Chapter 37 Mia
MIA
The shot split the room—glass shrieked, wine bled across linen. Dante only smiled. Red streaked over the table and dripped in slow, obscene beads. His eyes slid to mine, lazy, amused. Maybe this was a bad decision. Did I just set myself to be murdered?
“Temper,” he murmured. “It runs in our families.”
“Move and you die,” Enrico said.
Dante lifted both hands again. “I wouldn’t dream of spoiling the reunion.”
Reunion.
“Back,” Enrico said, to me, without turning. “Now.”
I didn’t argue. I stepped away from the table.
“Ah,” Dante said. “Company.”
He didn’t have to give the order. Men flowed in—three, four, six. The first gun coughed. Andre’s.
“Down,” Enrico snapped.
The room erupted in staccato. I crawled, low and graceless, toward the sideboard. A hand snatched at my ankle, but I kicked it away.
“Left!” Marco barked from somewhere I couldn’t see. “Two more!”
Dante laughed—actually laughed—as if blood and choreography were entertainment. “Careful, King. Your board is crowded.”
Something dark moved in my periphery—a man too close, his shadow bigger than his body.
“Exit!” Andre yelled.
The corridor tunneled—peeling wallpaper, blank-eyed portraits. Footsteps behind me—not pursuit, protection. Marco. His hand found my elbow and turned me toward a narrower hall, the kind built for servants or secrets.
“This way,” he said.
A door at the end and we burst into an overgrown courtyard.
“Car!” Marco barked. “Now. Go.”
“I’m not—” I started, because my pride liked to make unhelpful arguments when I was terrified.
He cut me a look that said everything: Don’t be a fool. Not now. He shoved a small folder into my hand, fast, like a magician planting proof. “Keep it down. Don’t open it here.”
Dante’s folder. The one he’d offered like a dare. My fingers tightened.
“Marco—”
“Go.”
I went.
The courtyard gate yawned; beyond it, gravel. Andre was already at the car, door open, engine a low growl. I dove into the back seat. Shots cracked behind us. Andre flinched, then didn’t, which was worse. He flicked his eyes to the rearview mirror, then to me. “Seat belt.”
“Is he—” My throat closed.
“He’s Enrico.” He threw the car into motion and we tore down the lane. Trees blurred.
At the intersection, the night burst open.
Headlights. A black SUV fishtailed across the road like an answer no one wanted.
Andre didn’t brake. He drove through the space that wasn’t there and somehow made it be.
The SUV spun; metal shrieked. A glance in the mirror—men pouring out, angry ants.
And then—two pops from the orchard road. Sniper. Our side. The ants folded.
I clutched the folder to my chest like a relic. Smooth cardstock, damp now from my fingers. The phone on the dash buzzed. Andre hit speaker without looking. “Sì.”
Enrico’s voice filled the car. Low. Controlled. “Status.”
“Package secure,” Andre said.
“Good.” A breath. Paper-thin. “Five minutes. North gate.”
“Copy.”
The line clicked off. Andre’s mouth ticked, not quite a smile. “Told you.”
But my insides had not gotten the memo. They shook. Not visibly. I have pride.
The estate gates opened like a mouth. We slid inside. The house reared up, pale and knowing. Men moved where men should be—at posts, in shadows, near doors that led to other doors. The car stopped. My door opened from the outside.
Enrico. He was whole and not. Shirt open at the throat, hair messier than his pride liked to allow, knuckles scraped, one sleeve darkening where blood had gone to hide.
His gaze skimmed me like hands do when they’ve earned it—swift, total, inventory and worship.
I exhaled a sound that wasn’t quite a sob.
“You’re late.”
He huffed something like a laugh and put his palm at the back of my neck. Warm. Real. “Get inside.”
We did.
The study ate us and made us ours again. He shut the door and the house’s other heartbeats grew fainter.
“You followed me,” he said finally. A crime, an absolution.
“I did. We’re either partners or not.”
He didn’t argue. He crossed to the sideboard, poured water, handed me a glass.
“Dante said—” My voice cracked. I tried again. “He said my father made sure the bullet landed.”
Silence stretched, delicate as spun sugar and just as easy to break.
“I know what your father told you. I know what mine didn’t.”
“And if it’s true?”
He didn’t flinch. “Then we cut it out. Clean.”
I nodded. The water made a slow circuit through me, found every tremor, and negotiated peace. It didn’t last.
“I have something,” I said, and set the folder on the desk.
His gaze sharpened. “Where did you—”
“Marco.”
