And I want to dress up.
Maybe because I have been trapped between fear, and work, and security briefings for weeks.
Maybe because for the first time in a month, I want to feel like a woman hosting her family instead of a target being moved from secure location to secure location. Maybe because Lucia is coming.
I haven’t seen her in months.
I have only seen Gabriel once since he was born seven months ago, which still feels impossible. Lucia had a baby, and somehow life became so complicated that I haven’t seen my nephew even once. A chubby, dark-haired little thing with Nick’s blue eyes and Lucia’s stubborn expression already forming in miniature.
I smile faintly at the memory and blend the shadow a little darker at the outer corner.
Lucia has been to dinner with us plenty of times since she came back into our lives. At Papà’s house. At Giovanni’s. At Roberto and Olivia’s. At my place too, once or twice, though always with more family than furniture.
But dinner with just the siblings?
Without Papà? Without the uncles?
Only once, and it was shortly after Lucia and Papà mended fences.
And that dinner had been… difficult.
That is a charitable word.
Awkward. Stilted. Everyone trying too hard not to say the wrong thing, which of course guaranteed someone would say exactly the wrong thing.
That someone was Vito.
Or Lucia.
Depending on which side of the table you were sitting on.
I set the brush down and reach for eyeliner, my mouth twisting at the memory.
The argument had been needed. I know that now. At the time, I wanted to crawl under the table and stay there until everyone just shut the hell up.
Lucia is the oldest.
Vito is the second oldest.
That sounds simple when you say it like that. A birth order fact.
Not so simple in our family.
When Lucia testified against Papà, and he went to prison, it did more than tear the family open. It rearranged it completely. Lucia disappeared into witness protection. Papà was gone. Mama got sick shortly after. My uncles were busy stepping into the family business and filling the big shoes of the don, while everyone outside our walls watched for weakness and the chance to swoop in.
Nico and I were young.
Too young for the things we were forced to understand anyway.
And Vito—
Vito stopped being the careless second child.
He was always the heir, but he was never the oldest.
Then he became the oldest son overnight. And more. The shield, the caregiver. Both father and mother, when Mama could not be, and Papà was behind bars, and Lucia was gone.
I pause with the eyeliner near my lashes.
