Chapter 3
PIETRO
Don Lou really picked an inconvenient time to die.
God rest his soul and all that, but I had intended to see Emily again. Speak to her properly this time. Use the normal channels available to a man who was not in the habit of loitering around university libraries in the hope of running into the same woman twice.
That alone should have concerned me.
In twenty-three years, I had never felt anything remotely like the spark I felt across that table. Not once. To the point that, on more than one occasion, I had wondered whether I was built wrong in some fundamental way. Whether I was perhaps a little too much like Matteo Genovese for comfort.
A dangerous thought.
Matteo’s devotion to his wife was legendary in the family. Also mildly terrifying.
And yet it had been two days since I met her, and Emily was still in my head.
I kept replaying the time we had spent together. The way she had looked at me without awkwardness. The dry little edge in her voice when she bartered that book from me. The brief blush I managed to pull from her afterward.
None of it should have stayed with me.
All of it had.
I had threatened Olivero with a great deal of pain and the strategic loss of several body parts if he so much as hinted to my father what he witnessed in that library.
Then, because I was apparently determined to abandon both pride and common sense in the same week, I considered going around him and asking one of my father’s men to find out who she was.
Which, of course, was a fantasy.
Nothing in my family ever stayed quiet for long. If a report existed, my father would see it at roughly the same time I did.
So I decided to go old school.
That decision had backfired spectacularly.
Instead of returning to Hawthorne and relying on luck, timing, and the embarrassing hope that Emily might be there again, I was sitting in the back of the family jet on the way home to pay my respects to one of my father’s oldest associates.
I sighed and tapped my fingers once against the armrest.
Across from me, Olivero looked up from his phone.
“You appear distressed,” he said blandly.
I gave him a long look. “Be careful.”
“What?” He slipped his phone into his pocket. “I know you’re not especially fond of public displays.”
Ah. That.
I cleared my throat and adjusted my cuffs. “I’ll survive. I have to stand beside my father, pay my respects, and look appropriately solemn. It comes with the territory.”
“Interesting,” Olivero said. “And here I was thinking your mood had more to do with the girl.”
There it was.
“What girl?”
He gave me a sideways smile I would have enjoyed removing from his face. “Of course. My mistake.”
I narrowed my eyes at him.
“Just so you know,” he said lightly, “I have a friend. Derek. IT genius. If you ever needed information on this imaginary girl, I’m sure he could help. But as you said, there is no girl, so naturally that would be unnecessary.”
I ground my teeth hard enough to feel it in my temples. For a brief and not entirely unappealing moment, I considered stabbing him.
Instead, I looked back down at the book open in my lap and pretended to read.
It was an old habit.
Reading had been more than a pastime when I was young.
It was refuge. Escape. Whole lives hidden between covers while mine remained carefully contained on an island my father called safe.
For years, I thought his distance meant shame.
That I was something he had tucked away because a son with a disability did not fit the image of a future don.
I was wrong.
What I mistook for rejection was fear. Not fear of me, but for me. Fear that if I was visible, I could be used. Taken. Broken.
It had taken Lily to make me understand that.
She came into my life when I was ten and tore open the walls of that careful little prison with more warmth than force. She never treated me like glass. Never let me retreat into the version of myself built by other people’s limits. If my father taught me caution, my mother taught me possibility.
After that came years of pain, training, discipline. My uncle Hoka had no patience for self-pity and even less for excuses. With his help, and more stubbornness than was probably healthy, I built strength where I could, balance where I lacked it, and endurance where I needed it.
The cerebral palsy did not disappear. It never would. But I learned very early that difficulty was not the same thing as defeat.
By the time this plane landed, I would step back into the role waiting for me as if I had never left campus at all. Pietro Benetti. Alessandro’s heir. Soon-to-be sotto capo.
And yet, for reasons I found increasingly irritating, part of me was still in a university library, watching a woman in a pink headband push her glasses back up her nose and look at me as if I were simply a man in her way.
When we landed, a car was already waiting on the tarmac.
