CHAPTER 35
Darius
The silence that followed the call settled into the room like a reward.
Not empty nor peaceful. Satisfied. It had weight to it—anticipation, certainty, the quiet satisfaction of knowing exactly how an event would unfold long before they did.
I remained seated, the phone resting loosely against my palm, my gaze fixed somewhere beyond the glass as the city stretched endlessly below.
She would come. There had never been a version of this where she didn’t.
A slow smile curved at the edge of my mouth.
“My pumpkin.”
The name lingered in the air, not softened by time, not diluted into something harmless. If anything, the years had sharpened it, stripped it down to what it had always been—possession disguised as familiarity, history that refused to stay buried.
Denial had a way of doing that. Of preserving things exactly as they were, untouched, waiting. Denial had only fuelled the hunger—the memory of small whimpers, wide, petrified eyes. More enduring than prayer.
My mind always circled back to her. The first always leaves a mark. Not because they matter more, but because they teach you where people fracture.
I set the phone aside and reached for the iPad resting on the desk.
The screen lit instantly, her image already waiting for me.
Roxanne stared back from it—caught mid-step, wind lifting strands of her hair, her face turned just enough to avoid the camera, unaware of the eyes that had followed her long enough to capture this moment.
Time had refined her, smoothed the edges, given her the illusion of control.
But the readiness to flinch was still there.
The same tension threaded through her posture.
The same awareness she tried so carefully to mask.
She had learned how to carry herself better, how to exist in spaces without shrinking—but she hadn’t unlearned what lived underneath.
My thumb dragged slowly across the glass, not quite touching her image, but tracing it anyway, as if confirming that what I was seeing was real, that the years between then and now hadn’t rewritten her into someone unrecognisable.
“You learned to stand with confidence,” I murmured, more to myself than anyone else. “But not well enough.”
The memory of the gallery returned with ease, not as a distant blur, but a sequence I had been replaying long before this moment. I hadn’t gone there for her. Not initially.
Ireland had been a necessity, not a choice—a consequence of business gone sideways. Millions lost because men with delusions of morality had interfered where they didn’t belong.
Marcello Vitale.
The Rossi dog.
And that Chinese fool who thought loyalty made him family.
Together they interfered where they shouldn’t, dismantling arrangements that had taken years to cultivate. And that had cost me more than I tolerated.
Marcello’s reach had extended further than it should have.
Sentiment. Always sentiment. Men destroyed empires for women and children every day.
Idiots.
But then I learned about his weakness—my darling niece, Roxanne. A poetic symmetry. Marcello’s empire had cost me blood and money, and now his own blood would pay me back.
My plan was simple: deal with Marcello, cut out the rot. Clean. Efficient. Necessary.
Until I saw her.
She had walked into that gallery like she belonged to a different world—light spilling over polished floors, conversations murmured in controlled tones, everything curated, structured, contained.
Exactly the kind of environment she had always gravitated towards.
As if order could erase what came before it.
I had watched her longer than I should have.
The way her gaze moved through the room. How she mapped it, instinctively. Entrances. Exits. Distances. People.
She carried awareness like a second skin, even now.
And then, without turning, without looking—she felt me.
That shift was small. Almost invisible. A pause in the rhythm of her movement. But I saw it. I always did.
Fear didn’t disappear from people like her. It settled deeper, learned to disguise itself, to wait until the right moment awoke it.
I had stepped into her space deliberately. Not enough to draw attention or cause a scene. And then I saw the flicker. Gone almost as soon as it appeared, buried under control, under composure—but it had been there.
She remembered.
I had expected that.
You didn’t undo lessons like that. Not the kind that were taught early, when the mind was still soft enough to take shape properly. Discipline. Correction. That’s all it had ever been. She had needed both.
Even at twelve, there had been a defiance in her—too wilful, too rebellious, too unaware of the world she was growing into. Someone had to teach her what the world did to girls like her. Someone had to make her understand what it meant to be looked at, wanted, taken apart.
Better it came from someone who knew her.
Who understood her. Someone who could teach her properly.
Better she learned early, when it could still be shaped—than later, when it would break her.
I had done what was necessary. And she had learned.
The way she froze now—controlled, contained, but never unaware—was proof of that.
