Chapter Seventeen
LIVIA
I sense him before I see him.
Not literally. But there is something that happens to the air in any room my father walks into, a subtle shift in pressure, and I have been finely calibrated to sense it since I was seven years old. My shoulders are at my ears before I’ve consciously registered anything at all.
The morning session has just wrapped. We’re in the main lodge’s reception corridor, forty-odd delegates milling between coffee stations and conversation clusters, and Nico has disappeared toward the far end with two other kids and an obliging staff member who has been running an unofficial children’s program since yesterday.
I’m watching him go, cataloguing the exits the way Valentino has been quietly training me to do for the last two days, when the double doors at the corridor’s end swing open and a familiar figure steps through.
Dante De Luca does not enter rooms the way other men do, he saunters in like he owns the room.
White shirt, no tie, the kind of effortlessly expensive tailoring designed to look casual but communicate the exact opposite.
Gray threaded through his dark hair now, more than I remember from the last time I stood across a table from him, but it only makes him look more authoritative, more permanent, like a building that has been designated a heritage site.
He’s scanning the room with a smile already in place. Warm. Interested. The smile of a man delighted to find himself among people worth knowing.
His eyes find mine in about four seconds flat.
The smile doesn’t change. That’s the thing about my father’s smiles. They never change, regardless of what’s happening behind them.
He moves through the room in my direction, stopping twice to shake hands, once to exchange a word with a woman in a blue blazer who laughs at whatever he says. By the time he reaches me I’ve had forty-five seconds to find my footing, and I still feel like the floor has dropped two inches.
“Livia.” He says my name like a gift he’s bestowing. He leans in for the cheek-kiss, and I let him, because the alternative requires a scene I don’t have the energy for. “I didn’t realize you’d be here.”
“I could say the same.”
“De Luca Meridian took on a subsidiary stake in the Aurelius energy division earlier this quarter. The consortium wanted representation.” He looks around the room with proprietary satisfaction, the look of a man assessing territory he has recently acquired. “Small world.”
“Remarkably,” I say.
He turns back to me, and the warmth in his expression adjusts by a fraction, just enough that I catch it and nobody else would. “You look tired.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re always fine.” He says it the way he used to say it when I was seventeen and coming down to breakfast after crying most of the night, because some things never change. “Walk with me a moment.”
It isn’t a question. It’s never a question.
I follow him to the edge of the corridor, where a row of tall windows overlooks the formal garden and creates the illusion of privacy without the commitment of actually being alone.
I can see Piper across the room in conversation with a pair of suits, her head angled slightly in my direction even as she appears fully engaged.
She’s been tracking me since Dante walked in.
I love her for it and I refuse to let my eyes linger too long in her direction.
“So,” Dante says, conversational, studying the garden. “The Ferretti engagement.”
“What about it?”
“I’ve been hearing about it for weeks. Ferretti Global Risk is generating some interesting noise in certain circles.” He pauses. “Interesting is not always a compliment.”
“I know what interesting means.”
“Do you?” He tilts his head toward me, not quite looking at me, not quite not.
“Valentino Ferretti is a serious operator. I’ll grant him that.
But he’s also a man who moves very fast, accumulates leverage, and forms attachments in ways that are more strategic than they appear. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Are you warning me about someone who manipulates people for professional gain?” I keep my voice light. “That’s generous, coming from you.”
“I’m warning you,” he says, still pleasantly, “because whatever game you think you’re playing here, you are out of your depth.”
“I’m always out of my depth, according to you.”
“And yet it’s always me who ends up being right about these things.” He finally looks at me properly, and there’s nothing in his expression that I could point to in a courtroom as threatening. It’s too measured, too practiced for that.
“You have a son, Livia. That changes the parameters of every decision you make. A woman in your position, attaching herself to a man under the kind of scrutiny Ferretti currently attracts, in a professional context that puts you both in public view. That’s the kind of situation that invites questions. About stability. About judgment.”
My blood goes cold.
He doesn’t say it more plainly than that.
He doesn’t need to. I’ve known this particular threat my whole life, have felt it in the way he used to comment on my choices at family dinners, in the way he looked at me when I told him I was pregnant and his first question wasn’t about my health or my plans but about who else knew.
“Nico is happy and safe,” I say, and my voice is very steady, steadier than I feel. “Whatever questions you’re implying anyone might be asking, those are your questions. Not anyone else’s.”
“Perhaps.” He glances past my shoulder, and I feel the change in him before I see it, a fractional straightening, a recalibration. “Your fiancé is watching us.”
I don’t turn around. “He has good instincts.”
“So I hear.” Something moves through Dante’s eyes that I haven’t seen in a long time, a flicker of genuine assessment.
Then the smile returns, easy and warm and as useful as a closed door.
“But alas everything you build, I can still reach. It’s good to see you, sweetheart. You look well. Tired, but well.”
And then he’s moving again, crossing the room toward another cluster of delegates, stopping to clap someone on the shoulder like a man who has always belonged everywhere he’s ever stood.
I realize my hands are clasped in front of me, pressing together hard enough that my knuckles ache.
I release them.
“Who was that?”
Piper materializes at my elbow so smoothly it’s almost impressive. She’s holding two cups of coffee, and her expression has the particular quality of someone who has been watching something carefully and has reached a preliminary verdict.
“My father.” I take one of the coffees. It burns going down and I’m grateful for it.
