“Don’t worry so much. I’ll win the game.”
Merda, Omar curses under his breath in Italian. Which amuses me.
I have known him since he was twenty and stupid enough to think loyalty meant dying quickly. I taught him better. Loyalty means living long enough to be useful. It means speaking when every coward in the room nods. It means standing close to the line without stepping over it. Tonight, he is considering stepping over it for the first time.
I let him.
“She is not some stray thing you can keep because she entertains you,” he says. “She is not going to soften to you just because you let her see the children. She will turn every kindness into leverage and every insult into a weapon. And you still want her here.”
It is not a question, but I answer anyway.
“Yes.”
Omar looks at me as if he is seeing the first crack in something he believed was stone. He should be careful with that. Cracks only matter if they continue. I decide what continues in my house.
Usually.
The memory comes without permission. Maya in the hallway mirror after dinner, still enough that anyone else might have missed the fracture. Red dress. Bare feet. Bruised wrist. Mouth too soft from the bite of chocolate I fed her because she had the nerve to demand it. She looked at herself like she had found evidence of a crime.
She sat in my lap to regain power.
She did regain some.
That was what made it worth letting her.
“You are thinking like a man,” Omar says carefully, “not like the Don of Miami.”
That earns him a cold look. Omar does not step back, but his throat moves once. He knows he has walked close enough to feel the temperature drop.
“My father used to say that.”
The color shifts in his face.
“My father believed men were divided into parts,” I continue. “The man who wanted, the man who ruled, the man who bled, the man who killed. He thought the trick was choosing which part survived.”
Omar’s voice is quiet. “Was he wrong?”
“Yes.” I set the glass down. “A Don does not stop being a man. He becomes one who can afford what he wants.”
“And if what he wants costs more than expected?”
“Then he pays or takes a better deal.”
Omar holds my gaze. “Maya Reeves may be too expensive, even for you.”
“Then I will have to enjoy the purchase while I have it.”
He looks away, frustrated. I let him keep the dignity of it. The silence holds for several seconds before his phone vibrates. He checks the screen, and whatever he sees sharpens him back into the man who handles problems before they bleed onto my floor.
“We should relocate the children. Leon’s on the prowl,” he says, tucking the device back into his pocket.
“We will.”
“And Maya?”
“She stays close.”
I open the top drawer and take out Maya’s file. Not because I need to read it. I know the contents well enough. FBI record. Undercover assignments. Smotrov connections. Alice. Photographs. Dates. The hard proof of a woman reduced to paper by men who thought information was the same as understanding.
