"But understand this."
The restaurant murmured around us. Silverware on porcelain. A woman laughing three tables over. The sommelier making his rounds, oblivious to the fact that he was circling a detonation site.
"If you come near my wife again—if you send her flowers, if you look at her too long across a room, if you so much as speak her name—I will forget that war is bad for business." Each word was placed with care. The way I placed everything that mattered."I will forget strategy and patience and every lesson my father taught me about restraint. And I will kill you with my bare hands."
Silence.
Enzo studied me. Those grey eyes moving across my face with the clinical focus of a man searching for the bluff, the angle, the hidden strategy beneath the threat. Looking for the Dante he knew—the measured don, the strategist, the man who weighed costs and calculated returns before committing to anything.
He didn't find him.
What he found was something simpler. Older. A man who would protect his wife.
I stood.
Reached into my jacket. Placed two hundred-dollar bills on the tablecloth beside the wine I hadn't touched. Straightened my cuffs—a gesture I'd stolen from him, deliberately, a small act of theft to remind us both that I paid attention.
"And please, Don Enzo, don’t think this is a threat," I said. I locked eyes with him. "It's much more than that. This is apromise. From one don to another."
I walked out.
Didn't look back. Didn't need to. The expression on Enzo Valenti's face—the first genuine emotion I'd ever seen there, the hairline crack widening into something that looked almost like doubt—was already seared into my memory where I'd keep it.
Santo straightened against his car. Read my face. His jaw unclenched—just barely, just enough for me to notice.
"Done?" he asked.
"Done."
He didn't ask what I'd said. Didn't need to. Whatever he read in my expression was enough. He opened his car door, dropped into the driver's seat, and pulled away from the curb with theunhurried confidence of a man who knew exactly where the night was headed.
I stood on the sidewalk for a moment longer. Breathed. Let the cold settle into my lungs and felt the adrenaline recede—not gone, just banked, like coals that would stay hot for hours.
My hands were shaking.
I looked down at them. Watched the fine tremor that betrayed what my face and voice had refused to show. The hands of a man who had just drawn a line in the sand against the most dangerous person in Chicago and meant every syllable of the consequence.
I got in my car. Drove toward home. Toward Gemma.
The shaking stopped somewhere around Michigan Avenue.
Shestoodinthefoyer in a black dress I'd never seen, and the emerald earrings caught the hallway light like small green fires against her dark hair. I'd left them on the bathroom counter that afternoon—the velvet box open, no note, because some gifts spoke better without explanation. She'd put them on without being asked. Filed under: reasons my chest hurt.
"Gibson's," she said. Not a question—she'd read the reservation confirmation on my phone when I'd handed it to her, a deliberate act of transparency that was still new enough to feel like a gift. "Dante, that's—everyone goes to Gibson's."
"That's the point."
Her hands went to the earrings. Touching them the way she touched everything she wasn't sure she deserved—lightly, tentatively, like they might be reclaimed. "Why are we doing this?"
I crossed the foyer. Took her hands. Brought them down from her ears and held them between mine, her cold fingers warmingagainst my palms the way they always did—slowly, reluctantly, as though her body needed to be convinced that warmth was permitted.
"Because I want every family in this city to see how much I love my wife." I lifted her hand. Pressed my lips against her knuckles, against the wedding ring, against the thin skin over the blue veins where her pulse was racing. "Because Enzo thinks he can take you from me, and I want him to watch me walk you through his territory like the queen you are."
Her eyes searched mine. Looking for strategy. For the angle. The calculation beneath the romance. I watched her look and I let her find it—because it was there, and she deserved the truth.
“It’s a trick? A play?”
"It is. But, it’s also real. That’s not a contradiction in my world." I tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, my thumb brushing the emerald stud. "You've spent ten years being invisible. Tonight, everyone sees you."
