The Don of New Orleans.
My hand is shaking.
My throat closes. My vision blurs at the edges and I let it.
“Dio.” I can’t get a full breath. “Cassia. A baby.”
She cups my face. She’s crying, laughing through it.
I kiss her. Taste salt.
“Both of you.” My voice comes out wrecked. Raw. My hand spreads wide across her stomach. “I love both of you.”
She pulls me down until my forehead rests against her belly.
I close my eyes. Press my lips to the skin where our child is growing. My hands won’t stop trembling and I let them. I let all of it happen. The shaking. The tightness. The crack in my chest that isn’t breaking.
It’s making room.
But even now, a shadow presses at the edge.
Renzo.
He’s been disappearing for weeks. Came back from Milan with bruised knuckles and eight pounds missing. Someone breached our firewalls, and he traced it to a hacker embedded in the Benedetti network. A ghost. He’s been hunting him ever since, and whatever he’s finding is eating him alive.
His eyes are flat where they used to be just empty. He looks at me sometimes like he’s trying to memorize my face.
I won’t let him go much longer. That’s not a plan. That’s a promise.
Tomorrow we’ll tell the family. Gia will cry. Renzo will nod and grip the back of my neck in that way he has when words fail him. Marco will demand to be the favorite uncle. Nico will say something that makes everyone laugh. Nonna Rosa will pressher magnolia handkerchief to her face and whisper Mama’s name like a prayer.
Tomorrow.
But tonight I hold my wife. I hold what’s coming. And I breathe.
Just breathe.
