22. Rocco
ROCCO
Istand in Lucia Russo’s hallway with a biscuit in my hand while the woman I love asks another man to stay until our baby is born.
There are more impressive ways to suffer. I know that. Still, this isn’t my favorite morning.
Lucia gave me the biscuit like she was issuing a weapon. Eat. Do not bleed on my hallway. I’ve obeyed half of that so far.
The bedroom door is cracked behind me. Not enough for me to see them. Enough for sound to escape if sound wants to.
I don’t listen on purpose. There’s a difference. It’s a thin, stupid difference, and I’m standing on it like it’s the last bridge out of hell.
My name, once. Then Serena’s voice, soft and cracked.
Please. Stay until the baby comes.
My hand closes around the biscuit. It turns to crumbs in my palm.
Of course. I can’t even hold a snack without making a mess. Lucia is going to kill me. Fair.
My phone vibrates. Lewis. Again.
I step down the hall into Lucia’s narrow kitchen and answer before it wakes the whole flat. “Talk.”
“Rafe’s men are moving,” Lewis says.
Good. I was worried the day might become emotionally simple.
“Where?”
“Not toward the flat. Not yet. Two cars spotted near the private maternity hospital in Hampstead. One near St. Agnes. One near Edinburgh Royal.”
Hospitals. He’s testing hospitals. Not attacking. Not yet. Clocking the ambulance bays, the delivery entrances, the blind corners a woman gets wheeled through—mapping the places where my child might enter the world.
My vision narrows. For one second, I’m back in the council room with Vittorio’s smile in my face. Rafe will come for the baby now.
“Send six men to each hospital,” I say. “No. Twelve. Pull the armored?—”
I stop. My teeth clamp shut so hard my jaw hurts.
The old instinct. More men. More cars. More walls. Turn Serena’s life into a convoy and call it love.
My wife is in the next room asking a man who didn’t abandon her to stay until the baby comes because she’s afraid. And my first instinct is to build another cage.
“Rocco?” Lewis says finally.
“Hold.”
“For how long?”
“Until I ask Serena what she wants.”
There is a pause. I know Lewis. The pause says, Are you feverish from the stab wound?
“Understood,” he says. “Do not move anyone near her without my instruction.”
“Already no one inside the building except the two she approved. Enzo and Miriam. They’re currently arguing over tea in the stairwell.”
“Why are they arguing?”
“Enzo put sugar in her tea.”
“Fire him.”
“Tempting.”
Miriam is one of the few women on my security staff. Fifty-two. Former military police. Once broke a man’s wrist with a clipboard because he tried to touch a waitress at a Castellano event. Serena liked her. Said Miriam had “absolutely no time for masculine nonsense.”
“Keep hospital eyes at a distance,” I say. “No uniforms. No Castellano cars. No approach unless there’s a direct threat.”
“That leaves gaps.”
“I know.”
I hate gaps. Gaps are where bullets go. Knives. Lies. Cousins. Gaps are how Serena got taken from our bedroom by men wearing my orders.
Maybe some gaps are necessary. That thought makes me want to chew glass.
“Before you go,” I say. “The leak. Tell me you have it.”
Lewis doesn’t like this part. It’s in the pause. “We have it.”
“Name.”
“Harris.”
I say nothing for a moment.
Harris ran the protected flat in Marchmont. Harris carried Serena’s bags up three flights the day I sent her away and called it safety.
“Sal’s people reached him in June,” Lewis says.
“A number. A new car. A standing order—report where she goes. That’s what my protection costs on the open market, apparently.
One capo outbids me and my own man starts filing reports up Rafe’s chain instead of mine.
He sent the stairwell photograph. He handed Rafe the hospitals. ”
I put Harris on her. I chose him. I told Serena those men were her protection, and one of them was already selling her to the man who now sends flowers to maternity wards.
The cage was never locked from the outside. I built it and handed the key to a traitor and called it love.
“Where is he,” I say. It’s not a question.
“Holding. Alive. Yours.”
“He does not get Rafe’s ending. Strip him—every account, every friend who might feed him—then give him to the council as proof of what Vittorio’s faction was able to buy inside my own house. Let him spend a long life watching her stay safe without him.”
“Understood.”
I hang up and stand in the small kitchen. White cabinets. Blue mug by the sink. One yellow baby sock on the counter because Lucia apparently went to the pharmacy and returned with tiny emotional warfare.
The sock is small enough to fit in my palm. My child’s foot will be that small. My child will need a hospital. Rafe knows that.
I grip the counter until the edge bites my skin.
Because I could put men in every hospital corridor in London and Scotland. I could make the world around Serena so heavy with protection that no one could breathe near her. And she’d look at me with that old fear. Not fear of me hurting her. Fear of me deciding for her.
I can’t be that man again.
The bedroom door opens. I turn.
