Valentina
He opens the door in a white t-shirt and sweatpants. Barefoot. Reading glasses on, which means I interrupted Augustine or Machiavelli or one of the French novels I can't read. His face shifts when he sees mine. The smile he was building collapses halfway through construction.
"Valentina."
"Let me in."
He steps aside. I walk past him. The penthouse is dim. One floor lamp in the living room. The bay through the windows, the city lights, the black water. His book is facedown on the couch. A glass of water on the side table. Not whiskey. Water. A quiet night. A man reading alone in his penthouse, waiting for nothing, expecting nothing.
Least of all, me.
I stand in the center of the living room. The bag is on my shoulder. The Beretta is inside it, loaded, suppressor attached. I’m carrying enough weaponry to kill him three times over.
He closes the door. Walks toward me. His bare feet on the marble. The reading glasses still on, which makes him look younger, softer, like a man who belongs in a university library rather than at the head of a criminal empire.
"What's wrong?" he says.
"Did your family kill my parents?
Niccolo
The sentence lands in the room like a detonation.
She is standing in my living room with a bag over her shoulder and an expression I have never seen on her face. Not anger. Not grief. Something beneath both. Something geological. The look of bedrock exposed after everything above it has been stripped away.
"Did your family kill my parents?" She asks again.
I don't move. My body understands before my mind catches up that the next thirty seconds will determine whether this woman stays in my life or removes herself from it permanently. The word "remove" has more than one meaning when applied to a woman whose hands never shake.
"Sit down," I say.
"Answer me."
"Valentina—"
"Answer me."
Her voice is flat. Level. The specific frequency of a person who has moved past emotion into something colder. Something operational. I recognize it because I use the same frequency when I'm giving orders that will change someone's life.
The truth. She asked for the truth. I told her two nights ago that love survives knowledge. I told her my mother said it. I meant it.
I take my glasses off. Set them on the side table.
"Yes," I say. "My father's generation. Fourteen years ago. A hit was ordered based on intelligence that indicated your parents were cooperating with law enforcement. Direct threats to the family."
She doesn't flinch. She doesn't blink. She absorbs the confirmation the way stone absorbs rain. Without visible reaction. Without visible damage.
"You knew," she says.
"Not when I met you. Not when we started. I learned about it recently, through the investigation into the Ferrante leak. The same investigation that led me to your uncle."
"My uncle."
"Valentina, youhave no idea."
Valentina
More.
