Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty Seven
Adrian
The office looks better now, I note, as I watch Caterina sit behind her desk, which now faces the correct sight line.
The chair is positioned so Caterina can see the door without turning her head. The glass along the interior wall has been reinforced. The blind system is automatic now, tied into the office controls and my security panel.
The artwork that used to create a blind corner is gone, replaced by a narrow console table with a few tastefully decorative pieces sitting on it.
The room still looks like Caterina.
Elegant, curated, and expensive without screaming it.
Caterina has almost stopped complaining about it, too. But not quite.
I think she mostly does it for fun now, though. Which helps.
Right now, she is behind the desk, dark hair smooth over one shoulder, a fitted cream blouse tucked into dark green trousers, a gold pen in one hand while she listens to her personal admin, Oliver, run through the afternoon schedule.
The morning light catches her profile, the dark sweep of her lashes, the slight pursing of her lips when she hears something she does not like.
I stand near the interior wall where I can see the door, the windows, Oliver, and the faint reflection of the hallway in the polished surface of a framed photograph.
My side barely hurts today.
That is a lie.
But it’s nothing compared to what it did a month ago, and that is close enough.
My side is healing. Not fast enough for my taste, but faster than predicted.
Dr. Alfonsi cleared me for more movement last week with a list of restrictions I have followed closely enough not to reopen anything and loosely enough to function as security.
The stitches are gone. The scar is ugly and fresh, still tight when I turn too quickly or lift too much weight. I can move without favoring it now, as long as I am careful. I can draw, pivot, drive, clear a room, and stand for long periods without looking like I am about to bleed through my shirt.
I can even train lightly, though the doctor would disagree with my definition of lightly if he knew.
He does not need to know.
Caterina knows.
Which means Teresa probably knows too, because those women communicate in ways that should be studied by intelligence agencies.
The recovery has been easier than it should have been because Caterina has done something I did not expect.
She listened.
Not always and not pleasantly. Definitely not without commentary, argument, and the occasional threat to fire me.
But she listened.
She is not in the casino every single day now. She still works too much, answers too many emails, and takes too many calls from people who seem to think an attempted assassination should have no effect on response time, but she does what she can out of the house.
She has also allowed me to increase coverage on her property.
That one cost me.
No, not financially.
But with patience.
She hates feeling watched. She hates seeing my people at her gates, in her camera feeds, near her garage, along her route.
She hates that the first thing she sees when she pulls into her own driveway is proof that someone forced her home to become a protected site instead of a private one.
What should be her retreat at the end of the day.
But she said yes.
For me.
That is the part I try not to think about while I am standing in her office and watching her work.
It would be easier if there had been another incident.
That sounds wrong. It is wrong.
I do not want another attack. I do not want another note, another rerouted vehicle, another staged fight, another moment where Caterina is in the open and someone is going after her.
But the quiet can be worse in some ways.
No more incidents since the casino.
No attempts on the homes, no threatening packages, no suspicious vehicles close enough to trigger a response. No new notes or obvious tails.
After one month of the quiet, some of the Contis have started to relax.
Not fully or stupidly. This family does not relax the way normal families do.
Their version of relaxed still includes guns close at hand and vehicles checked before use. But the shoulders have lowered. The conversations have grown less clipped.
The women have started taking the children outside again under supervision.
The men no longer look like they are thirty seconds from ordering everyone into armored vehicles.
The assumption that the enemy missed their shot and retreated.
I do not share it.
The silence puts me on edge.
It puts me more on edge.
Whoever is behind this did not simply give up after the casino.
No one puts that much effort into a coordinated threat, tests routes, maps routines, clones badges, stages a fight in the middle of a gaming floor, sends armed people after Caterina, and then walks away because the first serious attempt failed.
Failure teaches.
It does not always deter.
They are waiting. Adjusting.
Watching the family relax again.
That is what I would do.
It helps a lot that Caterina knows it.
