Chapter 20 #2
For the first time all morning, my frustration stops spinning in place and turns into momentum.
I grab my notebook, my phone, and my coffee, even though it has gone cold.
Then I leave the bedroom.
Halfway down the stairs, I hear Olivia’s voice from the sitting room off the kitchen.
I head toward it.
She is seated on the sofa with Isabella tucked against her side, a half-eaten piece of toast abandoned on a small plate near her knee.
Roberto is not with her for once, though I doubt he is far.
Olivia has a phone in one hand and a legal pad on the cushion beside her, because apparently, none of us know how to experience trauma without turning it into work.
She looks up when I appear in the doorway. She gestures me in while she finishes her phone call.
“Of course,” she says into the phone, her voice smooth and professional despite the baby half-asleep against her. “Send it to Roberto and copy me.”
Then she ends the call, sets the phone facedown, and looks at the notebook in my hand.
Then back to my face.
“Well,” she says. “That looks serious.”
“It is.”
“Good. I was afraid this was going to be an emotional check-in.”
I take another step closer. “Absolutely not.”
“Thank God.”
I feel that.
Isabella lifts her head from Olivia’s side and gives me a sleepy, solemn look.
“Hi, sweetheart,” I say softly.
She blinks at me, then drops her head back against her mother as if I have been assessed and deemed uninteresting.
Olivia strokes a hand over her daughter’s hair. “She’s been in a mood all morning.”
“She comes by it honestly.”
“Yes. Roberto is very difficult.”
That gets a laugh out of me.
I sit in the chair across from her and open the notebook on my lap.
Olivia’s expression changes.
There she is.
Not just my former roommate. Not just my best friend. Not just Roberto’s pregnant wife.
The woman who understands rooms, guests, staff, timing, and the thousand quiet calculations that make a casino look effortless from the outside.
She reaches for her water. “What do you need?”
I look down at the page, then back at her.
“You don’t have to answer anything right now if you’re tired,” I say because I feel like I have to.
“I am tired,” she says. “But I am also bored, trapped, and pregnant, so please give me something useful to do.”
That gets a smile out of me.
Then it fades as I get down to business.
“I need to know if anything strange happened in VIP services over the last few weeks.”
Her brows lift.
By noon, I have spoken to five women and learned a whole lot of unrelated information. The headache that was brewing at breakfast is now full-blown and throbbing.
I stare at my notebook and the disjointed pieces of what I gathered.
Olivia gave me VIP complaints that escalated too quickly, guests who asked for executive attention too specifically, and problems that seemed designed to pull management out of secure spaces.
Bianca gave me staff chatter, vendor schedule changes, and guest questions that may have seemed innocuous at any other time.
Nothing obvious enough to sound like danger at the time. Vendors asking whether she would be there personally to sign for deliveries. A server mentioning that guests always liked seeing “the little Contis.”
Someone asking if Giovanni usually comes in after lunch or closer to dinner. A delivery window changed twice without Bianca approving the change herself, though the system showed approval.
Erica gave me the reroute again, but this time I wrote down every touchpoint before it happened: the appointment confirmation, the driver, the call, and the tiny circle of people who knew where she and Emma were supposed to be.
She can't stop thinking about it, and she doesn't say it, but I know she can't help but think about what would have happened if her driver hadn't been so quick-thinking.
Elsa gave me finance access, insurance inquiries, and unusual pressure from outside firms that might have seemed like normal post-incident concern if we were not already looking for pressure points.
Elena gave me old prosecutions, old family names, and the uncomfortable reminder that people from Papà’s past do not always stay in the past just because we stop looking at them.
Teresa gave me the note again, not the words themselves, but the delivery, the choice of her office, and the possibility that someone wanted us looking at her patients instead of the family.
She tells me it was not written like an impulsive threat. It was constructed to make Papà think in terms of legacy. Tree, branches, pruning. Family as structure. Family as future. Family as something that can be cut down piece by piece while the roots are left alive to feel it.
I write all of it down, as much detail as possible.
Then I sit back and stare.
My notebook is a mess of arrows, circles, underlined names, half-formed thoughts, and questions I cannot answer yet.
VIP questions.
Regalia staff chatter.
Children’s routines.
Medical appointments.
Old vendor files.
Private rooms.
Executive access.
Board pressure.
Press speculation.
The casino.
The casino.
The casino.
I tap the pen against the page until I realize I am doing it hard enough to make my hand ache.
None of this proves anything.
That is the problem.
It is not proof. It is not even a theory I would be willing to say out loud to Papà yet.
If I walked downstairs right now and told him I thought the casino was part of the target because Olivia heard strange questions and Bianca had a delivery window moved, he would send me away.
He wouldn't say the words, but I would feel them anyway.
Why don't you go visit with the women and let the men take care of this?
And his verdict would be final. I would lose any chance of anyone else listening.
Vito has become a lot more independent since meeting Teresa.
I am proud of him for taking his own stand, but on this, he wouldn't defy Papà.
Roberto would need evidence, Antonio has his hands full with the cybersecurity, and Giovanni has his hands full with the physical security.