Matteo steps out first. Pale under the bruises. One arm in a sling. He moves like each rib has its own complaint department.
He sees me in the kitchen. His face goes still. Mine probably does too.
For one ugly second, all I can see is Serena’s hand in his. Serena asking him to stay.
I want to hate him. Not politely. With the clean, easy force of a man who has found a target outside himself. It would feel good. For maybe three seconds. Then I’d still be the man who made room for him.
Matteo looks down at my hand. “You killed the biscuit.”
“It started it.”
His mouth almost moves. Then he leans one shoulder against the doorframe. “She wants to talk to you.”
My body shifts forward before my brain gives permission. Matteo notices. Of course he does. Bodyguard.
“Is she upset?” I ask.
His eyebrows lift slightly. “Yes.”
Fair. Stupid question.
He steps aside. I walk past him into the bedroom.
Serena sits propped against the pillows, the legal packets spread around her like paper ruins. Her eyes are red. Her hair is still in that collapsing knot. One yellow baby sock sits beside her knee.
Either Lucia put it there or she did. Either way, it nearly kills me.
“Hi,” Serena says.
“Hi.”
“What happened to your biscuit?” she asks.
“Stress.”
Lucia appears behind me with a dustpan. “I knew it.”
“I’ll clean it,” I say.
“You will not. You’re bleeding adjacent.”
“I’m not bleeding.”
Serena clocks the way I hold my side. I should have kept my mouth shut. “Rocco.”
“I’m fine.”
One pregnant wife and one Lucia make that sentence sound stupid with no effort at all.
“Sore,” I correct.
Serena nods. “Better.”
Lucia mutters something about men and crumbs and leaves with the dustpan.
I stay near the foot of the bed because I don’t know where I’m allowed yet. Serena notices. She always notices me. “Sit,” she says.
I sit in the chair. Not on the bed. Her mouth softens like I guessed right.
“Lewis called,” I say.
Her whole body changes. Matteo steps into the room behind me but stays by the dresser.
“Rafe?” she asks.
“His men are watching hospitals.”
The room goes cold. I don’t soften it. She told me she’s not a houseplant with anxiety. She is my wife. She gets the truth.
“Which hospitals?”
“Hampstead private. St. Agnes. Edinburgh Royal.”
Her hand spreads over her stomach. “How would he know those?”
“He wouldn’t know for sure. He’s guessing based on our properties, your location, past Castellano medical use, and probably anything Claudia’s people could access before I cut them off.”
“So maybe more.”
“Maybe.”
I keep my hands open on my knees. Do not reach. Do not take fear as permission.
“What did you do?” she asks.
There is the test. Not cruel. Earned. I hate my answer before I give it.
“I started to order men to every hospital.”
Matteo’s face hardens in my peripheral vision. “Started,” Serena says.
“Then I stopped.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted a fortress. Armored cars. Twenty men. Control over every door you might walk through until the baby is born. And that’d make me feel better. Not you. Me.”
The room is silent.
“So I told Lewis to hold,” I say. “Eyes only at a distance for now. No uniforms. No Castellano cars. No one near you unless there’s a direct threat.”
Serena stares at me. “You asked me before building the cage.”
The word lands. I deserve it. “Yes.”
Her eyes shine again, and I hate that I can’t take back one hour I made her spend crying.
“Okay,” she says. Not forgiveness. But okay.
“What does safety look like to you?” I ask.
She blinks. Matteo looks at me like he’s trying to decide whether someone replaced me in the hall. Lucia says from the kitchen, “Good question.”
Serena gives a small, watery laugh. “Apparently you have passed the Lucia test.”
“There is a test?”
Lucia appears in the doorway with a packet of biscuits. “Many.”
Serena almost smiles. Then she looks down at her stomach. “I don’t want to go back to the London house.”
Something in my chest twists. Because some arrogant part of me still thought if I made everything safe enough, she’d come home.
“Okay,” I say.
She looks at me sharply. Waiting for the argument. I don’t give it to her.
“I don’t want to be watched in rooms,” she says.
“No cameras inside any space you use.”
“Or listening devices.”
“No listening devices.”
Lucia points at me with a biscuit. “If I find one in my flat, I’ll remove it with a hammer and insert it somewhere medically interesting.”
“Understood.”
“We can use exterior cameras on public access points if you approve placement,” I say. “Or not.”
“I want to know where they are.”
“You’ll have a map. And access.”
She glances at Matteo. He nods once, not to me. To her.
“Chosen guards,” she says. “Miriam stays. Enzo can stay if he stops putting sugar in people’s tea.”
“I’ll make that a condition of employment.”
Matteo coughs. It might be a laugh. He winces immediately and presses a hand to his ribs. Serena’s eyes fly to him. So do mine. He waves us both off. “Fine.”