Chapter 25
Peace is a foreign concept to me. I’ve always seen it as a tactical interval between conflicts, a chance to reload, never a state of existence.
But that Tuesday night, as October rain lashed the penthouse’s triple-pane glass, transforming Chicago into a blurred impressionist painting of gray and distant lights, I experienced something dangerously close to peace.
The linear gas fireplace was lit, a strip of controlled flame dancing over black volcanic stones. We didn’t need the heat—the climate control was perfect—but Solaia liked the light. She said the fire made the apartment feel less like a laboratory and more like a home.
We were on the living room rug. I sat with my back against the sofa (the pink one, yes, it was still there, defying my aesthetic like a monument to her stubbornness), one leg stretched out, the other bent. Solaia lay with her head in my lap, her body sprawled lazily, holding a glass of Barolo.
My hand was in her hair. My fingers traced idle patterns on her scalp, twirling the dark strands.
A repetitive, hypnotic movement I made without thinking.
If someone had told me three months ago I’d be stroking Vittorio D’Angelo’s daughter’s hair while drinking wine on the floor, I would have had them committed.
“It’s really coming down,” she murmured, eyes half-closed, watching the flames.
“Autumn storm. Forty-knot winds coming off the lake.” The automatic, analytical response.
Solaia laughed softly, the vibration passing from her body into my leg. “You never turn it off, do you? Even the weather is an intelligence report.”
“Weather affects logistics, Solaia. Rain means slow traffic, reduced visibility, compromised escape routes.”
She raised her hand and touched my face, her fingertips cold from the wine glass. “Shhh. Forget logistics for an hour. No one’s coming through the window on the fiftieth floor.”
I wanted to point out that tactical rappelling was a real possibility, but I kept my mouth shut. She was right. The perimeter was secure. Franco was in the lobby. The security system showed green. For now, the world outside didn’t exist.
She shifted, turning to face my torso. The t-shirt I wore—black, simple—rode up with the friction. Solaia’s eyes, always curious, dropped to my abdomen. She reached out. Hesitated for a second. Then touched the exposed skin just above the waistband of my sweatpants.
Her fingers traced the hard line of an old scar. A white line, irregular and ugly, that ran from my last left rib to my hip bone. I tensed. The muscle contracted under her touch. It wasn’t ticklishness. It was memory.
“This one isn’t from a bullet,” she said. It wasn’t a question. She’d already seen the gunshot marks on my shoulder and thigh. They were small, circular, clean craters. This one was a tear.
“No,” I confirmed, my voice rougher than I intended.
“Knife?”
“Glass.”
Solaia raised her eyes to my face. Her curiosity wasn’t morbid—it was a need to understand the map of the territory she now inhabited. “How did it happen?”
I could deflect. I could say “work accident” or “a bar fight when I was young and stupid.” It would be easier.
Safer to maintain the mystique of the invincible Consigliere.
But Solaia wasn’t looking at the Consigliere.
She was looking at Cassian. And after everything—after the birthday, after the night in the kitchen, after the shooting range—lying felt like a worse violation than violence.
I took a sip of wine, feeling the tannins dry my mouth. “I was twelve,” I began.
Solaia sat up, crossing her legs, abandoning her glass on the coffee table. Her full attention locked on me.
“Twelve?” she repeated.
I looked at the fire. It was easier to talk to the flames than to her eyes. “My parents weren’t part of the Family. My father, Marco Varro, was an accountant. An honest, timid man who kept the books for a bakery in Little Italy. My mother taught piano. We lived a... normal life. Small. Safe.”
I felt the weight of memory settle on my shoulders.
“The problem with honest men in controlled neighborhoods is they see things. And my father saw a transaction he shouldn’t have.
He didn’t go to the police. He didn’t tell anyone.
But the Kovacs...” The name tasted like bile.
“The Kovacs were expanding territory at the time. Nikolai’s father, Ivan, was paranoid.
He didn’t need proof of betrayal. Just the possibility. ”
Solaia’s hand went to her mouth. She knew who the Kovacs were. She knew about the war her father had waged against them for decades.
“They came on a Tuesday night. It was raining, like tonight,” I continued, my voice monotone, devoid of emotion, reciting the facts like I was reading from a police file.
“They broke down the front door. I was in my room, studying. I heard my mother scream. I heard my father begging. Not for his life. For mine.”
I closed my eyes for a second. The sound of breaking glass came back, sharp.
“Ivan Kovacs didn't like loose ends. They shot my parents in the living room.
Point-blank execution. I tried to escape through the back window.
I was fast, but not fast enough. One of the men grabbed me.
He threw me against the glass door of the balcony.
The glass wasn't tempered. It shattered.”
I touched the scar on my side absently. “A piece of glass lodged here. Tore through the muscle. I fell. Bled on the carpet, staring at my parents' bodies, waiting for the bullet that would finish the job.”
I felt Solaia's hand take mine, fingers interlacing tightly. She said nothing, didn't interrupt with cheap pity. She just held on.
“Why are you alive?” she whispered.
“Because your father showed up.” I opened my eyes and looked at her. “Vittorio didn't get there in time to save my parents. But he arrived in time to kill the men inside.”
