Vito (The Conti Family #6)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Teresa

Saturday afternoons at Moretti’s are always a mistake.

I know that, and I come anyway.

By noon, the place is packed with weekend shoppers crowding the aisles with overloaded carts and poor spatial awareness, everyone moving a little too slowly or stopping a little too suddenly.

A toddler is crying somewhere near dairy. A man in the pasta aisle is arguing with his wife about sauce. Two teenagers in store aprons are trying to restock apples while three different people reach around them at once.

And I am standing in front of a pyramid of canned tomatoes, comparing labels like this is a serious and meaningful use of my doctorate.

I shift my cart closer as an older woman in an electric wheelchair comes flying by.

I scan the shelf and consider my options again.

Crushed, diced, whole, peeled.

I should have made a list with more detail.

My week has been full, my patience is thin, and I am trying to remember what exactly I promised myself I would cook tomorrow after Mass.

Something simple. Something I can put together without thinking too hard.

I spend too much of my life in rooms where every word matters, every reaction matters, every silence matters.

Sometimes I want dinner to require nothing from me but heat and spice.

I reach for a can on the top shelf, misjudge the angle, and knock another one forward.

A hand catches it before it hits the floor.

I turn quickly and nearly jump out of my skin.

“Oh.” The laugh slips out of me before I can stop it, half embarrassment, half relief. “Sorry. You startled me.”

A man stands beside me with one can in his hand, and another tucked against his palm, like catching falling cans of tomatoes is a perfectly normal thing for him to be doing.

He is dressed simply in a black long-sleeve Henley pushed up at the forearms, dark jeans, black shoes. But nothing about him reads simple.

He is too big, too solid, too visibly powerful for that.

Tall, broad-shouldered, thick through the chest and arms, the kind of man people notice even when he is doing absolutely nothing to draw attention.

Dark hair, dark eyes, hard mouth. He looks like he belongs in a tailored suit or a fight, maybe both.

Usually, when I see Vito Conti, it’s at church. The other side of it. With plenty of space between us.

But standing next to him in the tiny aisle of the grocery store makes me acutely aware of just how big he is in a way I never have before. And I’m not exactly petite.

For one stupid second, my pulse kicks hard enough to make me feel it behind my ribs. Then embarrassment floods in right after it, hot and immediate.

“Sorry about that,” I repeat.

Vito’s mouth shifts, not quite a smile but close. He gives a small tilt of his head, like he’s acknowledging both my reaction and apology without making anything of it.

I should probably just grab my tomatoes and move along.

Bury myself somewhere before I actually die of embarrassment.

“You all right, Doc?” His voice is more of a rumble.

I exhale and shake my head at myself. “Yes. Just a little clumsy today.”

His mouth curves slightly, but it’s not a smile. It should be a smile, but it’s too… neutral for that.

“Better be careful then,” he says, and it almost feels like a warning.

Puzzled, I tilt my head.

“Of falling tomatoes,” he says and holds out the can.

I let out a nervous laugh and take it from him, our fingers brushing for the briefest second. “Thank you.”

“Any time.”

For a moment, we just stand there, awkward in that familiar way people are when they know each other only in passing. I know him. He knows me. But not really.

Same parish. Same Sunday Mass often enough that faces become fixed in memory.

A short nod in the aisle after Communion.

A polite hello at a church fundraiser. Once, a brief exchange at the parish festival when one of his little cousins—or nieces, maybe; the Conti family tree seems to multiply by the month—ran past and nearly collided with me near the dessert table.

Passing acquaintance. That is all.

But of course I know of him.

Everyone does.

In this city, everybody knows who the Contis are, even if they pretend not to. It’s sometimes better if they pretend not to.

Luca Conti and his empire. His brothers. His sons. His daughter. The businesses, the money, the reach. The kind of reputation that does not need to be spoken aloud to be understood.

I have known that name all my life.

And I know men like Vito in another way, too.

Not personally. Professionally.