“Ah.” She watches his progress across the room. “He’s very charming.”
“He really is.”
“In the way that makes the back of your neck itch.”
“Exactly that way.”
She’s quiet for a moment, and then, because Piper has never in her life sat with an observation when she could turn it into a sentence: “Dominic Calder redirected him.”
I look at her. “What?”
“Before I got to you. I saw what was happening, I was coming over, and Calder stepped in first.” She says his name the way she always does, like a word she’s been forced to learn in a language she finds objectionable.
“He came up to your father, said something about consortium professional conduct protocols, cited a specific clause, and your father pivoted. Smoothly. Like he knew he’d been managed. ”
“Dominic Calder.”
“I know.” She takes a long drink of her coffee. “I don’t know what to do with it either. I still hate him. But I hate him slightly less now, and I want it on the record that I resent it.”
I almost smile, which is something, given the last ten minutes.
“What did Dante say to you?” Piper asks, quieter now.
“He implied I’m making poor choices. That it might reflect on my fitness as a parent.” I say it flatly, the way I’ve learned to say all things Dante, stripped of the weight that would otherwise make them impossible to carry. “The usual.”
Piper’s jaw tightens. “Okay. I want to say several things about that.”
“I know you do.”
“And I’m going to restrain myself to one, for now.”
“That’ll be a first.”
“He’s wrong,” she says simply. “About all of it. You’re the best mother I have ever watched operate under pressure, and whatever he’s using to make you doubt that, he is wrong.”
I look at her for a moment, this woman who has been my best friend since we were twenty-two and sat next to each other in a seminar where neither of us was supposed to be and both of us pretended otherwise.
“Thank you,” I say.
“Don’t cry. We’re in public.”
“I’m not going to cry.”
“You have the face.”
“I don’t have the face.”
“You absolutely have the face.” She links her arm through mine, pressing her shoulder against me in the way she’s been doing since university. “Come on. The afternoon session starts in twenty minutes and you need to find Nico first.”
She steers me toward the far end of the room, and I let her, and I don’t look back toward where my father has absorbed himself into another cluster of delegates like he was always there and always will be, because that is the thing about men like Dante De Luca.
They never really leave. They just move to the other side of the room.
I find Nico by following the noise, the high bright shrieks of children who have been cooped up in adult spaces all morning and have found a patch of garden to be feral in.
He’s running in wide, unstoppable circles with a boy roughly his age, arms out, making a sound that is either an airplane or a rocket or possibly a dragon.
It’s unclear and his face is incandescent with the joy of being four years old and moving fast and answering to nobody.
I stand at the edge of the garden and watch him, and I breathe.
“You’re all right.”
Valentino’s voice comes from beside me, low and even, and I don’t startle because I felt him coming, it's like my nervous system has updated its registry and put him at the top of the alert list.
“I know,” I say.
“You didn’t look all right, across the room.”
“I wasn’t, across the room.” I watch Nico execute a particularly spectacular turn that nearly sends him into the garden wall. “I am now.”
A pause. Valentino is watching Nico too, I can feel it, that same focused attention he brings to everything, except with Nico it’s never strategic. It’s just there.
“He threatened you.”
“He implied. It’s different. Dante doesn’t threaten directly. Direct threats can be documented.”
Another pause, longer. “He mentioned Nico?”
“Yes.”
I hear the exhale beside me, controlled and deliberate, and I finally look at him. His jaw is tight, his eyes still on my son in the garden, and there is something in his expression I haven’t seen on his face before.
It looks like fury. Not the explosive kind, this is quieter than that, and far more dangerous, the fury of a man who has encountered something he cannot risk-assess his way around.
“Valentino.” My voice comes out softer than I intend. “I’ve been handling Dante De Luca since I was old enough to understand what he was. I don’t need you to—”
“I know.” He says it quietly, still watching Nico. “I know you don’t need me to.”
And he leaves it there. Not as the careful distance he usually puts between himself and us. He leaves it there like a door he’s decided to open.
In the garden, Nico has stopped running and is now attempting to convince the other boy that the correct way to be a dragon is on all fours, demonstrating with complete conviction and no self-consciousness whatsoever.
The other boy watches doubtfully. Nico is unperturbed.
He has never in his short life met a position he couldn’t advocate for with his whole body.
My father’s voice replays in the back of my head, smooth and certain.
Everything you build, I can still reach.
I think about last night, the hallway, Valentino’s mouth on my throat, the words I almost said.
I think about the way Nico curled his fist into Valentino’s shirt and went straight back to sleep, because on some animal, unexamined level my four-year-old already knows what I’ve spent four years trying to outrun.
I think about what it would mean to let someone stand beside me. Not in front, not in the way Dante’s men always stood, as a wall you couldn’t see past, that you eventually realized was a cage. But beside. Actually beside.
“He said everything I build, he can still reach.” I say it without looking at Valentino, keeping my eyes on Nico, who has successfully converted the other boy to dragon methodology and is now leading him on a patrol of the garden perimeter.
“He’s said versions of it my whole life. Usually he’s right.”
“Not this time,” Valentino says.
I look at him then. He’s looking at me, not the garden, and his expression is the quietest, most unguarded I’ve seen it in the daylight, stripped of the careful professional remove he carries like a second jacket.
“You don’t know that” I say.
“No,” he agrees, and doesn’t look away. “But I know what I’m going to do about it.”
In the garden, Nico raises both arms above his head and roars.