Page 96 of The Kingpin’s Bride

Black lacquer. Heavy. The handle was a skull in twenty-four karat gold, the crown on it slightly crooked, like it had been made for a man who had no interest in looking holy. It caught the clinic light and threw it back too bright.

I stared at it. “I don’t want a gift from you.”

“It isn’t a gift,” Leo said. His voice was the same as it had been the night he congratulated me on the seat. Neutral. Final. “It’s a fact. You’re going to walk out of here on something. You can do it on hospital steel, or you can do it on this. Chiara had it made.”

He said my sister’s name like it was the only part of this conversation that belonged to him. That was worse than if he had claimed the gift himself.

I looked at the skull. At the crooked crown. At the man who had married my oldest sister and given her the kind of fierce, open devotion I had spent years telling myself I would never want.

“You came to watch me limp,” I said.

“I came because I feel a debt to you.” Leo’s gaze did not flicker. “You are my family now. So I come bearing an offering.”

“Which is?”

“Peace,” he said. The word did not fit his mouth. It did not fit mine.

I laughed once. It came out raw. “You poisoned my father. And you want peace.”

“I ended your father because he did unforgivable things to your family.” No heat. No apology. “I am not asking you to forgive me. I am telling you that Chiara still has a brother, and Aurora still has one, and the little girl in your penthouse does not need you starting a war you cannot finish on one leg. You can’t just think about yourself now.”

Santino’s eyes moved between us and stayed silent. I looked at the cane again. Twenty-four karat. Ugly. Beautiful. Mine whether I wanted the hand it came from or not.

“If I take it,” I said, “it does not make us even.”

“No.”

“And if anyone from your side of the table uses my wife or that child as a lesson…”

“Then they will have to come through me to reach them,” Leo said. “They come first. I am setting a boundary that includes the women we did not deserve and the children who did not ask to be born in this.”

He stepped back from the bed. The offer stayed where he had left it, gold skull against the white sheet, close enough that I could reach it without sitting up.

I hated him. I hated that the words were clean. I hated that part of me, the part that had stood in a dark hallway outside a guest room and sworn I would not become my father, heard the only version of peace I was ever going to get from a man like Leo.

My hand closed around the cane. The gold was warm from the room. The weight of it was honest. It would click against my floors for the rest of my life. Every step a reminder. Every step a choice.

“Tell Chiara thank you,” I said.

Leo nodded once. Not warmth. Recognition. “You should tell her yourself. Soon. And, Matteo… Walk proudly.”

He left the way he always did. No backward glance.

Santino stood. “Your wife has been in the hall since they let her past the first desk. The little girl is with Aurora. I wasn’t putting a four-year-old in a room that still smells like blood and flowers from Greco.”

I nodded once. The movement still cost me. “Send her in.”

He paused at the door.

“She’s going to see all of it,” he said. “Don’t perform for her. She already knows what you are.”

Then he was gone, and the room was empty. The door opened again. Morena came in like she had been walking toward this room for days and had only just been allowed to finish the distance. No makeup. My shirt under her coat. The thin pink line on her cheek. Her eyes went to my face first, as if she needed proof I was still in it, and then they dropped.

Brace. Bandaging. The gold skull in my fist.

Something raw moved through her expression so fast I almost missed it. Fury. Relief. The particular kind of fear that only shows up when the worst thing has already happened and the person you wanted to hate is still breathing.

She did not run to the bed. She crossed the floor like the tile might give out, stopped at the side of the mattress, and looked at me.