Chapter 32 Nico
Sleep doesn’t stick.
It brushes over me in thin, useless waves, never enough to drag me under. Every time my eyes close, I see the coffee table. The blood. The rat. The way Isabella’s face went white in my doorway when she told me, like she was trying not to let the fear win.
Her breathing is slow and even against my chest now, warm and soft and steady. She’s tucked half on top of me, one hand fisted in the fabric of my t-shirt like she doesn’t trust me not to vanish if she lets go.
As if I could go anywhere.
I lie there for another stretch of minutes, staring at the ceiling, waiting for something in me to unclench.
It doesn’t.
Careful not to jostle her ribs, I slide out from under her, easing her hand free. She makes a soft sound, a small protest, but settles again when I pull the quilt higher around her shoulders.
“I’m just in the next room, Bella,” I whisper, brushing a kiss across her temple. “I’ve got you.”
She doesn’t answer. Sleep has her completely, which is a relief. She needs it. Tomorrow will be worse.
I grab a hoodie off the chair and tug it on as I step into the hallway, leaving the bedroom door cracked, that sliver of light an old habit I can’t shake.
My father used to do that for us when we were kids, door ajar, lamp left on in the hallway, his shadow moving past at odd hours on his way between his office and the kitchen.
People sleep better when they know someone is standing watch.
He was right.
The penthouse is quiet now. My men are posted in the hallway outside. I can sense them more than hear them, that particular stillness a good guard has when he’s listening to more than one thing at once.
The living room is clean. Table wiped down, no evidence of what sat there earlier except in my head. The tree glows steadily in the corner, a ridiculous, twinkling thing that has no business existing in the same world as rats and the Bratva.
I should go back to bed.
Instead, my feet take me to my office.
The door clicks shut behind me with a soft, final sound. The monitors on my desk throw a blue wash across the room, cycles of security feeds playing on mute. Hallway. Elevator. Lobby. Exterior. A dozen angles of a building that’s supposed to be a fortress.
I drop into the chair, stare at the screens for a minute, then scrub a hand over my face. My skin feels too tight.
Something glints near the edge of my desk.
For a second my brain can’t place it. Then I remember.
The ornament she bought me.
It’s ridiculous. A Santa ornament, all red suit and beard. Except, instead of holding a sack of presents, he’s got a tiny toy gun in his gloved hands, pointed at nothing in particular. Someone, somewhere, thought that was charming.
Isabella saw it in the shop, argued with Rossi over it, and I think that was the moment I fell in love with her.
“Tell me that is not the most on-brand Christmas decoration you’ve ever seen,” she’d said later, grinning, holding it up to my face.
“It’s a felony in three states,” I’d replied.
She’d laughed and ignored me and bought it anyway, insisting it needed to go on the tree “near but not at the top,” because “you’re not fully reformed but you’re trying.”
Now it’s sitting on my desk, where she left it this afternoon when she was “organizing” the decorations we didn’t use.
I pick it up, turning it between my fingers.
It’s stupid and cheap and a little ugly.
I love it.
Of all the things in this office, contracts, trophies, heavy, leather-bound proof that I’m a respectable businessman now, the little armed Santa is the only thing that feels like it has a pulse.
Like her.
She walked into my life with her sharp questions and sharper pen, ready to gut me in print, and somehow, she’s the one who brought a tree into my sterile penthouse.
Lights. Wreaths. Pie. My brothers laughing in my kitchen.
My father’s chair at the head of the table filled with stories instead of silence.
She brought my mother back into this place, too, in ways I hadn’t expected. The glitter. The chaos. The bossy Italian women taking over my kitchen.
She changed everything.
And now she’s bleeding into the parts of me I thought I’d sealed up years ago.
I set the ornament down carefully, like it’s fragile glass instead of cheap plastic, and reach for the frame propped near the monitor.
The photo is an old one. Ma insisted we take a proper family portrait one summer, all of us in suits, no blood, no bruises, no evidence of what we were or had been. Papà in the middle, hand on my shoulder, Matty smirking, Adi trying not to, Ma’s smile like a sunrise.
I trace a thumb over my father’s face. “Hey, Papà,” I murmur, feeling vaguely ridiculous and not caring. “You picked one hell of a time to be gone.”
He stares back at me, sepia and still.
“You see this?” I go on quietly. “You see what they’re doing? Orlov. Domenico. Whoever keeps pulling strings in the dark?”
Saying my uncle’s name leaves a sour film in my mouth.
“You told us we could be clean,” I say. “You made us promise. You dragged us out of the docks and into boardrooms. You turned gun money into real estate and shipping and tech. I thought it was about you. About how you wanted to die with a different kind of stain on your hands.”
My chest tightens. “I get it now,” I admit, voice rough.
“It was never just about you. It was about us. About making sure there were parts of our lives you didn’t have to flinch at when you looked at them.
Women we loved who didn’t have to worry about bullets every time they left the house.
Kids who didn’t have to learn which alley to duck down when things went bad. ”
I think about Isabella asleep in my bed down the hall, my t-shirt swallowing her, the way her body shook in the stairwell today even as she kept moving.
I think about my mother-in— No, not that word yet.
Isabella’s mother, standing on my balcony, threatening me with a frying pan if I broke her daughter.
I think about Letty, small and loud and covered in flour, saluting her Uncle Matteo with a cookie cutter in her hand.
