Which meant Sergio Avola was already moving. Which meant whatever I needed to have in place needed to be in place now.
"Call everyone in," I said. "We need to get the full picture before we make any moves."
"Where will we fight?" Emilio said it with the directness of a man who had already made his own decision about his role in what was coming.
I looked at him. "Emilio?”
"Your father can't stand with you." He sat straighter in the chair, and I saw in him the man he had been before years of consigliere work had made fighting someone else's battles the primary expression of his loyalty. "So it's my job now. I haven't forgotten any of my training." His jaw was set and his eyes were level and I knew without asking that he'd been preparing for this since the day my father was diagnosed, quietly and without announcement, the way he did everything that mattered.
"I know you haven't," I said. "I've seen you in the shooting range." Three times a week, every week, without fail. "I'm glad you're with me."
"Always." He nodded once. "Where?"
"Here." I leaned forward on the desk. "I can control everything here. I know every inch of this property and so do my men, and that advantage matters more than it sounds." I thought through the logistics, the parts of the grounds that were defensible, the parts that weren't, the staff who needed to be gone before this happened. "I'm sending everyone non-essential home. Housekeeping, the chef, the gardeners, anyone who doesn't need to be here. I want only guards, soldiers, and the security team on the property when this goes down."
Emilio nodded, already cataloguing.
"And Dante," I said, because it needed to be said. "He's going to push back but I need him in the safe house."
Emilio's expression shifted slightly. "He already knows," he said. "I told him this morning because I thought he'd want time to prepare." A pause. "He said he'd take his chances."
I looked at the desk for a moment. My father, who was dying of lung cancer in his bedroom, who had been the most formidable man I'd ever known, who was refusing to be moved from his own house in the face of an armed threat because he was still, even now, more don than patient. I couldn't decide if I was frustrated or proud.
"I'll talk to him," I said.
I was reading back through the transcript, going through every vile thing Sergio Avola had written about his daughter with a cold fury that I was keeping carefully managed, when a knock came at the door and Cecelia walked in.
She stopped when she saw Emilio and read the room immediately, the way she read rooms, which was to say completely and without apparent effort. Emilio excused himself with a nod and she waited until the door closed behind him before she came to me.
I pushed my chair back from the desk and held out my hand and she settled onto my lap with the naturalness of someone who had been doing it for years rather than days, and I held the transcript in front of her without preamble because she had asked to be treated as a partner and I intended to keep that promise.
She read it. I watched her face go through several things in quick succession, none of which she tried to hide from me.
"I knew he hated me," she said finally. "But this is vile, Con." She let the paper flutter to the desk and leaned back against me. I wrapped my arms around her and felt some of the tension in her shoulders slowly release.
"You challenged him and won," I said. "I never imagined he'd take that lying down. Especially with my family involved."
She was quiet for a moment. I half expected her to stiffen at the reminder of what her father was, but she didn't. "He used to be kind," she said. "He was a good father, once." Her voice was distant, reaching for something that was a long way back. "Before the wars. Before he understood what I was worth to him." She didn't finish the sentence and she didn't need to.
I held her tighter and didn't try to offer anything that would ring false. Some things didn't have a response that was adequate and this was one of them.
"I'm sending the staff home within the hour," I said after a moment. "We'll be down to guards and soldiers until this is resolved." I paused. "I hate to ask, given that we're technically on our honeymoon."
She turned on my lap and looked at me with an expression that had something in it I was still learning to recognize, the particular warmth she reserved for moments when I said something that surprised her with its honesty. "Will you cook for the men? It's a lot to ask."
"You don't have to ask." She held my gaze. "I will do anything you need me to."
I looked at her face, at the concern in her eyes and the steadiness underneath it, at this woman who had crossed an ocean alone and walked into enemy territory and built something real here with the same quiet determination she brought to everything, and I thought that I had not adequately understood what I was agreeing to when I proposed marriage in the library six days ago. I had thought I understood. I had been wrong in the best possible way.
"I'm going to remember you said that," I said.
"I promise." She leaned in and kissed me, and it was the first time she'd initiated it without the context of the bedroom, the first time it had come from her without anything prompting it except the wanting to, and I held her the way you held things you intended to keep and kissed her back with everything I had.
Her arms went around my neck and she leaned into me and the kiss stopped being something gentle and became something considerably less manageable, and I had one hand in her hair and the other moving down her back and I was genuinely considering the structural integrity of my own desk when a soft knock on the door made us both go completely still.
"Oh god, Con." She let go of me and was off my lap and across the room in approximately two seconds, smoothing her hair withboth hands before pressing her fingers to her mouth. Her lips were beautifully swollen and her face was flushed red from the stubble of my jaw. I slid my chair forward and closer to the desk with a speed that was not my most dignified moment.
"Come in."
