That… doesn't help. It should. But what I need right now is something that will slot neatly into the version of Jenna I've been clinging to, the girl who ran, who hid, who chose someoneelse and built a life without me. The woman who kept my son from me and thought she could manage the fallout.
But this? This doesn't fit that story at all.
Or maybe it fits too well. This is the Jenna I remember. The one who took a situation that should have broken her and ended her attacker. The one who collapsed afterward, yes, but she was eighteen. Bleeding. Alone. Still standing when she had no right to be. Still breathing when men stronger than her would have folded.
That was ten years ago.
Ten years is a long time.
Long enough for empires to rot from the inside. Long enough to rebuild them stronger. Long enough for a woman to sharpen herself into something unrecognizable. Suddenly, I'm seeing her again, not as the mother of my son, not as the woman who lied to me, not as a complication I have to control, but as someone I may have fundamentally underestimated.
She walked into the Oven.
She didn't flinch.
She didn't beg someone else to do it for her.
She broke a man with words and will and the kind of quiet authority that can't be taught.
That changes things.
It makes me wonder how many times she's done that in the last decade. What else she's survived. What else she's hidden. What parts of herself she's buried so deep no one—including me—thought to look.
Ten years.
A lifetime in this world.
The balance shifts. I'm not just furious with her any longer. I'm curious. Dangerously so. Because if Jenna Whitford has been carrying secrets of her own all this time—if she's been building herself into something this formidable—then I don'tjust want answers. I need to know every skeleton in her closet. Before one of them decides to come for my family.
"Send me everything," I command. "I'll be back in a few hours. Get a meeting organized. We'll plan from there."
"Understood."
He doesn't hang up. "Massimo," Enzo adds. "There's more."
I close my eyes for half a second. "What now?"
"I don't know if it's something or nothing." He's careful now; experience has taught me that heads are about to roll when he gets like that. "Jenna and Bello… they know each other. It was weird. And Bello's been acting off ever since."
My jaw tightens. "How off?"
"Like a man who just realized something he buried isn't dead."
I don't reply. The silence stretches, heavy with implications neither of us is ready to name.
"Any ideas?" Enzo asks, finally.
I do. The memory surfaces slowly, like something pulled up from deep water. Ten years ago. I was barely conscious. Days after the hit. With my bones shattered and skin stitched together without any consideration for the flesh, my pain was so constant it blurred thought.
My phone—the disposable counterpart to the one I shared with Jenna—is gone. Lost somewhere between asphalt and blood and impact.
I can't leave the room. Can't move. Can't even sit up. But Bello is there. standing at my bedside, watching the door like he expects death to walk through it at any moment. "Hang in there, Massimo. You need to survive and get back on your feet quickly. This is your uncle and your cousins' doing. They want you dead. Just like they did your father."
He tells me to survive. He tells me my uncle ordered the hit.
And I believe him.
"If you die," he adds quietly, leaning closer so only I can hear, "everything rots from the inside out."
