Something shifted in her face. Not the slow dawn I'd been watching for weeks—this was sharper. Quicker. A decision made in the space between breaths. She squared her shoulders. Lifted her chin. And for a moment—just a flash—I saw the woman she was becoming. Not the girl who disappeared into curtains. Not the wife who apologized for existing. Someone fiercer.
"Okay," she said. "Let's go be seen."
Gibson's was everything a Chicago steakhouse should be—dark wood, white tablecloths, the smell of seared meat and old money hanging in the air. The kind of place where fortunes were celebrated and alliances were cemented over porterhouse cuts thick as a fist. Every table occupied. Every seat filled with someone who knew someone who mattered.
The room noticed us.
I felt it the way you feel a change in air pressure—the subtle shift in attention, the conversational lull that rippled outwardfrom the hostess stand like a stone dropped in still water. Heads turned. Some openly. Some with the practiced discretion of people who'd spent careers pretending not to stare.
Don Caruso. And his wife. Together. In public. At the most visible table in Chicago's most visible restaurant.
I kept my hand on the small of her back. The black dress was open there—a wide V of bare skin above her waist—and my palm pressed flat against it, warm and possessive, a point of contact that every eye in the room could read.
Mine. See her. Know it.
The maître d' led us to the best table. Center of the room, not the corner—I'd requested it specifically. No sightlines to the exits, no strategic positioning. Just visibility. Just the two of us, lit by candlelight, surrounded by every family and associate and player in Chicago's particular game.
I pulled out her chair myself.
She sat. Smoothed her dress. Her composure was good—the Moretti training, the lifetime of performing in rooms full of dangerous men—but I could see the tremor in her fingers when she reached for the water glass. The slight widening of her eyes as she registered the faces around us. People she recognized. People who recognized her.
I sat across from her and ordered champagne.
"Dom Pérignon," I told the sommelier. "The 2008."
Gemma's eyebrows lifted fractionally. I caught it and smiled.
"Special occasion," I said.
"What occasion?"
"It’s Tuesday."
The champagne arrived. I poured her glass myself—the sommelier tried to intervene, and I gave him a look that suggested he find somewhere else to be. The bubbles rose in fine, steady lines. I raised my glass.
"To being seen."
She touched her glass to mine. The crystal sang—a small, clear note that hung in the air between us like something suspended.
We ate. Filet mignon for her, the bone-in ribeye for me. I ordered sides she loved—creamed spinach, baked potato with everything, the au gratin that she'd mentioned once, weeks ago, in passing. She noticed. I saw the moment it registered—the small flash of wonder, the quick blink—and it hit me the way her surprise always hit me. Like a bruise on something tender.
I fed her bites of my steak. Cut the pieces small—medium-rare. Held the fork across the table and watched her lean forward to take it, her lips closing around the tines, her eyes on mine.
Intimate. Public. Both at once, in proportions that shouldn't have worked but did.
She laughed at something I said about Marco's cocktail experiments—the real laugh, the one that crinkled her eyes and showed the gap between her teeth—and I laughed with her, and the sound was loud enough for the neighboring tables. Deliberately. I wanted them to hear. Wanted every carefully eavesdropping ear in the room to register that Don Caruso was happy. That his wife made him happy. That whatever the Valenti family thought they could leverage, this was the answer.
We are not afraid. We are not hiding. We are here, and we are in love, and you cannot touch us.
The dessert arrived. Crème brûlée. She cracked the caramelized surface with the back of her spoon—that satisfying snap of burnt sugar—and the smile she gave me was so unguarded, so genuinely delighted, that I felt the room compress to the dimensions of her face.
"People are staring," she murmured.
"Good."
"Dante—"
"Let them stare." I reached across the table. Took her hand. Threaded my fingers through hers the way I'd been doing forweeks now, the gesture that had become a language all its own. "Let them see."