The image of Vittorio D'Angelo, twenty-three years younger, standing in my destroyed living room in a beige overcoat stained with rain and blood, was the clearest memory I had.
“He found me bleeding. He could have left me there.
I was an orphan, a nobody, an inconvenient witness.
The police would come, social services would take me. I'd disappear into the system.”
“But he didn't leave you,” Solaia finished.
“No. He crouched down. He didn't look at my wound. He looked into my eyes. And he asked me a question.” I let out a short sigh. “He said, ‘Boy, do you want to cry or do you want revenge?’”
Solaia shuddered. It was exactly something Vittorio would say.
“I said I wanted them dead.” Vittorio smiled.
He picked me up in his arms—I was covered in blood and glass—and carried me to his car.
He paid the best surgeon in the city to stitch me up.
He paid for my education. He gave me a room in the mansion.
“I never saw you there,” she said, confused.
“I stayed in the east wing. And then I went to military boarding school. Vittorio didn't want a son; he'd already tried to have one and hadn't succeeded yet. You were born years later. He wanted a weapon. He saw the emptiness in my eyes that night and decided to fill it with loyalty and tactics.”
I let go of her hand and ran it over my face.
“I'm not the Consigliere because I like power, Solaia.
I'm the Consigliere because Vittorio D'Angelo gave me a purpose when I had nothing but pain.
I owe him every breath I take. And when he asked me, on his deathbed, to protect you…
it wasn't a contract. It was the payment of a blood debt.”
The silence in the room was absolute. The rain outside seemed to ease, respecting the weight of the confession.
I felt exposed. Vulnerable. I had just handed her the instruction manual to my psyche. I had told her I was shaped by trauma and trained like an attack dog. I waited for her to pull back. For her to see that my “love” or “protection” was just programming.
Solaia moved. She didn't pull back. She came closer. She knelt between my legs. Her face was wet with tears, but she wasn't sobbing. She lifted the black t-shirt I was wearing, exposing my torso completely.
She looked at the white, ugly scar. “He took your childhood,” she whispered, her voice choked. “The Kovacs took your parents, and my father took your innocence. They turned you into stone so you wouldn't break again.”
“It was necessary,” I defended automatically. “Stone survives.”
“But stone doesn't feel,” she countered. “And you feel, Cassian. I see it.”
She leaned forward. I stopped breathing. Solaia pressed her lips to the scar. It wasn't an erotic kiss. It was a kiss of reverence. Of healing. Her lips were soft and warm against the irregular, numb skin of the scar. I felt the warmth of her breath seep into where the glass had cut years ago.
My hands went to her hair, holding her there, trembling. “Solaia…” My voice failed.
She kissed the skin around the mark. Then moved up, kissing my abdomen, my sternum, until she reached my chin. She lifted her face. “You don't owe me anything, Cassian. The debt to my father ended when he died. If you're here… if you're protecting me… I want it to be for me. Not for a ghost.”
I looked into her eyes. I saw the truth there. She didn't see the monster Vittorio created. She saw the twelve-year-old boy who bled on the carpet. And she loved them both.
“It's for you,” I confessed, the truth coming out like a surrender. “Everything I've done in the last few weeks. The violence. The fear. The marriage. It started as debt. But now…”
I ran my thumb across her cheek, wiping away a tear. “Now, if the world burned, I'd save you first and let Vittorio's memory turn to ash.”
Solaia let out a sound that was half laugh, half sob. “That's the most romantic and terrifying thing anyone's ever said to me.”
“I'm a practical man.”
“Shut up and kiss me, Varro.”
I leaned in to comply. The moment was perfect. Fragile. Crystalline. The final barrier between us—the past—had crumbled. We were about to build something new, something that belonged only to us.
TRIIIIM.
The sound of my cell phone, left on the kitchen island, sliced through the air like an air raid siren. It wasn't the standard ringtone. It was the emergency tone. That tone meant only one thing: Code Red.
Solaia froze. I froze. The moment shattered. The bubble of intimacy burst, letting in the cold air of reality.
I pulled away from her. The movement was instinctive—the soldier taking command over the husband. I rose in one fluid motion, ignoring my body's protest, the part of me that wanted to stay on the floor with her. I walked to the phone. Looked at the screen.
Franco. Maximum Priority.
I answered. “Varro.”
“Sir”—Franco's voice was tense, wind and sirens howling in the background—“we have a problem. One of the port shipments was intercepted. And it wasn't the feds.”
“Kovacs?” I asked, my eyes fixed on Solaia, still kneeling on the rug, fear written across her face.
“Worse,” Franco replied. “They knew the route, sir. The route we changed yesterday. The route only the Capos knew.”
Ice flooded back into my veins. The peace I'd felt minutes ago evaporated. “What are you saying, Franco?”
“I'm saying we have a leak. The rat is inside the house, Cassian.”
I hung up. Looked at Solaia. She stood, hugging herself, sensing the shift in the room's atmosphere. “What happened?” she asked.
“War just knocked on the door,” I replied, donning my armor of coldness once more. “And someone opened it from the inside.”