“OK. Just this once.”
Her hand found mine under the table.
She squeezed.
I squeezed back. My eyes were wet. I blinked hard and looked at my wine glass and felt her fingers tight around mine and breathed.
Across the table, Santo was watching me. I could feel his eyes—the dark, steady warmth of them, the particular quality of his attention that I’d been cataloging since the first morning with the eggs and the avocado. He was seeing something in my face that he hadn’t seen before. Something that softened me in a way I couldn’t control and didn’t want to.
His shoulders dropped. A fraction.
For a moment, a wonderful moment, Gemma’s hand stayed in mine. Warm. Steady. Holding on.
Theplateswerecleared.Gemma gathered dishes with the efficient grace of someone who had learned to be useful, and Dante watched her move through his kitchen with an expression that made my chest ache.
Coffee appeared. Dark, rich, poured from a ceramic pot that looked older than I was. The conversation had shifted while I was still recovering from the small earthquake of Gemma’s hand in mine—Dante and Santo speaking in the shorthand of brothers, half-sentences that completed themselves, references I couldn’t follow.
Then Dante said, “The community center.”
The words changed the temperature. Not dramatically—not the way it had changed in his office, when the word bait had landed between us like a grenade. This was subtler. A cooling. The domestic ease that had filled the apartment pulling back a few degrees, making room for something else.
“We’re rebuilding,” Dante continued. He was turning his coffee cup on the table—slow, deliberate, the motion of a man organizing his thoughts into sentences. “The neighborhood’s rallying. Donations coming in faster than we expected. Father Dominic’s coordinating volunteers.” A pause. “It’s not enough. It won’t be enough. But it’s something.”
Santo’s jaw was tight. I could see the muscle working along the hinge—the familiar compression that meant his body was processing something his mouth wasn’t ready to say.
“The Valentis,” Santo said. Not a question.
“The Valentis.” Dante confirmed it with a single nod. “This is their territory now. Not officially—not yet. But they’re pushing.The community center, the firebombing. It’s a message. To us. To the neighborhood. To anyone who remembers what Bridgeport was before Enzo decided he wanted it.”
Gemma returned from the kitchen. She didn’t sit—she stood behind Dante’s chair, her hand finding his shoulder, the contact grounding. Her face had changed. The warmth was still there, but something else had arrived alongside it. The face of a woman who had married into a war and was learning to hold her position in it.
“This is how it started before,” Dante said. His voice had dropped—not in volume, in register. The casual warmth of dinner conversation giving way to something heavier. Something that had weight and history and the particular gravity of a man who had inherited more than a title when his father died. “The last war. Twenty years ago. It began exactly like this. Small moves. Strategic destruction. Messages delivered through fire.”
My coffee was cooling in my hands. I wrapped my fingers around the ceramic and felt the heat leaving it, the warmth transferring from the cup to my palms.
“It’s the civilians I can’t stand to see hurt,” he continued. “Like that girl, back then.”
The words landed in my chest before they reached my ears.
Santo joined in. “Maria Flores. I’ll never forget the name. Poor thing was just sixteen years old. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong summer to be alive in this city.”
My glass stopped.
Maria.
Her name in this room. I couldn’t feel my face. I knew it was doing something—knew the blood was draining from it the way water drains from a tub when you pull the plug, fast and total and leaving nothing behind. My lips were numb. My jaw was locked. The name was still echoing in the space behind my eyes,bouncing off the walls of my skull, Maria Maria Maria, and I couldn’t make it stop.
Santo saw it first.
I felt his attention shift—the particular weight of his gaze leaving Dante and finding me, the way a compass needle finds north. His body changed. The tension that had been in his jaw traveled down, into his shoulders, into his hands. I watched him watch me and I couldn’t explain it, couldn’t form the words, couldn’t do anything except sit in my chair and hold my coffee cup and feel the past twenty-three years of my life collapse into a single point.
My mouth opened.
The words came out in someone else’s voice. Flat. Stripped. The voice I used when I was giving directions or describing a lock mechanism or doing anything that required information without emotion.
“She was my sister.”
The silence after was total.
