Chapter Sixteen
VALENTINO
Nico falls back asleep within minutes, his small fist still curled into the front of my shirt, and I sit there longer than necessary before I carefully unhook his fingers and ease him back against the pillow.
I should leave. I should go to my own room, put a wall between myself and what just happened in that hallway, and let the night pass, quietly, without consequence.
Instead, I sit on the floor beside Nico’s bed in the dark for a long time, back against the wall, knees drawn up like I’m twenty years younger than I am.
When I finally stand, I don’t go to my room. I go outside.
The cottage door clicks shut behind me softly.
The night air off the lake is cold enough to clear my head, or at least cold enough that I can pretend it does.
I walk down to the dock, the same one where I caught Livia’s waist yesterday during the boat transfer drill, and I stand there with my hands in my pockets, looking at water.
I pull my phone out after a while and begin dialing.
Beckett answers on the fourth ring, voice thick with sleep. “This had better be an emergency, Ferretti.”
“It’s not.”
A pause. “It’s past midnight.”
“I know what time it is.”
“Then why,” Beckett says, and I can hear him sitting up, the rustle of sheets, “are you calling me at midnight to tell me it’s not an emergency?”
I look out at the water. The question I want to ask is absurd. It is, on its face, a question a teenager asks, not a grown man in charge of security operations across four continents.
“If a child has a nightmare,” I say, “how do you know what to do?”
The silence on the other end stretches long enough that I wonder if the call dropped.
“Valentino,” Beckett says slowly, “are you asking me how to parent?”
“I’m asking a hypothetical.”
“At midnight.”
“The timing is irrelevant.”
“You called me at midnight,” Beckett says, and I can hear the grin forming in his voice even through the phone, “to ask a hypothetical about comforting a child who had a nightmare. Ferretti, that's father-adjacent behavior.”
“It’s a work situation.”
“Of course it is.”
“There’s a child at the retreat. He had a nightmare. I went to him.” I keep my voice level, the same tone I’d use briefing a client on a logistics plan. “I want to know if I did it correctly.”
Another pause, shorter this time, and when Beckett speaks again, the teasing edge has softened. “Did the kid go back to sleep?”
“Yes.”
“Quickly?”
“Within minutes.”
“Then you did it correctly.” A beat. “What did you say to him?”
I hesitate. The lake is very still. “I spoke to him in Italian. Told him he wasn’t alone.”
“Huh.” Beckett’s voice has gone quiet, thoughtful, the version of him I’ve heard maybe twice in the years I’ve known him.
“You know what the trick is, with kids and nightmares? It’s not the words.
They don’t understand half of what you’re saying half the time anyway. It’s that you showed up. That’s it.”
“That seems inefficient.”
“Everything seems inefficient to men like us,” Beckett says, and there’s something dry and knowing in it.
“We’re used to fixing things with leverage, contingency plans, money, force if it comes to it.
And then a four-year-old wakes up scared in the dark, and none of that means anything.
All that matters is whether someone comes when they’re called. ”
I don’t answer right away. Out on the water, something breaks the surface, a fish or a bird, gone before I can place it.
“You said a child,” Beckett says, after a moment, and his voice has shifted again, sharper now, the way it does when he’s circling toward something. “Whose child, Valentino?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters enough that you called me at midnight.”
“It’s a work situation,” I say again, and even I can hear how flimsy the lie sounds.
“Right.” Beckett doesn’t push, which is somehow worse than if he had. “Well. For what it’s worth, you sound like a man who’s further down a road than he’s willing to admit he’s walking.”
“I’m not walking down any road.”
“Sure.” A pause, and then, quieter: “Can I tell you something, and you don’t interrupt until I’m done?”
I exhale through my nose. “Go ahead.”
“When Scarlett and I first got together, I thought the worst thing that could happen to me was losing control. That’s the whole architecture of a man like me, like you, like every one of us in that Society.
Control is the currency. You lose control, you lose everything.
That’s the lesson we all learned somewhere along the way, one way or another. ”
I say nothing. The water laps quietly against the dock supports.
“And then I had kids,” Beckett continues, “and for about a week I was convinced it was going to be exactly what I feared. That loving them, needing them, being terrified something would happen to them, that it would make me weaker. Slower. Less effective. A liability in my own life.”
“And?”
“And it was the opposite,” Beckett says simply.
“It made me more dangerous. Not in the way I used to be dangerous, all edges and arrogance but more cautious. I started seeing threats I’d never have noticed before, because suddenly there was something in the world worth protecting that wasn’t an asset or a client or a contract.
There was a kid who needed me to come home.
And a man who has something worth coming home to doesn’t get careless, Ferretti.
