“Thank you, Dr. Santoro.” Luca’s voice is quiet. He doesn’t look away from her when he says it.
“Giada is fine.” She strips her gloves. Still not meeting his eyes. “The clinic can follow up if it opens.”
“I’ll remember that.”
She gathers her instruments and leaves. Doesn’t look back at him. Doesn’t look at me either. The door clicks shut behind her.
Luca and I sit in the silence she left behind.
“The Benedetti territory,” I say, because business is the language I speak. “Dante wants the port operations dissolved. Valentino gets the French Quarter supply routes as agreed.”
“Agreed.” Luca flexes his bandaged arm. “Clean work, on the raid. Your family operates well.”
“We had help.”
“You did.” He looks at his forearm. At the careful, precise bandaging. “Your sister. Giada.” A pause that lasts one beat too long. “She’s exceptional.”
My back teeth lock. “She’s off limits.”Damnright she is.
Luca meets my eyes. Dark, steady, the gaze of a man who doesn’t bluff. “Of course.”
But his tone doesn’t match. A door left ajar. I hear it. I let it sit. This is a conversation for another day. When my sister isn’t running on fumes. When I’ve had time to determine whether Luca Valentino is a problem or a man who saw something extraordinary and didn’t have the sense to look away.
I leave him there and double back toward the supply alcove. Gia should have returned to clean up.
I find her alone. Cleaning instruments by the light of a single lamp. The precision is gone. She looks tired. Lonely. Worn through.
She murmurs something. Barely audible. I hold my breath to catch it.
“Someone should see me too.”
Five words. My gut drops through the floor.
I don’t move. Don’t enter. If she knows I heard, she’ll bury it under competence and that warm, steel voice that makes everyone think she’s fine.
I stand in the dark hallway and hear my little sister asking for something I should have given her years ago.
I take the stairs back to the second floor. East corridor, past the guest wing. Nico is on the floor.
My brother is sitting with his back against the wall, legs stretched across the hallway, head tilted back against the wainscoting. T-shirt and sweatpants, no shoes. He looks like a man who set up camp hours ago and has no intention of moving.
The door beside him is closed. Mila’s room. No sound from inside.
“She throw anything at you today?”
Nico looks up. His smile is instant, reflexive. “Only a book. Progress.”
The smile stops at his mouth. I’ve known Nico for twenty-eight years and I’ve never seen that before. The gap between his mouth and his gaze.
“You speak Russian,” I say.
His smile doesn’t change. “I pick things up.”
“Since when?”
“Long time ago.” His gaze drifts to Mila’s door.
I let it go. That’s how this works.