“Of course.” Half a smile, razor-thin. He flipped the flap back.
Inside: photographs. Copies of ledger pages.
A typed memorandum with a date that made my stomach go strange: October 3, 1985.
The same handwriting I’d seen in my father’s ledger—elegant, precise.
A paragraph underlined: Assurance of Continuity.
A line about alternative bonds if ports proved…
intractable. Someone had initialed in the margin. D.M. and G.G..
And then another sheet. A deposit slip. A florist. Casa dei Fiori. Date-stamped the day before Giovanni died. The note line read: cymbidium—white. A number next to it I recognized for no sane reason—my father’s old private line. The room tilted. I put one hand on the desk and my fingers went pale.
He reached for the next photograph. Old—edges foxed, color gone to sepia’s older brother.
A table. The same table from last night, but intact.
Don Moretti and Giovanni Gallo on either side.
A third man blurred at the edge—profile only, silver at the temple catching the flash.
Not entirely in frame. My father has always had an uncanny talent for not being fully seen in pictures.
It keeps power from sticking to you in the wrong ways.
My throat went raw. “I need to ask him.” So my father played a role in all this? Of course I knew did horrible things, especially in his business, but… something about this was different.
“You will,” Enrico said. “But not tonight.”
“When?”
“When I can keep you between me and a bullet while you hear the answer.”
“And if the answer is yes?”
The look he gave me then had too much tenderness for a room with this much history. “Then I take care of him like a king. Not like a butcher.”
“You’ll kill him.” No question. A statement that hurt to be that honest.
His jaw worked once. Twice. “If I must.”
“I need air.” I need to not cry in front of the man who would burn down a city for me.
He stepped aside. Gave me the path. He has learned that love sometimes looks like letting someone walk out of the room before they drown. Like I was.
The gallery was all reflection and expensive silence. Moonlight turned the marble blue. The black paper crane perched on the sill.. I cracked it open. Another line in small print waited on the inside of a wing:
brING THE PAGE. MIDNIGHT. COME ALONE.
Of course. Of course he’d say alone.
I folded the crane back up, crisp edges against my fingerprints. The room pressed around me, a kind of velvet suffocation.
“Mia.” Enrico’s voice. Close. Not touching.
I turned. Held up the crane. He read the tiny line without taking it. Then his mouth drew inward, that particular not-smile that always means strategy and pain have shaken hands. “Dante said alone.”
He stepped closer. My body went back to last night, and the night before that, and the bone-deep understanding that desire in our world was not a soft thing.
“Come back to the study,” he said. “Andre’s already in the rafters.”
“And my father?”
“Tomorrow.”
“You’ll stand behind me…If he lies.”
“Of course.”
We walked back together. He didn’t take my hand. I didn’t offer it. The men gathered as if summoned. Maps bloomed across the desk. Addresses. Old permits. Property transfers. The florist—Casa dei Fiori—had changed hands twice on paper. Enrico assigned positions.
“North alley, Marco. You take the roofline with Andre. Two outside, two inside,” he said. “No shots unless necessary. We talk first. We take who we can. ”
He glanced at me. “You do not move until I tell you.”
“Understood,” I said, and his mouth twitched because we both heard the lie. I was trying to be obedient, but not docile.
Catrina slipped in with tea that none of us drank. Her eyes bounced from his hands to my face to the map, making mental lists, building counter-weights.
At five to midnight, Enrico touched the back of my neck again, an anchor that would have unraveled me if I let it. “Last chance,” he said. “Say the word and you stay.”
I glanced up at him. “You married the wrong woman for that.”
His mouth did that almost-smile again, then didn’t. “I married exactly the right one.”
Marco and Andre became shadows.
Casa dei Fiori sat on the corner of a street. The awning hung like a tired sigh. We parked two blocks down. Walked. I shrugged Enrico’s coat tighter around me. He opened the florist’s door.
“Stay,” he said under his breath.
I nodded, but didn’t. We moved as a unit. Back room. Walk-in cooler door ajar, lip of frost glinting. A counter too clean. A ledger on its surface, open to a blank page and a single white envelope. My name on it. Not Moretti. Mia.
I didn’t think. I ripped it free.
“Mia—” Enrico warned.
I slid the page out. One sheet. Thin, old. Not a copy. The original. The Assurance of Continuity addendum. The signatures like scars.
Execute Plan C.
His father.
My vision went black at the edges, then hissed back in like a TV waking. Andre swore from the doorway. Marco didn’t speak at all. Behind us a compressor kicked on.
“Welcome to your end.”
The lights went out.