It was all still there. The sword still hung over the family. The debts, the secrets, the slow tightening of a noose I couldn't yet see.
But the weight was different.
Not lighter, exactly. The facts hadn't changed. The threat hadn't diminished. Enzo was still out there, still circling, still accumulating leverage with the unhurried confidence of a man who'd been winning quietly for twenty years.
But I could breathe.
For the first time since I'd opened that ledger—since I'd sat in my father's chair in the back office at Caruso's and understood that the man I'd worshipped had been bleeding for two decades—I could take a full breath without feeling like my ribs were made of iron.
Because I'd told her. It hadn't sent her running. Hadn't turned her gaze from warm to calculating, hadn't triggered the carefulretreat I'd been bracing for—the moment when she realized the Caruso name was a liability, not an asset, and started planning her exit.
No. She’d just kissed me.
My father never had this. Vito Caruso had carried his secrets alone for twenty years. Had sat across from my mother at a thousand dinners and said nothing. Had watched his empire erode from the inside and told no one—not his wife, not his consigliere, not the sons he was grooming to inherit the mess.
And it killed him.
Maybe not directly. Maybe the heart attack was just a heart attack, just the inevitable failure of an organ that had been working too hard for too long. But I knew what silence did to a body.
I would not be my father.
Gemma stirred. A soft sound—not a word, something smaller, a breath caught between sleeping and waking. Her fingers uncurled beneath her chin. Her lashes fluttered, caught the light, opened.
Brown eyes. Warm as honey, soft with sleep, focusing slowly on my face.
The smile that spread across her features undid me.
Not the composed smile she wore for the world. Not the careful curve she offered at dinners and galas, measured and pleasant and revealing nothing. This was artless. Unguarded. A sunrise happening in real time across her face.
She saw me. And she was glad.
"Morning, daddy." Her voice was rough with sleep. She pressed her face against my chest, hiding the smile against my skin like it was something precious she wasn't ready to share with the room yet.
"Morning, little one."
I kissed her forehead. Her nose. The corner of her mouth where the smile was trying to escape. She giggled—that sound, God, that sound I'd discovered last night during the bath, the one that belonged to the girl she'd stopped being at twelve. It hit me the same way it had then: like a fist around my heart, squeezing.
She pushed at my chest with both palms. Weak, laughing, her hair falling across her face in a dark curtain.
"Your stubble is attacking me—"
"My stubble is kissing you. There's a difference."
"There is not a—" She dissolved into laughter as I found the spot below her ear that I'd cataloged as sensitive, pressing my unshaven jaw against it with deliberate intent. She squirmed. Kicked at the sheets. Her foot connected with my shin and I grunted, and she laughed harder, and somehow we ended up tangled together in a knot of limbs and sheets and warmth, her face in my neck, my arms around her waist, both of us breathing hard from nothing more strenuous than joy.
This. This was what I'd been missing.
Not the sex—though the sex had been extraordinary. Not even the love, though the love was a revelation I was still processing, still turning over in my hands like a stone pulled from deep water.
This.
The laughing. The lightness. The absurd, mundane, beautiful ordinariness of a morning in bed with someone who made the world feel survivable.
I hadn't known I needed it. Hadn't known I was starving for it. Had spent thirty-four years building walls and strategies and contingency plans, preparing for every threat, anticipating every angle—and never once considered that what I actually needed was a woman who called me daddy and giggled when I tickled her neck.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand.
I ignored it. Pulled her closer. Pressed my mouth against her hair.
