Now it was a ritual. A penance, maybe. Standing in the dark hallway, listening for sounds of life behind her door, imagining conversations we'd never have.
I'm sorry you're here.
That was the truth I couldn't speak. The confession that sat on my tongue like broken glass.
I'm sorry I can't stop thinking about you.
Worse. Weaker. The admission of a man who was supposed to be in control, who was supposed to want nothing more from this marriage than what was politically expedient.
I'm sorry I'm not the man you deserve.
That was the core of it. The ugly, shameful center.
She deserved someone who would let her go. Someone who would tear up the alliance papers and hand her the keys to her own future. Someone better than a mafia don with his father's blood on his ledgers and his brother's pressure at his back.
Instead, she had me. Watching from doorways. Standing outside her room at night. Cataloging the seven stirs of her coffee spoon like it was intelligence gathering.
I wanted to know her. The real her, not the performance.
But what I wanted didn't matter. She hadn't chosen me. She'd been sold to me, wrapped in white silk and delivered to my altar by a father who saw her as currency.
The best I could do was give her space. Give her structure.
And stay the hell away from her door.
Thedoortomystudy closed with the deliberate care that meant a storm was coming.
Santo stood with his back against it, arms crossed, that restless energy he'd been barely containing since the funeral coiled tight as a spring. Ten days. He'd given me ten days, and from the look on his face, that patience had cost him.
"We agreed to talk after Saturday," he said without preamble. "It's after Saturday."
I set down my pen. I'd been reviewing the ledger again—those damning payments to MV, the twenty-year trail of my father's secret shame. The numbers were starting to blur together, but the implications remained sharp as ever.
I slid it across the desk.
Santo crossed the room in three strides, grabbed the leather-bound book, and began to read. I watched his face as he worked through the columns. The tightening of his jaw. The whitening of his knuckles against the aged leather. The muscle in his cheek that ticked with each new revelation.
He read in silence. I let him.
When he finally looked up, his eyes were dark with fury. "How long?"
"Twenty years. Monthly payments. They started three months after the 2003 peace was brokered."
"MV." He said the initials like he was spitting out poison. "Massimo Valenti."
"That's my conclusion." I leaned back in my chair, lacing my fingers over my stomach. The posture of a man in control. The lie of a man whose world was crumbling. "Papa was paying him. Tribute, maybe. Or blackmail. The amounts increased over time—small at first, then substantial. Whatever leverage Massimo had, it was worth a fortune to keep quiet."
Santo's hands clenched on the ledger. "The payments stopped six weeks before Papa died."
"Final payment. It's done." I quoted the notation from memory. "Whatever debt he owed, he believed it was settled."
"And six weeks later—"
"Heart attack." I held Santo's gaze. "Or something made to look like one."
The silence that fell between us was thick enough to choke on. Santo's jaw worked, fury and grief warring across his face in waves I recognized because I felt them myself. The difference was I'd learned to bury them. Santo had never mastered that particular skill.
"So Enzo knew." His voice was low, dangerous. "About the money. About whatever leverage his father had."