She has been working her own angle since the morning after we stayed at Luca’s.
At first, I thought she was trying to keep busy to stay ahead of the fear.
Then I actually saw the notes. The shell companies, the old property records, the vendor connections.
The names that did not line up until she made them line up by staying awake too late and staring at filings until her eyes went red.
She thinks she is close.
She has said those exact words three times in the past week.
Every time, I believe her.
Every time, I hate it.
Because close means she is approaching something, and if she can see it, there is a chance it can see her too.
The structure she is tracking is ugly. Shell company inside shell company.
Development groups with clean public images and dirty old ties.
Vendor accounts that changed hands multiple times in five years.
Insurance inquiries that look ordinary until they sit beside board pressure and press leaks.
Names tied to other names tied to old Conti history.
Each one takes time.
Caterina doesn’t have enough time.
She still has a casino to run. A board to manage. A staff to reassure. Investors to keep from panicking.
And tonight, because apparently, she has decided sleep is optional, she is having a dinner party. At her house. For her siblings.
That fact annoys me enough that I can feel it in my jaw.
This, she’s planning on her own because even though she has her incredibly efficient admin sitting across from her, no one outside the family can know it’s happening.
Hell, no one outside the family can know the don’s eldest daughter, Lucia, is going to be in town.
Oliver, seated across from her, nods along while she moves through the day’s schedule at a pace that would make a lesser assistant cry.
He is young, efficient. Nervous around me, though he tries not to show it.
Smart enough to anticipate most of what Caterina needs before she asks, which means he is useful.
He is also one of the few people outside the family who currently has access to her schedule, communications, and preferences, which means I have already vetted him personally.
I also have him being run regularly by my company. In case something changes at some point or new information crops up.
Caterina knows. She rolled her eyes when she found out, but… she did not tell me to stop.
I call that progress.
“Move the vendor review to Thursday,” Caterina says, scanning the tablet in front of her. “Push the investor call by thirty minutes, but do not make it sound like we are pushing it. Tell them I wanted a longer block to discuss their concerns.”
Oliver types rapidly. “Longer block. Not delay. Got it.”
“And I want the updated board packet before noon tomorrow. Not end of day. Noon.”
“Understood.”
“If Legal pushes back on the incident wording again, send it to Roberto and copy me.”
Oliver nods.
Her phone buzzes again. She glances at it, ignores it, and flips the page in front of her.
“Did the vendor compliance form come through?”
“Not yet,” Oliver says.
“Follow up.”
“Already did.”
She looks up at him.
He almost smiles. “Twice.”
“Good.”
I keep my attention on the room, but some of it stays on her. It always does. That was true before I touched her. It is worse now.
I watch her process three different tracks at once and understand, again, why her family underestimates her at their own risk.
They see the youngest. The daughter. The baby. The one to protect.
I see the woman who can control an office without raising her voice, read people through a line item, and put out multiple fires before anyone else realizes there even was one.
On top of all of that, the dinner.
I understand why she’s doing it. I do.
It has been a point of discussion for days.
Argument, really.
Lucia is finally coming into town with Nick and the children. She has put off the trip long enough because of the threat, because of security, because everyone kept telling everyone else to wait until things settled.
Things have not settled.
They have only gone quiet.
Against my objections, she’s coming anyway. I’m happy they’re keeping it quiet, at the very least.
But, now that she’ll be here, Caterina wants all of her siblings, their spouses, and their children under one roof for one dinner before the rest of the visit becomes the entire Conti machine orbiting around them.
One night. Just siblings. Just the people who grew up in the same house and somehow found their way back to each other in pieces.
I understand the emotional value.
I do not like the security aspect of it all.
I made my objections loud and clear.
Caterina addressed my concerns while trailing her wicked tongue down my stomach, stopping to nibble the skin just above my cock and making all my logic turn to static.
It was the most compelling argument I’ve ever heard.
And my counter-argument, if I recall, was a strangled groan.