There were lines I had never crossed, though. Not out of morality. Simply because patience had always served me better than greed.
I didn’t need to speak to her. Didn’t need to corner her, didn’t need to force anything into the open.
Recognition was enough. Letting her walk away was enough.
Because the moment itself wasn’t the point—it was what followed.
The way it would linger. The way it would crawl into her thoughts, sit in the back of her mind, make her question what she had felt, what she had seen. What was coming.
“She’s not alone.” My guard had informed me the following day.
The photographs were grainy, taken from a distance, but they didn’t need to be clearer than they were. Roxanne stood in each of them, but she wasn’t the only point of interest anymore. The man beside her was.
“He’s the same one who killed the informant asking about her,” my man added.
I nodded once, unsurprised. “Interesting.”
Santino.
Men like him didn’t need introductions. They carried their history in the way they moved—in the stillness that wasn’t passive, in the awareness that never dropped, in the quiet readiness for violence that sat just beneath the surface.
I remembered him briefly from China and the whispers left behind whenever he entered a room.
He stood close to her, not carelessly, not loosely, but with intention. Protective without making a display of it. Claiming space without asking for permission.
My gaze lingered longer than necessary, studying the small details most would overlook—the angle of his body, the way he positioned himself half a step closer to the street than she was, the subtle way his attention divided between her and everything else. Not just a guard. Something more.
“How very interesting,” I murmured, swiping the photograph aside only to see another.
Marcello had always been precise. Calculated. He didn’t make careless decisions, didn’t leave loose ends. And yet—he had left her with him. Confident. Foolish.
Marcello’s mistake hadn’t been carelessness. It had been sentiment. He had built a stable life around her—protected even, and in doing so, he had made her valuable in ways she didn’t even understand.
Her father had been careful. He’d strategically buried assets where I couldn’t reach, under her name, before he died. Not in my name. Not where they belonged. But in hers.
Before I could bring it back under my name, she was married, and I’d been locked out. I had been patient then. There had been no need to rush. But time changes circumstances.
For years, that marriage kept her out of reach. A name I couldn’t touch without consequence. But that was gone now. No husband. No shield. Just her—and what was mine sitting quietly in her name.
Some things didn’t need to be chased; they only required patience. They only needed to be reminded where they belonged. And the certainty that, no matter how far they strayed—they would always find their way back.
A deep breath left me as I leaned back in my chair, my attention returning to the iPad. This time, I pulled up the image of her alone again, isolating her from the rest, removing the distraction. Simpler that way. Cleaner.
“Send a set to him,” I said calmly.
There was a brief pause before the response came. “All of them?”
“No,” I replied, my gaze still fixed on her face. “Just enough.”
Enough to be understood. Enough to be questioned. Enough to settle in Marcello’s mind and refuse to leave. Because breaking a man was never about what you showed him. It was about what you made him imagine.
My thumb brushed across the edge of the screen once more, as though committing the image to memory all over again.
“My pumpkin,” I whispered.
Not affection. Never that—history. An old claim left unfinished.
Some things imprint too deeply to fade. Roxanne had always been one of them.
She’d hated the name by thirteen, but I kept using it anyway.
Children rarely understood what was good for them.
She believed she had grown. Believed she had escaped.
But I knew better. Fear lived in her bones, the way it silenced her.
“It’ll be fun,” I added after a moment, my voice low, almost thoughtful. “To see how long she holds together.”
Because that was what interested me. Not the superficial illusion she had built so carefully around herself. But the moment where control slipped, where the structure failed, where everything she believed she had left behind came rushing back in.
She had spent years convincing herself I was gone. People mistook absence for mercy. They were rarely the same thing. And breaking her would only be the beginning, and watching the real game unfold of what the men around her did when she fell apart.
Tomorrow, at three, she would walk in. Not because I was forcing her. Because she had been taught to.
Conditioning had always been more reliable than chains. She would try to gain the false control I would let her have only to watch her crumble as I took it back from her.
She would come the same way she always had—resisting, perhaps, trembling, maybe. Because children trusted the adults who hurt them long before they learned to fear them.
Tomorrow, I reclaim what should never have been taken from me. What was wrongly given to her.
And I would be waiting, patient, certain. Because the forbidden fruit ripens eventually, and when it does, it falls into the hand that never stopped reaching.