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I know the number before Romeo picks up. I know because Vittore Bianchi never calls this house. Vittore Bianchi sends messages through layers — encrypted apps, intermediaries, the occasional sealed envelope hand-delivered to Fabio’s front gate by a driver who never turns off the engine. Vittore does not dial the Rivas penthouse directly unless the man who owns him says dial.

I am in the kitchen. Coffee in my hand. Marisol’s chessboard between us, her fingers hovering over the knight she’s been threatening to sacrifice for three moves. She hears the ring too. Her eyes flick to mine — one beat, assessment complete — and she pulls her hand back from the board.

She knows.

Romeo answers in the hallway. I hear his voice but not his words — the wall between the kitchen and the corridor swallows consonants and leaves only rhythm. And the rhythm is wrong. Too even. Too measured. My brother’s natural register runs warm, loose, the cadence of a man who smiles while he thinks. This register is flat. Controlled. The voice he uses when charm is a liability.

Santino appears in the kitchen doorway. Arms crossed. The scar on his forearm catches the overhead light the way it always does when he’s standing still — a white ridge of tissue that maps every fight he survived before God and Pia gave him a reason to stop surviving and start living. He doesn’t look at me. He looks at the hallway.

“Vittore?” he says.

“Vittore,” I confirm.

“Fuck.”

That single word carries more theology than anything Santino has said in a confessional. He uncrosses his arms, crosses them again. The Bishop is calculating.

Romeo walks back into the kitchen ninety seconds later, and the absence hits me before his face does. The grin is gone. The deflection — that fluid, easy thing he wears like armor made of sunlight — stripped clean. What’s left is jaw. Green eyes carrying weight I have seen exactly twice in my life. Once when the photograph of Dante in chains arrived. Once now.

He sets the phone on the counter. Facedown. The gesture is deliberate — Romeo does not hide screens. Romeo leaves everything open, doors and phones and conversations, because Giovanni locked everything and Romeo built his empire on the opposite architecture. When Romeo turns a phone facedown, the information on it is not meant for the room.

It is meant for me.

“Vittore sends his regards,” Romeo says. His voice is so level it could cut glass. “Emiliano wants his daughter returned.”

Returned.

The word lands in my chest and sits there. Not rescued. Not invited home. Not asked to come back. Returned. The grammar of a man reclaiming property. A father who spent twenty years hiding his daughter behind locked doors and pristine walls and a trust fund she didn’t know existed — and when that daughter walks out on her own legs, into a house she chose to enter, the word he reaches for is returned.

“What exactly did Vittore say?” Santino asks. His arms have not uncrossed.

“Polite shit.” Romeo’s jaw flexes. “Diplomatic language. Respect for the alliance. Acknowledgment of shared objectives regarding Giovanni’s infrastructure. And beneath every fucking syllable, the promise that if Liana Maritz is not out of this building by sundown, the alliance dies and what follows will make the last two years look like a disagreement over parking.”

Silence. The kitchen clock ticks. Nova’s prenatal vitamins sit on the counter beside Tomás’s cereal bowl — two realities occupying the same square foot of granite.

Marisol has not moved. Her hand still hovers above the chessboard, over the knight she was about to sacrifice. But her eyes are on Romeo. Reading him the way I taught her to read — not the words, not the posture, but the weight between them.

Romeo looks at me.

And I see it. The thing he is not saying. The thing his open-door policy makes almost impossible to hide because openness means the gaps show.

He is not angry at me.

He is afraid for me.

The Knight Who Understands

The hallway.

Twelve feet of hardwood between the kitchen and the bedrooms. This is where every real conversation in this family happens — where the doors are closed, but the walls listen, and the truth comes out sideways, in low voices, between brothers who learned silence from a father who weaponized everything, including sound.

Romeo leans against the wall. I stand opposite. Six feet between every one of them and us, loaded.

He rolled his sleeves to his elbows before walking out here. The Patek Philippe sits loose on his wrist. His jaw is set, and his green eyes are doing the thing I’ve watched them do since I was old enough to understand what it meant — the calculation running underneath the charm, except right now there is no charm. There is just the man. The leader. The brother whose wife is thirty-two weeks pregnant and whose daughter will arrive into a world shaped by every decision he makes between now and the next seventy-two hours.

“You love her,” he says.

It is the first time either of us has said it out loud in this hallway. I don’t answer because my silence is the answer, and Romeo reads silence better than anyone in this family except me.