The moment I saw my mother step out, followed by the small whirlwind that was Victoria, the tension in my shoulders eased for the first time since leaving Boston.
“Pietro!”
Victoria bolted up the steps before I had even set a foot outside the jet and wrapped both arms around my leg with enough force to throw herself slightly off balance. I caught the top of her head with one hand before she could topple backward and laughed.
“Munchkin,” I said, “you couldn’t even let me get down the stairs first?”
“I missed you.”
I narrowed my eyes at her in mock suspicion. “Is that because Father refuses to play with you?”
She tipped her face up, all innocence ruined by the cheeky little grin that was far too much like our mother’s.
“Maybe.”
I ruffled her hair, and the softness of it triggered a thought so unhelpful I nearly cursed out loud.
Would Emily’s feel the same?
Focus.
I made my way down the stairs more slowly than most men would have, one hand firm on the rail, my cane steady against the metal steps.
Some days my body cooperated more generously than others.
Today it gave me enough, and I had long since learned not to waste energy resenting what would never change.
My mother waited at the bottom.
“You didn’t have to come, Ma,” I said, leaning down to kiss her forehead.
“I know,” she said, smiling as she touched my cheek. “But I missed you, and your sister was absolutely determined to come. You know how stubborn she is.”
I exhaled. “Like Father.”
“And you,” she said, with that look mothers perfected somewhere between affection and accusation.
“I’ve only been gone five weeks.”
“Five weeks too long.”
There was no arguing with that. Not successfully.
Olivero was already loading my bag into the car by the time we slid into the back seat, Victoria immediately plastered against my side.
“We have to go straight to Lou’s wake,” my mother said as the driver pulled away.
I turned my head toward her. “Do you think I could head back tonight?”
The way her expression fell made guilt hit.
“I mean,” she said lightly, though I knew her too well to miss the disappointment, “if you need to?—”
“No.” I cut the word off with a small shake of my head. “I’ll go back tomorrow. I’ll stay tonight, Ma.”
Her smile returned at once, brighter than before, and some traitorous part of me wondered what Emily’s smile looked like when it arrived as unexpectedly.
This was becoming absurd.
The wake was held at Lou Moretti’s estate, which meant the house was overflowing before we even reached the front steps.
Black cars lined the drive. Men in dark suits stood in quiet clusters beneath the portico and along the gravel sweep, speaking in low voices weighted with ritual, memory, and calculation.
Death was rarely just grief in our world.
It was optics. Allegiances. A reminder of who remained standing when someone else no longer did.
By the time I stepped out of the car, my expression had settled back into something colder, flatter, more useful.
Victoria reached for my hand automatically. I let her hold two fingers until we reached the entrance, then passed her back to my mother. This was not a place for a child, no matter how protected she was.
Inside, the air smelled of lilies, polished wood, cigar smoke, and too many people pretending not to study one another.
My father spotted us almost immediately.
Alessandro Benetti did not hurry. Men like him never did. He crossed the room with the same measured certainty he brought to everything else, broad-shouldered and immaculate in black, his presence stilling the air around him without effort.
Then he reached me and, without a shred of hesitation, pulled me into a hard embrace.
For one brief moment, I was not a future sotto capo, Benetti heir, or a man being measured by every pair of eyes in the room.
I was simply his son.
“Pietro,” he said, stepping back just enough to look at me properly. His mouth curved, the severity in his face easing. “You look well.”
“I’ve been told,” I said.
His hand closed briefly around the back of my neck, a gesture both grounding and deeply un-mafia in front of half the city’s most dangerous men.
Most fathers in our world were not demonstrative. They thought love softened boys, made them careless, weak, too easily used.
Not mine.
And if Alessandro Benetti loved harder than most men knew how to admit, I was certain my mother was the reason. Lily had a way of undoing old ugliness simply by refusing to let it stand unchallenged.
My father’s gaze flicked over my shoulder to where my mother stood with Victoria. Something warm passed over his face and vanished again so quickly most men would have missed it.
I didn’t.
“Come,” he said, his hand dropping away as business reclaimed him. “There are people you need to greet.”
And just like that, the son became the heir again.
