"I'm sorry." The words came out rough. Genuine. "I'm—"
What could I say? The truth was a labyrinth of secrets and suspicions that I'd been guarding for weeks. The ledger. The payments. The growing certainty that my father had done something terrible and that Enzo Valenti was going to make us pay for it. I'd been carrying it alone because that was what a don did. What my father did. What his father before him did.
And look where it got them.
"I've been looking forward to this all day," I admitted. "And now I'm ruining it."
She didn't argue. Didn't reassure me with the automatic it's fine that would have been a lie. Instead, she reached across the table and covered my hand with hers.
Her fingers were warm. Steady. The nails painted a soft pink that Donatella had chosen and her wedding ring caught the candlelight.
"You're not ruining anything," she said. "But you're somewhere else. And I'd rather be where you are than sitting here alone."
I looked at our hands. Hers small and fine-boned, draped over mine, covering the scarred knuckles and the thick fingers and the hands that had done things she was better off not knowing about.
I took in the contrast. Delicate and brutal. Light and dark.
"It's the family." The deflection rose automatically—work is complicated, nothing to worry about, I'll handle it. The same walls I'd been building between us even as I told myself I loved her. Even as I promised her transparency in our contract, honesty in our dynamic, the trust that was supposed to be the foundation of everything we were building.
I was a hypocrite. The realization tasted like acid.
"But . . . it's more than that," I amended. The words fought me. Twenty years of training—don't show weakness, don't share burdens, don't give anyone ammunition they can use against you—warring against the woman sitting across from me with her hand on mine and her eyes that saw everything.
My father had kept his secrets. Had carried them alone for two decades while they poisoned his marriage, his businesses, his health. Had died with them locked in a ledger that his sons found too late to do anything but inherit the damage.
I would not be my father.
"Can we—" I stopped. Started again. "Can we walk? After dinner? I need to tell you something, and I'd rather not do it here."
Something shifted in her expression. Not fear—I'd learned her fear, knew its exact texture and temperature, the way it tightened the skin around her eyes and sent her hands into her lap. This wasn't that. This was attention. Focus. The quiet alertness of a woman who'd spent her life reading rooms and had just recognized that the room had changed.
"Of course," she said. Simply. No questions. No pressure.
She squeezed my hand once and let go.
We finished dinner. She ordered dessert because she wanted it, not because she was performing enjoyment or filling awkward silence—she genuinely wanted the panna cotta, and she ate it with the small, focused pleasure that I'd come to recognize as one of her truest expressions. I watched her lick the back of her spoon and felt something crack beneath my ribs.
This woman. This brave, brilliant, impossible woman who had walked into my life as a transaction and become the thing I couldn't afford to lose.
I had to trust her the way she'd trusted me.
I paid the bill. Helped her into her coat. Stepped into the autumn night with her hand in mine and the weight of my father's secrets pressing against my skull.
It was time to stop carrying them alone.
Thelakefrontpathstretchedahead of us, dark and quiet, the city throwing its light across the water in long broken lines. October had arrived overnight—that sharp Chicago shift from lingering warmth to the kind of cold that made you zip your jacket and accept that summer was dead. Gemma pressed close to my side, her arm threaded through mine, her shoulder against my ribcage.
I kept her hand in mine. Her fingers were cold. I closed my fist around them, warming them against my palm. The lake was black and restless beside us. Waves lapped at the rocks below the path, a steady rhythm that sounded like breathing. Somewhere behind us, the restaurant's warm light spilled from its windows, and ahead, the Drake Hotel glowed like a lantern against the sky.
"You can trust me," Gemma said quietly.
Not a question. Not a plea. A statement of fact, offered with the same calm certainty I usually reserved for my own commands.
"Whatever it is," she continued. "I'm your wife, Dante. Your partner. You don't have to carry everything alone."
I sighed.
"My father was paying Enzo Valenti's family." The words came out rough, scraped over the part of me that still wanted to protect her from this. To shield her the way I shielded everyone—by standing between them and the truth, absorbing the impact so they wouldn't have to. "For twenty years. Monthly payments. Almost four million dollars."
