Enzo leaned back in his chair. Crossed one leg over the other with the practiced ease of a man settling in for the performance of a lifetime. His wine glass turned slowly between his fingers—a full rotation, deliberate, his grey eyes never leaving my face.
"Your wife and I have history," he said. "Did she not tell you?"
The words landed like a slap. Every instinct I had fired at once: danger, danger, he's flanking you.
I said nothing. Held his gaze. Let the silence speak for me.
Enzo smiled. The expression did not reach his eyes—it never reached his eyes. His smiles existed only on the surface, a mask worn over the machinery of calculation and contempt that drove everything he did.
"She was sixteen when we met." He said it casually. Conversationally. The way you might mention a restaurant you'd visited once, a place that had been pleasant enough at the time. "So eager for attention. For affection. Her father was thrilled at the potential alliance—practically gift-wrapped her for me."
My hands formed fists beneath the table. Slowly. The tendons in my wrists drawing tight, knuckles compressing against each other, the controlled violence of a man who could not—wouldnot—reach across the white tablecloth and wrap his hands around Enzo Valenti's throat.
Sixteen.
The number repeated in my head. Sixteen. The same age as Maria Flores. A child in a world of men, offered up by a father who saw her as currency. And across from her, this man—this fifty-two-year-old predator in his bespoke suit with his dead wife's ring on his finger—speaking about her hunger for affection as though she'd been the one pursuing him.
"She was quite devoted." Enzo swirled his wine. Sipped. Set the glass down with that same precise gesture that was beginning to feel like a countdown. "Obsessed, one might say. I was her first everything."
Her first everything.
My vision narrowed. The restaurant—the tables, the murmured conversations, the careful anonymity of wealth—compressed into a tunnel with Enzo Valenti's face at the end of it. His expression was satisfied. Smug. The face of a man who believed he was delivering a killing blow, who was watching me absorb the image of my wife in another man's bed and waiting for the crack in my composure.
The wire was hot against my skin. Marco was listening. Santo was listening. Both of them hearing this—hearing Gemma's past laid out like evidence by the man who had written it into her flesh.
I kept my fists beneath the table. Kept my breathing even. Kept the don's mask in place even as something behind it roared.
"I want her back."
Three words. Delivered with the same flat simplicity as an order at a restaurant. No emphasis. No drama. Just the calm, certain expectation of a man accustomed to receiving what he demanded.
"Return what is mine," Enzo continued, "and the debt dies with your father. The proof disappears. The Caruso name stays clean." He straightened his cuffs. An immaculate gesture, unhurried, the body language of a man who had already won and was simply informing the loser of the score. "I am not an unreasonable man. I do not want war. I do not want money. I want what was promised to me, and what your alliance with the Morettis stole."
He stood.
The movement was fluid, deliberate—Enzo Valenti never rushed. He removed a crisp bill from his wallet and placed it on the table beside his wine glass. Buttoned his jacket. Tugged each cuff precisely one quarter inch past the sleeve.
Then he looked down at me.
"Think about it, Dante." His voice was soft. Almost kind. The cruelty dressed in silk that was his particular specialty—the blade so sharp you didn't feel the cut until you were already bleeding. "Your family's future, or one woman. Surely even a man in love can do that math."
He walked away. The restaurant absorbed him—just another wealthy man leaving after a pleasant dinner, nothing to see, nothing to remember. The door opened. The October air reached in. The door closed.
I sat alone.
The wine glasses stood between us on the white tablecloth. His, half-empty. Mine, untouched water, the condensation pooling on the linen like something weeping. The appetizer plates had been cleared. The table looked like a stage after the actors had gone—props still in place, the audience departed, the violence of the performance lingering in the air like a frequency too low to hear.
She was quite devoted. Obsessed. Her first everything.
I want her back.
I could believe it. That was the knife in it—I could let those words take root, could let the poison of Enzo's smooth delivery and careful framing seep into the foundation of everything Gemma and I had built. He was convincing. He was always convincing. That was his weapon: not violence, not even leverage, but the ability to make terrible things sound reasonable.
But I knew my wife.
I knew the woman who flinched when unexpected flowers arrived. Who went white as bone when someone mentioned Enzo's name in conversation. Who had trembled at the funeral—not anger, not resentment, not the complicated emotions of a woman revisiting a past romance—but fear. Pure, visceral, animal fear, the kind that lived in the body long after the mind had learned to manage it.
That was not a woman who had been obsessed. Not a woman who had pursued, who had wanted, who had given herself willingly to a man three decades her senior when she was still a child.