After what happened with Erica and Emma, Nico is a loaded gun waiting to be aimed.
And Adrian—
I stop that thought before it finishes.
Adrian would listen.
That is the worst part.
He would listen in that still, focused way of his, and he would not dismiss me just because the picture is incomplete. He would ask questions I might not have the answers to yet, but he wouldn't dismiss me offhand. He would see too much.
I look toward the wall between our rooms.
No.
I turn back to the notebook.
The casino is where the family is most exposed because it is the place where our old life and new life touch.
Public guests, private money, staff, vendors, investors, regulators, security systems, family routines, children in restaurants.
The wives doing business in the same building as the husbands’ meetings.
It is the one spot where all of our business as a family converges.
It feels significant, but I'm not sure how.
The men can lock down houses and routes. They can trace badge cards. They can find shooters.
But this feels different.
This feels like someone studying the seams.
I write that down.
“Someone is studying the seams.”
Then I underline it twice.
Because that is what all of these details have in common. None of them are the center of power. Not Papà’s office. Not Vito’s men. Not Nico’s clubs. Not Antonio’s negotiations. Not Roberto’s legal walls.
The seams.
The places where one world touches another.
I sit back slowly.
My heart is beating harder now.
Not fear this time.
Recognition. Something is there.
I can feel it.
The attack on the casino floor was not only an attack on me.
It made The Regent Club look unstable, dangerous, vulnerable. It gave the press a story, the investors a reason to panic, and regulators a reason to ask whether the Contis can maintain public safety inside a casino we fought too hard to make legitimate.
And if the casino looks weak, I look weak.
If I look weak, Papà’s legitimate future looks weak.
I stare at the words until they blur.
That cannot be coincidence.
It might not be the whole truth, but it is not nothing.
I reach for my laptop and pull up the first batch of files Antonio sent over. I do this until the headache threatens to explode, and Bianca calls out that dinner is ready.
I have to press my fingers to my temples and close my eyes.
Dinner is a blur.
I am there because not being there would be noticed and because I have to look away from my laptop for at least an hour. I sit. I eat enough to avoid Bianca’s attention. I answer when someone speaks directly to me. Children are passed from lap to lap.
Adrian is there too.
He should be resting. Of course he is not.
He sits because Elena tells him to sit and because even he is not foolish enough to challenge her. He is pale, though he hides it well. Too still again. Too careful with his movements. He’s acting like a man who has decided pain is an inconvenience and nothing more.
I do not look at his mouth.
I do not look at his hands.
I mostly succeed.
Dinner ends eventually. I know this because people start retreating. Babies first. Then toddlers. Then exhausted mothers. Then men who claim they are done working and are absolutely lying.
Night folds over the house in layers.
The halls quiet. The voices thin. Doors close.
Papà catches my eye before I go upstairs.
I know he wants to ask.
What are you thinking?
Why have you been quiet?
Maybe he sees more than I want him to. Maybe he always has, and that is part of the problem.
I am not ready to tell him.
Not yet.
So I say, “Good night, Papà.”
His eyes narrow slightly, but he lets me go.
“Good night, tesoro.”
The word follows me up the stairs.
I return to my room with the unsettling sense that I have spent all day walking around the edge of something without finding the door.
The casino is involved.
I am almost sure of it now.
Not sure enough to say it. Not enough evidence to prove it.
But sure enough that I can't shake the thought.
I quickly shower and change into sleep clothes and sit on my bed with the notebook open again, rereading what I wrote until the words start to blur.
I close the notebook eventually because staring at it longer will not add new information.
I go still.
I know those steps.
Which is absurd. I have known Adrian Donato for a short time. I should not know the way he walks when he is trying to hide pain. I should not be able to distinguish his tread from Vito’s, Nico’s, or any of the other men moving through this house.
But I do.
He comes down the hall quietly, but not silently. He is too smart to move silently in a house full of armed Contis.
He is back from his final check of the grounds.
It annoys me he even did a final check of the grounds. The idea of him out there, wounded and pale and still doing rounds, makes something pull tight in my chest.
The idea of him going into the room beside mine makes something else happen.
Something warmer.
His door opens, then closes softly.
A moment later, I hear movement through the wall.
A drawer. A soft thud. Maybe his boots.
Then nothing for a minute.
I sit on my bed, still, listening like a fool.
I should get into bed. I should close my eyes. I should let the man rest.
I should stop thinking about his mouth.
I should stop thinking about the way he looked at me across dinner, careful and distant and too aware.
I should stop thinking about the way he encouraged me to take power in a different way.
I should stop thinking about the fact that he is in the room next to mine because he insisted on being close enough to get to me if something happened. Even while injured.
For safety.
For duty.
For the job.
My fingers curl into my duvet.
My notebook sits on the bed in front of me.
The casino is a knot I cannot untangle yet.
The family waits inside this house, all of us gathered like branches pulled close against a storm.
And Adrian is on the other side of one wall, injured, stubborn, impossible, dangerous in ways that have nothing to do with the gun he carries.
I look at the wall.
Then at my notebook.
Then back at the wall.
And suddenly, absurdly, dangerously, I get an idea.
I can't seem to shake this one either.