My work has put me across from violent offenders for years now. Men with tempers. Men with histories. Men who can sit very still while something dark moves beneath the surface. I have spent enough hours in clinical rooms to recognize danger when it is near me.

So I am not naive.

I am also not easily intimidated.

Still, there is something about standing in a grocery store with Vito Conti holding canned tomatoes that feels oddly disorienting.

Maybe because it’s not my usual setting. It’s not a prison, my office, or a facility. Or even church. It’s just out and about. A grocery store—a completely normal place to be.

My gaze drops to his cart before I can stop myself.

Water. Eggs. Chicken breasts. Coffee. Bananas. A massive bag of rice. Two jars of pasta sauce. A family-sized box of cereal that looks wildly out of place.

When I look back up, he has noticed.

“What?” he asks.

I smile a little, embarrassed. “Nothing.”

“That’s not nothing.”

“It’s just…” I glance at the cart again. “You’re ruining the mystique a little.”

His eyebrows lift. “I have mystique?”

“A bit.”

“Because I buy cereal?”

“Because I didn’t picture you standing in a grocery store buying pasta sauce.”

His expression barely changes, but there is a flicker of something in his eyes that reads like humor. “Am I not allowed?”

Stop. Talking. Now.

But I don’t. I just keep right on going.

“No, of course you are.” I pray for the calm, cool, collected self I usually am. “I just mean, your family always seemed very… traditional. Red sauce out of a jar…doesn’t seem to fit, you know?” I shrug, hoping he understands I’m joking.

What if I offended him?

But this time, his mouth does pull into a smile. A real one. It’s brief but unmistakable. It changes his whole face for a second. Softens it. Makes him look younger than twenty-eight, younger than the name and the reputation and the weight he carries on those broad shoulders.

Then it is gone.

“Ah. You would be right about that,” he says. “Nearly blasphemous in my family, especially if our resident chef finds out.”

Chef… Bianca, I believe? She married into the family a couple of years ago.

“Which is why,” he continues, “I buy it here, where no one knows me and can squeal.”

“And here I am buying canned tomatoes like a chump,” I joke. “Maybe I should buy a jar and get it over with.”

“You’ll have to go to a new grocery store for that,” he says. “Where no one knows your name.”

Did he just joke? Did he just make an actual joke?

Do I have an inside joke with Vito Conti?

What has my life become?

I laugh before I can stop myself, soft and surprised. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

His gaze holds mine a second longer than that comment warranted.

Then he nods once toward the shelf. “Get the San Marzano if you can. Better flavor.”

I glance back at the display. “Now you’re giving produce-adjacent advice with jarred sauce in your cart. Bold.”

“Some nights you cook. Some nights, you open a jar and eat,” he says.

I huff out a laugh. “That might be the wisest thing I’ve heard all week.”

His mouth shifts again, not quite a smile but closer this time. “Long week?”

“A little.”

He gives one short nod, like he understands more from those two words than he should. Then his gaze drops briefly to my cart. Pasta, garlic, onions, bread. “Looks like you were aiming higher than survival.”

“I was pretending I had energy for effort.”

“Do you?”

“I’ll find out tomorrow.”

That almost-smile lingers for a second. “Fair.”

I reach for the San Marzano can and set it in my cart. “There. Influenced. Hope you’re right.”

“I am,” he says, so matter-of-factly that I laugh again. “I take my dinner very seriously.”

This time, his mouth does curve a little more. Gone almost immediately. But I catch it.

And for one strange, suspended second, standing in the middle of Moretti’s with canned tomatoes in my cart and Vito Conti beside me, he doesn’t feel like a name people speak in hushed whispers with quivering voices.

He just feels like a man making me laugh in the grocery store aisle.

There is something faintly absurd about this conversation. It makes me feel off-balance in a way I can’t quite explain. Not because it is inappropriate. It isn’t. It is nothing. Grocery-store nonsense. The kind of harmless banter people make every day.

But Vito has never really talked to me before, beyond mindless niceties. Once, he held the side door for me after Mass when I was trying to juggle coffee, a folder, and my purse all at once. That was the extent of it.

