Chapter 6
DANTE
Seven days.
Seven days of necessary words and nothing else. Seven days of treating meals like obligations, of lying beside her in a bed that feels like a battlefield, of counting the hours until I can escape to the study and pour whiskey I don’t taste.
Seven days of treating my wife like furniture.
It’s working. That’s what I tell myself.
Some mornings I leave before it gets light, slipping out while she’s a shape in the darkness. The curve of her shoulder. The fall of her hair across the pillow.
Gone before she can stir. Before I have to look at her and remember what I’m pretending not to want.
Other mornings, when meetings demand a later start, we sit across from each other at the breakfast table. Polite nods. Pass the coffee. Nothing else.
I make my own eggs in the empty kitchen on the days I rise early, the way Mama taught me when I was eight. The staff knows not to interfere. The eggs are always overdone. I eat them anyway.
The days I fill with work. Meetings with captains. Calls with lawyers. The endless machinery of an empire that doesn’t care if its Don is sleeping or eating or losing his mind.
Renzo shadows me, silent and watchful. He knows. Hasn’t asked. Won’t. That’s not how we work.
Zio Pietro pulls me aside on day four.
“You look like death warmed over.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re lying.”
He doesn’t push it. Just claps my shoulder once, the way he used to when I was a boy pretending not to be afraid.
“Your father went through dark times too. He came out the other side.”
I don’t mention that my father came out the other side broken. That he spent years as a ghost who forgot to stop breathing. That coming out the other side isn’t the same as surviving.
The evenings are harder.
I return late. Always late. She’s in bed by then, back turned to my side, her body a careful curve of avoidance that mirrors my own.
Her breathing is too even. Too controlled.
She’s not sleeping.
Neither am I.
We lie there in the dark, inches apart, and I count the cracks in the ceiling because it’s better than counting the ways I want to reach for her. Better than breathing in the scent of her hair on the pillows, the warmth radiating from her skin, the sounds she makes when she drifts off at last.
By 3:00 a.m., I give up. Slip out of bed. Cross to the study. Pour whiskey. Repeat.
It’s not sustainable. I know that.
But it’s safe. Safe is all I have.
Mid-morning on day eight, I head for the study to review the quarterly projections.
The door is already open.
I stop in the hallway. My blood cools. Every muscle locks tight.
No one enters my study without permission. Not the staff, not my siblings, not even Renzo unless I’ve summoned him. This room was my father’s before it became mine, and the rule has held for years.
Someone is breaking it.
I move forward, quiet, controlled. Ready for anything.
What I find is my wife.
She’s sitting at my desk. Not perched on the edge. Not hovering. She’s settled, surrounded by ledgers spread open across the mahogany surface, a cup of coffee cooling at her elbow and a pen moving across a notepad.
She’s wearing reading glasses.
Oversized tortoiseshell frames that swallow half her face and make her look like a graduate student pulling an all-nighter. My lungs seize. All the air just gone.
Cazzo.
She doesn’t look up. Doesn’t notice me standing there. She’s absorbed, lost in whatever pattern she’s tracing through those numbers, and I stand like an idiot, frozen by the sight of a woman doing paperwork.
Move. Say her name. Send her away.
I don’t.
Instead I watch. She tucks a strand of dark hair behind her left ear when she leans closer to a column of figures. A small furrow forms between her brows as she runs her finger down a row of numbers.
She holds the pen left-handed. I didn’t know that.
How the hell did I not know that?
She’s been here for hours. I can tell by the cold coffee, the stack of completed notes, the comfortable sprawl of her materials across the desk. She didn’t ask permission. Didn’t wait for an invitation. She walked in and started.
Like she belonged here.
“You’re in my chair.”
Her head snaps up. The reading glasses magnify her eyes before she tugs them off. Her lips part, then press flat. A flush climbs her throat. Her chin lifts.
“I needed to do work.”
“So you broke into my study.”
“The door was unlocked.”
“That’s not an invitation.”
She sets down her pen. Folds her hands on the desk. Lifts her chin, shoulders squared, gaze locked on mine. Not backing down.
“I’ve been in this room dozens of times. Quarterly audits with my father for three years. I know where the ledgers are kept. I know the filing system. I know.”
She stops herself. Takes a measured inhale.
“I was going stir-crazy. I needed to work. I’ve been at this all week.”
I should be angry. This is my space, my territory, and she invaded it without asking.
My feet carry me into the room instead. Closer. Studying the spread of papers, the columns flagged in her careful handwriting. The chair I should be reclaiming.
“Nonna Rosa mentioned you had tea with her this morning.”
Her head tilts. A beat of silence before she recalibrates.
“Yes. She invited me. I didn’t want to be rude.”
“Nonna Rosa doesn’t invite people to tea. She tolerates their presence or she doesn’t.”
Cassia processes this. Her lips part. Her eyes brighten as they search mine.
“She was kind to me. Told me stories about your mother.”
Of course she did. Nonna Rosa adored Mama. If she’s sharing those stories with Cassia, it means Nonna Rosa has decided my wife is worth getting to know.
So have I. Somewhere along the way, without meaning to.
“What are you looking at?”
She hesitates. Her fingers brush the edge of a ledger, accounts receivable by the binding, and I see the moment she decides to show me.
“There’s a problem with these numbers.”
I move closer to the desk. Closer to her.
“Wrong how?”
“I’m not sure yet. But.”
