Retaliation. For something I did. For something I am.
I look at the fire for a moment and I let it sit there, the weight of that name, the specific and familiar shape of it.
Then I put it back where it lives.
"I'll honor the marriage," I say. "Politically. The alliance stays intact and Salvatore gets nothing he can use as a grievance." I look at Matteo. "But I'm keeping distance until I know what this actually is. Until I know her."
"That's smart," Dante says.
"It's necessary," I say, because smart implies I had options.
"Watch Salvatore," Matteo says. "Something about how he ran this was too clean. Too neat. Men like him don't give away daughters, they invest them. The question is what he expects back."
Enzo shifts forward. "There's something else that's been sitting with me. The sister."
Matteo looks at him.
"Salvatore has a second daughter. Nine years old. Nobody knew she existed — not in our circles, not in the De Luca network, not in any of the intelligence we've had on that family for the last decade. She was kept completely off the books." He pauses. "A man like Salvatore doesn't hide a child by accident. He hid her because she's useful hidden."
The room is quiet for a moment.
"Leverage," Dante says.
"That's my read," Enzo says. "Which means that whatever Salvatore expects back from this marriage, he's already got a way to make sure he gets it."
I think about the way Gia talked about her sister, not fear for herself. Something older than that. Something that had been living in her chest for a while.
I think about the way she looked coming back from that conversation with her father at the reception. The ten seconds she stood at the edge of the tent, face smooth and still and every person who didn't grow up in this world would have seen composure. I saw someone holding a wall up with both hands and hoping nobody noticed the cracks.
I noticed.
I filed it away. I've been filing things about her away all day and I don't particularly want to think about what that means.
"You’re right," Matteo says. "So we watch."
"There's something else," Enzo says, and the easy tone is gone. "The O'Rourkes have gone quiet."
I go still. "How quiet?"
"Three weeks. No movement on the east side operations. No contact with the usual channels. No noise anywhere we'd normally hear noise." He pauses. "You know what O'Rourke silence means."
I know exactly what it means. Killian O'Rourke quiet is not Killian O'Rourke inactive. It's Killian O'Rourke listening. And Killian O'Rourke only listens when he's already decided what he's about to do and doesn't want us hearing it come.
"Three weeks," Matteo says, and something behind his eyes has sharpened into the thing that made him the man sitting in this room. I look at Dmitri, who is standing in the doorway because he is always exactly where he needs to be.
"How long have you been standing there," Enzo says.
"Long enough," Dmitri says. His eyes move to me, not to Matteo. Waiting.
"Perimeter rotations doubled," I say. "Eyes on every approach, east side first. Anything that moves, I hear about it tonight." I look at Dmitri. "And I want to know what they've been doing for three weeks. Every thread you can pull."
"Already started," he says, and goes.
Enzo watches the empty doorway. "That man is going to give me a heart attack one day."
"You'll deserve it," Dante says.
I stand. The scotch is gone, the fire is lower, and somewhere upstairs there's a woman in my room.