This is the most words we have ever exchanged.

And up close, in the bright overhead lighting of Moretti’s, he is exactly what I would expect and somehow not at all.

He has that same aura I have always noticed around him, even in church clothes and polished silence.

Rage held close. Danger near the surface.

Not loud, not sloppy, not out of hand. Just there.

Wound tight beneath the skin. The sense of a man who could go from stillness to violence in half a breath if given reason.

Or maybe he didn’t need a reason.

I know that aura. I know how to read it. I have made a career out of reading it.

What I do not know what to do with is the inconvenient fact that, on him, I find it a little attractive.

Not in my patients. Never in my patients. Never in any man I have sat across from in a professional setting, listening to him detail the ugliest parts of himself while I remain clinical and untouched and objective. There is nothing alluring in pathology. Nothing romantic in cruelty.

This is different, and I do not like that it is different.

Maybe because I don’t know him well enough to separate the man from the reputation.

Maybe because attraction is sometimes stupid and uninvited.

Maybe because Vito Conti looks like trouble in a way that would be easy to regret.

And I would never be involved with someone like that. Too volatile. Too risky. Too much darkness too close at hand.

But today feels different. There is warmth in the exchange now, easy and unexpected, and for one strange second, I can almost forget who he is. Or rather, what he is supposed to be.

Almost.

Then his phone vibrates in his pocket.

He pulls it out, glances at the screen, and something changes.

It is small. So small that most people probably would not catch it. But I do. The shift is immediate and absolute. His body goes still somehow; his expression closes. He becomes… sharper. The humor vanishes from his eyes as if it was never there.

Every instinct I have pays attention.

He looks up from the phone and tucks it away again. “I should keep moving.”

“Of course.”

There is a pause.

Then he steps aside to let me move my cart past him, one hand shifting his basket out of the way with easy strength.

“Have a good evening, Doc,” he says.

Doc.

Not Teresa. Never Teresa. I’m not sure whether that should make the moment feel safer or stranger.

“You too,” I say.

And then he is gone, pushing his cart down the aisle and disappearing past pasta and olive oil and the endcap stacked with store-brand soup.

I stay where I am for a second longer than necessary, my fingers tightening slightly around the basket handle.

That was nothing, I tell myself.

A harmless conversation in a grocery store. Small talk. Pasta sauce. Sunday Mass.

Nothing.

But my pulse feels a little uneven anyway.

I have known Vito Conti by sight for years. I have spent enough time near his family at church to recognize the internal rhythms of the Contis, the hierarchy, the quiet deference other people give them without seeming to.

I know what men with reputations like his can feel like in a room. I know how danger can wear good tailoring and polite manners and sit through a homily with perfect stillness.

And yet today unsettles me in a way the usual church nod never has.

Maybe it is because he caught me off guard.

Maybe it is because he smiled.

Maybe it is because he made me laugh.

Maybe it is because when his phone buzzed, and his face changed, I saw something cold and hard settle into his eyes so fast, I nearly tripped over it.

Or maybe I imagined all of it because I am good at seeing what lives under the surface and sometimes, if I am honest, a little too tempted to look.

I let out a quiet breath and shake my head at myself.

Ridiculous.

I came here for tomatoes, pasta, and something green that won’t die in my refrigerator before Wednesday. I am not going to stand in aisle six psychoanalyzing a man I barely know because he made a joke about pasta sauce.

I grab an extra can of San Marzano tomatoes, add them to my basket, and head for dairy.

But the weird tension stays with me the rest of the trip. As I pick up parmesan, mozzarella, and basil. As I peruse dessert options and decide on a mini cheesecake.

And as I wheel my cart out into the parking lot and the damp spring air hits my face, I catch myself scanning the rows of cars without meaning to.

I suppress a shudder, telling myself I’m being ridiculous. I’m being paranoid and overanalyzing this whole thing.

This was just banter with an acquaintance in a grocery store.

That’s it.