I see it then; in the line of her shoulders and the way her head is slightly bowed.
Not just resentment.
That’s still there. It’s been there all day, sharp and present and easy enough to understand. A woman whose life has been rearranged around a threat and a man she didn’t choose and doesn’t want.
But this is something else now.
Fear. Real fear.
Not panic. Not helplessness. Just quiet, cold fear. The kind that settles in when the stakes become real and stop sounding hypothetical.
I stand there for one beat longer and feel something tight pull in my chest.
I regret it.
Not being here. Not the work. Not the decisions. Not the rules I put in place the second I understood how exposed she was.
I regret that I had to be the one to drag the reality into the light and leave it where she could no longer step around it and ignore it.
I regret Regalia. The children. The women going pale. The men’s faces hardening even more.
Everyone having to look directly at what they had all apparently spent days avoiding.
But they had to know.
All of them did.
Because families like this survive by handling things in-house. They trust blood, history, loyalty, shared language, old debts, old wounds, long familiarity. They assume they can tighten their own circle and muscle through whatever threat comes next because that is how they’ve always done it.
This time, they can’t.
This time, the threat is too close, too real.
It was aimed at Luca’s children. His heirs.
However the sender meant it, it comes down to the same thing in practice. Hurt the legacy. Hurt the future. Hurt the people carrying the name forward.
Cut into the family where it matters most.
Maybe the motive is punishment. Maybe it’s leverage. Maybe it’s some version of inheritance war, old grudge, new enemy, fractured loyalty. Doesn’t matter. The result is the same.
Luca’s children are exposed.
Their spouses are exposed.
Their children are exposed.
And whatever they think, the men in the family are not somehow outside the blast radius just because they carry guns and have more practice with violence than Caterina does.
If those men are spending all their time protecting wives, and babies, and sisters, and homes, then who is protecting them?
There aren’t enough bodies for this.
Not when the trusted circle has shrunk this badly. Not when there are so few long-time made men they still feel safe leaning on. Not when every familiar face has to be looked at twice and every routine reexamined from the ground up.
Six men cannot hold a whole bloodline together by themselves.
Not with this many houses. This many routes. This many women. This many children.
