Whether I was the don, or just the man who happened to be standing in his father's office.
"We wait," I said finally, and watched Santo's jaw clench. "Not because I don't believe you, Santo. Not because I don't want blood if blood is owed. But because Papa didn't build this family on impulse, and I'm not going to tear it down in a single night."
"Dante—"
"Three days." I held up a hand, cutting him off. "Give me three days to figure out what we're dealing with. To go through Papa's papers, to find out what that meeting with Enzo was about. If there's evidence, we'll find it. And then—" I met his eyes, let himsee the steel underneath my calm. "Then we act. Together. The right way."
Santo stared at me for a long moment. Then, slowly, he nodded.
"Three days," he said. "But after that, I'm done waiting."
He turned to leave, but before he had a chance, a small hurricane entered the room. A small hurricane wearing an expensive Armani dress.
Donatella.
"Minchia, I could hear you three idiots arguing from the parking lot," she said. She'd been crying—her eyes were red and swollen, mascara smudged into dark shadows—but her voice was steady and sharp enough to cut glass. and dropped into our father's leather chair with a deliberate lack of ceremony.
“Good to see you too, sis.” Santo said with a wry grin. We all loved Dona, but Santoreallyloved her.
The chair swallowed her small frame. Donatella was twenty-two, the youngest of us, the only girl. Technically she held the least power in our world—the old structures didn't have room for women in positions of authority, no matter how smart or capable they were. But she'd never acted like that mattered. She'd inherited our mother's looks and our father's stubbornness, and somewhere along the way she'd figured out how to wield both like weapons.
"Papa's body is at Russo's Funeral Home being prepared for tomorrow," she said, and her voice cracked just slightly on the word body. "They're dressing him in that suit he hated, the charcoal one, because Aunt Teresa insisted it was more dignified than the navy blue. They're putting makeup on his face so he doesn't look dead even though he is dead. And you're in here planning a war?"
"We weren't—" Santo started.
"Don't." She held up a hand, and he stopped. That was the power Donatella had always wielded over us: the ability to make us feel ten years old again, caught doing something we knew we shouldn't. "I don't want to hear about the Valentis. I don't want to hear about strategy or evidence or who's responsible. Not tonight."
"Then what do you want?" Marco asked, his voice gentler than I'd heard it all evening.
"I want my brothers to act like brothers." Donatella's eyes were bright with unshed tears, but she didn't let them fall. "The funeral is tomorrow. The whole city is going to be there, watching us like we're animals in a cage. Watching to see if we fall apart. Watching to see if we're weak." She looked at each of us in turn—Santo, Marco, me. "We can kill each other's enemies after we bury him. But right now, tonight, I need—"
Her voice broke. She pressed her hands to her face, and for a moment the fierce facade crumbled and she was just our little sister, twenty-two years old and grieving a father who'd been the center of her world.
I noticed things.
That was the curse of being the oldest, the one who'd been watching and assessing and managing for so long it had become reflex. I noticed that her skin was too pale under the fluorescent lights. I noticed the ragged edges of her nails where she'd been biting them—a habit she'd broken years ago, or thought she had. I noticed the way her collarbones stood out too sharply above the neckline of her black dress.
She hadn't been eating.
Without thinking, without announcing what I was doing, I walked past her to the small kitchen adjacent to the office. The staff had left food before closing—Rosa's leftovers, neatly packaged and labeled, because Rosa believed grief was no excusefor starvation. I found a container of pasta, plated it, added a fork, and carried it back to the desk.
I set it in front of my sister.
"Eat."
The word came out harder than I'd intended—not a request, not a suggestion. An order. The way I'd give orders to soldiers, or to associates who needed reminding of who was in charge.
Donatella looked up at me with red-rimmed eyes. For a moment I thought she might argue, might tell me to go to hell, might throw the plate at my head. That would have been very Donatella.
Instead she rolled her eyes and picked up the fork.
"Bossy," she muttered, but she took a bite.
Something unknotted in my chest. Not much—the weight of the last three days was still there, would be there for a long time—but something. She was eating. She was here. We were all here, together, in this room that still smelled like our father.
Santo sat down heavily on the small couch by the window. Marco pushed off from the door frame and claimed the armchair in the corner, the one Papa had always joked was reserved for visitors he didn't trust. The three of us arranged ourselves around our sister like a protective constellation, and for a moment no one spoke.
The silence felt different now. Less oppressive. More like the silence of a family keeping vigil, each of us lost in our own thoughts but anchored by proximity.
