Page 5 of The Hidden Heir

Oh, fuck.

I can't read a single thing on Luca's face while he does. No shock. No softness. No anger. Nothing. A closed door where a man should be.

His jaw flexes once. That's it.

One tiny movement, and somehow it's more terrifying than if he'd pulled the gun.

"Whatever you want," I hear myself say, low and fast, "whatever you think I did, fine. Me. But you're not touching my son."

The words are out before fear can stop them. Good. Fear can get in line.

Luca Petrucci looks at me for a long, long second. Then at Mikey. Then back at me.

"Your son," he says, "is the reason I'm here."

2

LUCA

Icame for my dead brother's son.

His mother wasn't supposed to survive the night.

An hour ago I was parked across the street with the engine dead while Victor argued in my ear. "If you're wrong about her, there is no taking it back."

"I'm not wrong. The tip that put a grenade at my brother's feet came from a burner, bought with cash in Calumet City, forty minutes after a withdrawal from one of her hidden accounts three blocks away. Same afternoon. Same three blocks. She's Mancuso's stepdaughter, and she stayed vanished until my brother was dead. I don't leave problems breathing behind me."

"Luca." A pause I didn't like. "You don't know the whole story."

"I know enough of it."

I ended the call. The rest I've done a dozen times in thirty years: the quiet approach, the dead porch light, the knock. My hands knew the work.

Then she opened the door already wearing my name in her mouth, chin up, my brother's son on her hip, and my hand closed around the gun.

And did not draw it.

Not on the porch, I told myself. Not standing in the open. Timing, not mercy. The plan is still the plan: question her, take the boy, and before sunrise Valentina Peroni becomes a closed file. I have given the order in my head a hundred times tonight.

It keeps not reaching my mouth.

Now she's standing in her living room with her body angled between me and the heir to everything my family has ever bled for, telling the most dangerous man in Chicago what he will and will not touch. She has no leverage, no weapon, no way out, and she is negotiating anyway.

I should find it tiresome.

I don't.

"He needs to go back to sleep," she says, when the silence gets too heavy. Steel over terror. "Whatever this is, it's not happening in front of him."

"Then put him down. We'll talk in the kitchen."

She doesn't put him down. She carries him with her into the kitchen, the room with the knives, which tells me she's thinking, and buckles him into his high chair where she can see both of us at once.

"What's his name?" I ask.

"Michael." She doesn't look at me when she says it.

Michael studies me with open, unhurried curiosity. Then Valentina hands him a cracker and I cease to exist. "Mama! Wawa!" he announces, and she gives him a sippy cup he takes with both small hands.