling, the bait he wanted me to take. He was telling me something—about him, about her, about whatever history existed between them. The kind of history that made a woman go white at the sight of him across a crowded room.
I thought about the way she'd refused to meet his eyes. The tremor in her hands. The careful blankness she'd pulled over her face like armor.
Eager to please.
The words were innocuous on the surface. Complimentary, even. But the way he said them—the satisfaction beneath the syllables, the possessive curl of his mouth—told a different story.
He was claiming something. Reminding me that he'd been there first, seen her first, had her in some way I didn't yet understand.
I wanted to ask what he meant. Wanted to grab him by his expensive lapels and shake the truth out of him. Wanted to do violence that this room full of witnesses would never let me forget.
Instead, I smiled.
