I say nothing.
"Rafael." A beat. "Hold it together."
Gritting my teeth hard to the point of hurt, I end the call.
I stand at the window with the phone in my hand, the grounds below dark and quiet, and my jaw so tight the muscle is starting to ache.
Matteo is right. Matteo is always right, which is why he's the Don.
I know how to do this. I have done this a dozen times. I know that patience is the sharpest tool available, and I know that losing my mind serves no one.
I know all of this.
I still need air.
The grounds at this hour are mine in a way they aren't during the day, quiet, dark, the perimeter lights casting long flat shapes across the lawns. I do the east walk, hands shoved in my pockets, the cold doing what the stale study air couldn't. The guards on rotation acknowledge me as I pass and return to their posts. Everything is where it should be. Everything is running the way I set it up to run.
I round the corner toward the garden.
And I stop.
Gia is on the stone path that runs along the lower garden wall.
Beside her is Luca.
I approved his employment eight months ago.
Young, capable, twenty-six.
She doesn't know I'm here.
The angle of the path and the shadow from the garden wall put me outside her sightline, and I don't move to correct it.
She's talking, and then whatever she's said lands and then laugh follows, that one, the real one. Head tipping back, shoulders dropping, completely unguarded. The laugh she does not produce in rooms full of people, or at dinner tables, or anywhere that I am standing close enough to see.
Luca responds, and she says something else. She gestures in that specific way she does when the thing she's describing has a shape to it.
He laughs too and shifts his weight toward her—the lean of a man who is not aware he's doing it.
I am aware.
My hand finds the garden wall beside me, and I press my palm flat against the stone. I stand there and watch, and something moves through my chest that has no clean name, something that crawls up from wherever I keep the things I don't look at and settles in the back of my throat, hot and ugly.
She is laughing in my garden with one of my men while somewhere in my house a rat is still breathing.
I push off the wall.
I find her an hour later coming down the upstairs corridor, hair loose, the robe, bare feet on the floor. She sees me and her step doesn't falter but her posture does that thing, that small recalibration, the brace.
"Rafael—"
"What the fuck were you doing outside?"
Her chin snaps up. Her whole body goes still.
"Excuse me?"
"The garden." I stop four feet from her. "Forty minutes. Luca."
