"You're lying. You forget I lived in that compound for twenty-three years. You don't eat when you're at war. You drink espresso and pace." Another pause. "How bad is it?"
"We took the South Side docks on Tuesday. Fabio hit the Ashland warehouse line." He stops. The next words come harder. "He lost two men."
Silence. When Lucia speaks again, the guarded edge has softened into something raw. "Vittorio and Sal?"
"Yes."
"God, Dom." A long exhale. "Their families?—"
"I'll take care of it."
"I know you will." The words are quiet, loaded with a complicated understanding that stretches across twenty years of shared blood and separate prisons. She knows her brother. She knows his version of love is a check delivered to a widow's door at midnight.
Dominic's arm tightens around me. I feel the shift in his body—the bracing, the gathering of nerve. His jaw works for several seconds before he speaks again.
"There's a woman in the brownstone."
The silence that follows is so complete I can hear the faint hum of the phone's connection.
"Say that again," Lucia says.
"A woman. A florist." His voice is clipped, the words dragged out of him by force. "She delivered flowers to L'Ombra and witnessed an interrogation. I couldn't let her leave."
"You couldn't let her leave," Lucia repeats, and there is something in her voice—not accusation, not anger, but a stunned, almost disbelieving recognition. She knows the Costa men. She lives with three of them. She knows exactly what "couldn't let her leave" means in the language of men who process love through absolute control.
"Her name is Sienna," Dominic says, and his hand finds my hip beneath the duvet, his fingers pressing into my skin as if anchoring himself to my presence while he speaks my name to the one person whose judgment he fears most. "Sienna Marchetti. She had a flower shop on the North Side. Petal and Stem. Her grandmother built it."
"Had?"
"The Bellantis burned it to the foundation." His voice goes flat, the way it does when the rage is too big for tone. "They've had surveillance on L'Ombra for weeks. They identified her van, pulled her name from city records before Vincenzo could finish scrubbing them. They took her shop to send me a message."
Another long silence. I imagine Lucia on the other end—dark-eyed, dark-curled, the woman who taught herself encryption in isolation and stole her brother's master ledger to buy her freedom. I imagine her processing the image of her brother, the man who caged her for twenty-three years, confessing that he has caged another woman and is terrified of losing her. I imagine the three men who orbit her life—Nick, Rafe, and Jude—the ones who pulled her out of her brother's compound and into a world where she finally chose her own walls.
"What did you do?" Lucia asks, and the question holds no judgment. It is the quiet, resigned inquiry of a woman who already knows the answer.
"I sent Fabio and Santi to burn their distribution hub. Tens of millions of dollars of Bellanti infrastructure. It will accelerate the war by months."
"For a florist."
"For her," Dominic corrects, and the raw, possessive heat in his voice makes Lucia go quiet again.
When she finally speaks, her voice has changed. The guardedness is gone. In its place is something tender and ancient—the particular ache of a sister who understands that the brother who destroyed her life to keep her alive has finally found something he is terrified of losing.
"You never do anything small, do you,fratello."
It isn't a question.
Dominic closes his eyes. The wordfratellohits him like a physical blow. His fingers tighten on my hip, and I press closer against his side, giving him my warmth, my weight, my presence.
"How are the girls?" he asks, and the roughness in his voice takes on a different texture—a grinding, reluctant tenderness, as if the question costs him something.
"Tyra just turned five. She's reading already—actual sentences, not just picture books. She has your stubbornness." A pause. "Sera is three months old. She has Jude's eyes and screams like a Costa."
Dominic's chest moves beneath my cheek, a deep, unsteady breath. He doesn't say anything for a long beat. He is sitting with the name of the niece he refused to hold, the child in tiny shoes, now five years old and reading sentences with his stubbornness in her spine.
"Good," he says finally, and the single word carries every apology he doesn't know how to speak.
"Dom." Lucia's voice is careful now, deliberate. "This woman. Sienna. Does she know?"