“Don.” Romano’s voice from the threshold.
I turn to find him there, a manila folder in his hand, posture perfect.
“The Treme warehouse lease. Needs your signature before end of week.”
He steps into the room, then stops. His eyes move to Cassia. To the ledgers spread around her. To the notepad covered in her careful handwriting.
“Mrs. Santoro.” He inclines his head. Polite. Correct. “Can I help you find anything?”
She looks up at him. Her jaw sets, a micro-flinch she covers by straightening the papers in front of her.
“No, I’m fine. Thank you.”
Romano sets the folder on the corner of the desk, but his gaze lingers on the papers too long. His hand moves to his left ring finger, turning the wedding band there.
“Also, Don. That shipment delay from last week? Resolved. The Baton Rouge contact came through.”
He glances at Cassia again, at the open ledgers.
“Should I have Maria clear these away? Mrs. Santoro shouldn’t trouble herself with business matters.”
The words are reasonable on the surface. Polite enough. My back teeth grind.
“That won’t be necessary.”
A pause. Romano’s expression doesn’t change, but his nostrils flare before he nods.
“As you wish, Don.”
He leaves. His footsteps fade down the hallway.
I stare at the empty threshold. My gut won’t settle.
Romano has been with this family since before I was born.
Loyal, reliable, trusted. My father relied on him through the darkest years, when grief had hollowed Salvatore Santoro into a man who stopped eating, stopped speaking, stopped being anyone’s father.
Romano kept things running. Handled operations. Earned his place a thousand times over.
So why did that exchange sit wrong?
The way his eyes lingered on those papers. The way he offered to have them cleared away, too eager. The turn of his wedding ring while he spoke.
I’m being paranoid. Exhaustion and sleeplessness making shadows where there are none.
“He doesn’t like me in here.”
Cassia’s voice, quiet.
I turn to find her studying the threshold with a small frown.
“Romano? He’s harmless. Been with my family longer than I’ve been alive.”
She nods. Lets it go. But her fingers tap against the desk, a tell I’m cataloging, and she doesn’t look convinced.
“Show me what you found.”
Her head comes up. “You want to see?”
“You said the numbers were wrong. Show me.”
She hesitates. Then she’s moving, gathering papers, spreading them across the desk with the quick efficiency of someone who knows what she’s doing.
“Here.” She points to a column of figures. “Supplier payments for the last eighteen months. On the surface, everything looks normal. Standard vendors, standard amounts, standard timing.”
“But?”
“But when you compare across accounts.” She pulls another ledger close, flips to a marked page.
“These three vendors are the same entity. Different names, different addresses, but the payment patterns are identical. Someone’s been inflating costs by about eight percent and routing the difference through shell accounts. ”
I lean closer. Study the numbers she’s highlighting. She’s right. The pattern is there, subtle but unmistakable once you know where to look.
“You found this in a week?”
“I found this in three days. I spent the rest of the time confirming it.”
Her voice has changed. Faster now, animated, the careful neutrality falling away. This is her in her element. This is what she does.
“There’s more.”
She pulls out her notepad.
“The timing of the payments clusters around specific dates. Three days after legitimate transactions, every time. It’s designed to look like normal cash flow, but it’s too consistent. Real business isn’t this clean.”
“Who has access to these accounts?”
“That’s the interesting part.” She taps a line of figures. “The authorization signatures vary. But there’s one name that appears on every single inflated invoice.”
She looks up at me. Her mouth is a flat line, brows drawn tight. The look of someone carrying a blade she doesn’t want to use.
“I don’t want to accuse anyone without more evidence. But someone in your organization has been skimming. And they’ve been doing it for at least two years.”
The implications settle over me like cold water.
Two years of betrayal under my roof. Under my father’s roof before that. I never saw it.
But she did. She walked into my study without permission, sat down at my desk, and found in a week what I’ve missed for years.
Fuck.
I look at her. The reading glasses dangling from her fingers. The pen tucked behind her ear. The notes in handwriting tighter and more precise than any of my captains’.
Not a transaction. Not a placeholder. Not furniture.
A weapon I didn’t know I had.
And now my hands won’t unclench.
“Keep looking.” The words leave my mouth before I can stop them. “Whatever you need. Access, resources, time. Find the source.”
Her eyes widen. She wasn’t expecting that.
“You’re serious.”
“I don’t make offers twice.”
She studies me, scanning my face the way she scanned those columns. Looking for the discrepancy. The hidden line item.
I should leave it there. Walk away. Keep the distance I’ve maintained for seven days.
Instead.
“Sundays we have family dinner. Everyone attends.”
She looks up from the ledgers.
“Before dinner, I play chess with Marco. Tradition.”
The tradition I’ve kept since Marco was twelve years old and grieving a mother he could not remember. The one constant in a decade of chaos. He’s beaten me three times. I remember every game.
“You should join us.”
“I don’t play chess.”
“Then watch.” I pause at the threshold. Don’t look back. “You’re part of this family now. Act like it.”
I leave before she can respond. Before I can see whatever crosses her face. Before I do something stupid, like go back and ask her to explain the numbers again.
Just so I can hear her voice speed up when she’s excited. Just so I can watch her hands move when she’s illustrating a point. Just so I can stand near enough to catch that faint floral scent that’s become familiar without my permission.
Her shampoo. Her skin. Her.
I head for the gym. I need to hit something.
It doesn’t help.
It never fucking does.