He gets sharper. Because the stakes are real for the first time in his life. ”
I think of the racetrack in the living room, blocks lined up with surprising precision, a small voice insisting on the car that makes the real sound. I think of a hand curling into my shirt in the dark, trusting, unguarded and certain that I would come.
“I used to think family was the thing that got used against men like us,” I say, before I can stop myself. “The weak point. The lever.”
“It can be,” Beckett says. “If you let the wrong people know it exists. But that’s not a reason to never have one, Valentino. That’s a reason to get better at protecting it.”
I don’t respond. The thought sits in my chest, heavy and unfamiliar, like a weight I’ve been carrying so long I forgot it was there.
“You still there?” Beckett asks.
“I’m here.”
“Good.” A pause, and then, lighter again, “Now. Are you going to tell me whose kid it is, or am I calling Vaughn the second we hang up?”
“Goodnight, Beckett.”
“That’s not a no.”
“Goodnight, Beckett.”
He’s laughing when I end the call.
I stand on the dock for a while longer, phone loose in my hand, the cold finally starting to work its way through my shirt. Behind me, up the slope, the cottage windows are dark except for the small nightlight glow from Nico’s room, a soft amber square against the black shape of the building.
It feels less fake every day.
That thought arrives unbidden, and I don’t try to push it the way I usually would.
The contract was supposed to be simple. A fabricated engagement, useful optics for the Aurelius deal, an arrangement with a clear beginning and a clear end.
I have run a hundred operations like it.
Clean lines. Defined parameters. No bleed between the performance and the reality.
This one has bled from the first day.
It bled when I watched her fumble through that interview with coffee on her blouse and felt something shift in my chest that I didn’t have a name for then.
It bled every time Nico looked at me like I was simply, unquestionably, a fixed point in his world, the way only a child looks at someone before they’ve learned that adults leave.
And it bled tonight, against a hallway wall, with her hands in my hair and my name on her mouth like she’d been holding it back for years.
I think about Venice. The timeline keeps landing on the same impossible, inevitable answer. Eighty percent certainty, I told Vaughn. The remaining twenty percent is fear.
But standing here, in the cold, with the echo of Nico’s hands clutching my shirt still warming my chest, I understand something I didn’t understand on the phone with Vaughn last night.
The eighty percent isn’t the part that frightens me anymore.
It’s the twenty.
Because if she is the woman from Venice, if Nico is mine, then everything that follows is complicated and dangerous in ways that have nothing to do with Dante or the Aurelius Consortium or any threat I know how to plan around.
It means years I missed. It means a child who has been growing up somewhere in the world without me, calling another man Daddy on the phone, or no one at all. It means Livia carrying that alone, hiding it, for reasons I haven’t let myself fully consider.
And if she isn't – if this is nothing more than a starving man's hope dressed up as certainty – then I have built a family out of scraps of coincidence and desire. The thought hurts in a different way.
Not because I would lose Livia, but because I would lose something I never truly had.
The boy asleep down the hall would remain exactly who he has always been: someone else's son.
And I would have to learn how to love them both while carrying the quiet ache of knowing that even if he calls me Daddy, it will never truly be me.
Either way, there is no clean exit from this. No contingency plan that resolves it without cost.
I have spent my entire adult life building exit routes. Apartments I can leave in ten minutes. Cars parked facing the street. Relationships kept at arm’s length, contained, manageable, nothing that couldn’t be walked away from if it had to be.
Standing on this dock, looking up at a cottage with a nightlight glowing in a child’s window, I find myself doing something I haven’t done in longer than I can remember.
I am looking for a way to stay.
The cold finally drives me back up the path. Inside, the cottage is quiet, the kitchen counter where everything started tonight innocuous now in the dark, just wood and stone and the faint lingering scent of cereal.
I pass the hallway, past the closed door of the main bedroom, past Nico’s door with its sliver of amber light. I don’t stop at either.
In my own room, I sit on the edge of the bed and stare at the wall for a long time, turning Beckett’s words over like a stone in my hand.
A man who has something worth coming home to doesn’t get careless. He gets sharper.
Tomorrow, the retreat continues. More drills, more performances, more eyes watching to see whether the Ferretti engagement is real enough to survive scrutiny.
Somewhere in the building, Dante’s people are still circling, still probing for weaknesses, and I know better than anyone how quickly a man like that can turn a soft spot into a wound.
If Livia and Nico are the soft spot, then I have a choice to make.
I can keep building exit routes. Or I can finally, for the first time in my life, build something worth defending instead.
I lie back on the bed without undressing, staring at the ceiling, and somewhere past two in the morning, I make a decision.
Tomorrow, I’m going to find out the truth. Whatever it costs.