"Yeah?" His voice was quiet. Almost tentative. The don stripped away, leaving only the man.
"I think I might be in trouble."
The words floated between us. Light enough to be a joke. Heavy enough to be a confession. I watched his face, watched the understanding land, watched him recognize what I was really saying because he always recognized what I was really saying. That was the miracle and the terror of him.
"Yeah," he said. Quiet. Certain. The way he said everything that mattered—without flourish, without drama, with the bone-deep honesty of a man who didn't waste words on things he didn't mean. "Me too."
I tucked my head back against his chest. Closed my eyes. Let his heartbeat fill the silence—that steady, reliable rhythm that had become the metronome of my new life.
His arms tightened around me. Not possessive. Protective.
I could feel it—the ground dropping away beneath my feet, the velocity of falling for someone who could actually catch me. My walls were crumbling. Not slowly, not brick by brick the way I'd feared. Fast. Whole sections collapsing at once, letting in light that exposed everything I'd hidden for years. My hunger for tenderness. My desperation to matter. The small, stubbornflame of hope I'd never managed to extinguish no matter how many men tried to blow it out.
Dante's fingers found my hair. Stroked through it. Slow, rhythmic, the motion of a man who had all the time in the world and intended to spend every second of it right here.
I should be afraid. I knew the calculus. Enzo had taught me what happened when you loved a powerful man—how the love became a leash, how the vulnerability became a weapon, how the softness you offered was stored and cataloged and deployed against you when you least expected it.
I was afraid.
But beneath the fear, something else was growing. Something that had started in a church with a kiss I hadn't expected, that had deepened in a kitchen at two in the morning over tea and Caravaggio, that had cracked open at a gala when he told me I didn't have to perform, that had bloomed when I signed my name next to his on a contract that promised I would be held.
Love. The word was too small for what I felt. Too common. Too used up by people who wielded it as currency, as leverage, as the pretty wrapping on ugly intentions.
But it was the word I had.
I was in love with my husband.
Chapter 11
Dante
ThebackroomatCaruso's smelled like Sunday even on a Wednesday.
Garlic and slow-simmered tomato, red wine soaked into wood grain, the ghost of fifty years' worth of conversations held in voices too low for the walls to carry. I pushed through the unmarked door and found exactly what I expected: Santo hunched over a plate of gnocchi like he was trying to stare it into submission, and Marco nursing an espresso with the expression of a man sitting on a secret he couldn't wait to detonate.
"You're late," Santo said without looking up. A gnocchi disappeared. He chewed with the focus of a man who treated eating the way he treated everything else—aggressively.
"I'm on time. You're early."
"No, no, no, I was hungry."
I slid into the booth across from them, the leather worn smooth by decades of Caruso asses. Sal appeared at my elbow before I'd fully settled—sixty-three years old and still movinglike a man half his age, white towel draped over one shoulder, reading glasses perched on the end of his nose.
"The usual, Don Caruso?"
"The usual, Sal."
He vanished. The usual was the veal. It was always the veal. My father had ordered the veal. His father before him. Some traditions weren't worth disrupting.
My phone buzzed in my jacket pocket.
I should have ignored it. Should have kept my attention where it belonged—on my brothers, on the business we needed to discuss, on the weight of the ledger that had been sitting in my chest like a stone for weeks. Instead, my hand was in my pocket before the second buzz faded, pulling out the phone with the kind of urgency usually reserved for threats.
Not a threat.
A photo. Gemma had found a gallery catalog somewhere—probably the bookshop on Michigan Avenue she'd been haunting since I'd told her to stop apologizing for spending money—and she'd photographed a page. Caravaggio'sThe Calling of Saint Matthew. A group of men around a table, caught in a shaft of light so sharp it could cut, half their faces swallowed by shadow. Christ's hand extended from the dark like an accusation. Or an invitation. Depending on how you looked at it.
Beneath the photo, a message:Thought of you. Brooding men at a table doing shady business in gorgeous lighting. Sound familiar?
