When the door closes, Valentina looks up at me. "You two are exhausting."
"She started it."
"You threatened to burn the city down twenty minutes ago."
"That was different." I pull her closer. "That was for you."
Her expression softens. She reaches up, cups my face. "I love you."
"I love you too." I press a kiss to her forehead, then lower, to her stomach. "Both of you."
My phone buzzes.
Matteo's name flashes across the screen.
I answer. "Fratello?"
"Your prosecutor friend just served me with a subpoena." His voice is flat, controlled in that way that means he's furious. "Outside, in front of half of our men."
I pinch the bridge of my nose. "Lindsay."
"She fucking smiled when she handed it to me."
Valentina is watching me, eyebrows raised.
"Handle it," I tell him.
"Oh, I'm going to handle it." There's something dangerous in his voice now. "She wants to play games? Fine. But she's going to learn that Vitale men don't lose."
The line goes dead.
Valentina tilts her head. "What was that about?"
"Matteo and Lindsay," I say.
"Oh, gosh." She laughs. "That's going to be a disaster."
"Or extremely entertaining." I pull her back against my chest. "Either way, not our problem."
"Poor Matteo."
"Poor Lindsay," I correct. "She has no idea what she just started."
I hold my wife for a long time.
There is no strategy in it. No calculation. Just my wife in my arms and her voice still in the room, I choose you. Something in me that has no name in the language of Dons and empires and men who learned at seven years old that feeling things made you weak.
My father was wrong about many things.
That was the first.
I think about the version of the story I wrote in my head before she existed in it. The surveillance photograph. The plan that would either secure my empire or burn it to the ground. The cold certainty that I was simply collecting a debt, closing a chapter, taking what was owed.
I think about the man who wrote those words.
He had no idea.
He sat at the head of his empire and believed he understood power that it lived in fear and strategy and control. That the right move was always the calculated one. That the heart was a liability and love was a word for men who hadn't learned what it cost.