I moved at his side through the room, offering my condolences to Lou’s widow, shaking hands, nodding to men I had known since childhood who were only now starting to look at me not as Alessandro’s boy but as the one who would soon stand beside him in full.
I knew how to do this. When to speak. When to stay silent.
A future sotto capo was not made in one ceremony. He was made in rooms like this, under watchful eyes, seen, weighed, and remembered.
I felt it happening.
Approval from some. Curiosity from others. Calculation from all of them.
Good.
Let them calculate.
Eventually my father steered me toward a side room where the noise dropped a fraction and the drinks were stronger.
“Laura Bianchi is here tonight,” he said, as if commenting on the weather.
I glanced at him. “My condolences to Laura.”
One dark brow lifted. “She would make a good wife.”
Of course she would. Laura was polished, obedient in the way some men desired, born to the right family, and blessed with the kind of beauty that made people forgive her for being uninteresting.
“She would make an excellent tax arrangement too,” I said. “That doesn’t mean I want to marry her.”
My father gave me the look that suggested I was skirting the edge of insolence.
“In time,” he said, “you will need to think seriously about these things.”
“In time,” I replied, “I may think seriously about throwing myself into the sea.”
His mouth twitched despite himself.
“That would be dramatic even for you.”
Before I could answer, my mother appeared at my side with the uncanny timing she had always possessed when my father and I were one sentence away from becoming mutually irritating.
She touched my sleeve lightly. “You seem worried, my son. What’s wrong? Is it the job? Because you know you do not have to become sotto capo if you do not want to. Sandro would?—”
I stopped her gently, closing my hand around hers and giving it a small squeeze.
“No. That’s not the problem.”
Her eyes sharpened at once.
“So there is a problem.”
I sighed. There were many things in this world I could manage. My mother’s perception had never been one of them.
“I don’t want to marry Laura,” I said quietly. “Or anyone else, for that matter.”
Her expression softened with patient understanding.
“You do not have to marry anyone you do not want to.”
I looked away toward the crowd, toward the black of suits, fancy dresses and old loyalties.
She studied me for a beat too long. “What’s her name?”
“There is no one.”
“Pietro.”
“Don’t worry about me.” I tipped my chin toward the far corner of the room. “You should worry about your other child. She’s about to start a war.”
My mother laughed under her breath. “Don’t be silly. She’s ten.”
I pointed.
Across the room, Victoria stood with her hands clasped behind her back, blinking huge doe eyes up at a completely oblivious twelve-year-old Nicolo Genovese, who looked as if he had not yet realized he was living his final hour.
A few feet away, my father stood utterly still, a glass in one hand, watching the boy with the kind of calm that usually preceded violence.
My mother followed my line of sight and burst into helpless laughter.
“Oh dear,” she murmured.
“Yes,” I said. “He’s done for.”
My mother was still smiling to herself as she drifted away, no doubt to save Nicolo Genovese from my sister’s devastating charm and my father from committing murder at a wake.
I stayed where I was for a moment, a glass untouched in my hand, the noise of the room washing around me without really landing. Men spoke in low voices. Alliances shifted by inches. Lou Moretti was dead, and already half the room was measuring what that meant for the living.
This was my world.
It had always been my world.
In a little over six months, I would stop standing at my father’s side as his son and start standing there as something closer to his equal. I knew what would be expected of me. Strength. Discipline. Loyalty. A strategic marriage, perhaps, if it served the family well enough.
None of it frightened me.
What unsettled me was the thought of a woman in a library looking at me with clear blue eyes and no trace of caution, no trace of pity. As if I were simply a man who happened to be in her way.
Laura Bianchi would have been a sensible choice. A useful one.
Emily was neither.
And yet she was the only woman I had thought about for two days.
I looked across the room to where my father stood, one hand resting lightly at my mother’s back while he glared at Nicolo Genovese as though the boy had personally declared war on the Benetti family.
Love, in our world, was supposed to be a weakness.
Looking at him, I had never believed that.
Looking at myself now, I was beginning to understand just how dangerous it could be.