This is why he did it.
Not out of weakness.
Out of love.
“I don’t know how to do this without turning into the man you were before,” I say, low. “The one who solved everything with a gun and a shallow grave. I don’t know how to protect her and keep my hands as clean as you wanted.”
The security feeds flicker.
Lobby. Elevator. Hallway.
All my safety lines feel thinner than they did a week ago.
“How do I keep her?” I ask the empty room. “How do I keep her safe and still look at myself in the mirror?”
Of course there’s no answer.
He’s a photograph.
I’m talking to paper.
But something settles anyway. Not because he speaks, but because I finally listen to the part of me that sounds like him when I’m very, very quiet.
You’re the one in the chair now, Nico. You make the path.
We’ve been reacting. Guarding. Moving pieces defensively.
It isn’t enough.
I set the frame down and reach for my phone.
It’s late. Matteo should be home by now, or at least done terrorizing his bartenders.
He answers on the second ring, voice rough with sleep or whiskey or both. “You better be dying, fratello.”
“Sorry to disappoint,” I say.
He sighs, and I hear rustling on the other end. “What’s on fire?”
“Nothing,” I say. “That’s the problem.”
“Start making sense.” Bed springs creak. “Is Isabella okay?”
“She’s sleeping.”
“Good. Then why are you calling and why does your voice sound like you’ve decided to murder someone?”
“Because I have,” I say simply.
Matteo goes quiet.
I can practically see him sit up, eyes narrowing, brain clicking on.
“Who?”
“Orlov,” I say. “Eventually. But we start closer to home.”
A soft curse. “Domenico.”
The word hangs there like a knife between us.
“We keep talking about proof,” I say. “About evidence. About not moving until we’re sure. Meanwhile, he’s feeding Orlov access and intel. Using Isabella. Using us. Using Papà’s name.”
“We don’t know the exact extent of…”
“For fuck’s sake, Matty.” My voice comes out sharper than I intend.
I inhale, force it level. “We’ve got Oleg’s word.
We’ve got the timing. We’ve got the language.
‘The uncle.’ ‘Protected at the top, the girl is fair game.’ Who else knows us like that?
Who else hates that Papà went clean and took the money with him?
Domenico has spent ten years smiling at us and sulking in the shadows.
This is his chance. You know it. I know it. ”
His exhale is long, rough. “I know.”
“I’m done waiting,” I say. “We’re not children anymore, hiding behind Papà’s decisions. This is our name now. Our company. Our family. If our uncle is putting targets on the people under our roof, then he’s not our uncle anymore. He’s a threat. And threats get handled.”
Silence.
When Matteo speaks again, his voice is cooler, the battle lines in it as familiar as my own reflection. “What are you suggesting?”
“We ask him to a meet,” I say. “Neutral ground. Somewhere ours. We look him in the eye and give him one chance to tell us we’re wrong. To give us something that makes sense. And if he lies, if he plays games, if he tries to spin this like we owe him?”
I let the implication hang.
Matteo doesn’t flinch from it. “You want to pull the trigger on family,” he says.
“I want to stop letting family use that word as a shield while they aim at us,” I counter.
He mutters something under his breath, half Italian, half creative profanity. “You know, once we do this, there’s no going back. We pull at this thread and it could unravel everything Papà built. Old alliances, old enemies, people who’ve been waiting ten years for us to slip.”
“We’re already unraveling,” I say. “They’re in my building. In my home. Next time it won’t be a rat. It’ll be a body. I won’t wait for that.”
Matteo is very quiet for a very long time. Finally: “Okay.”
The word is low, resigned, laced with a dark kind of relief. “Okay?” I repeat.
“We can’t half-do this,” he says. “We can’t be half clean and half the men who take care of problems. Papà tried to keep both worlds separate.
It worked for a while. It’s not working now.
So, we choose. We cut out the rot, even if it’s blood.
” A pause. “But we don’t do it with just you and me in the dark. ”
“I know.”
“We need Adi,” he says. “We need his brain in this. His caution. He’s the one who’ll see angles we miss. If we go to war with Domenico, it’s all three of us or none.”
“I’ll talk to him first thing,” I say. “We’ll lay it all out. No more half-truths. Then we plan. We invite Domenico to the table and see if he comes as family or as an enemy.”
“If he comes as an enemy,” Matteo says quietly, “I’ll pull the trigger myself.”
I close my eyes. “I won’t stop you,” I answer.
There’s a beat of shared understanding. Three kids in too-big suits standing in our father’s study, making promises we didn’t understand. Three men now, finally ready to cash in on them.
“Get some sleep, Nic,” Matteo says, softer. “You sound like shit.”
“Look in a mirror,” I mutter.
He snorts. “Love you, asshole.”
“Love you, too.”
The line goes dead.
I sit there for a moment, phone still in my hand, the office suddenly feeling too small, too full of ghosts. On the monitors, the hallway feed shows nothing but carpet and white walls and the edge of the Christmas wreath shadow on my door.
It looks peaceful.
It isn’t.
I set the phone down, touch the frame of my father’s photo one more time.
“We’ll do it right,” I tell him. “Your way. Smart. Clean as we can manage.” I glance toward the bedroom, thinking of the woman sleeping there, of the way she looked tonight when she said I’m all in. “But I’m not losing her, Papà. I’m not. Whatever it takes.”
He doesn’t answer, but I feel less crazy for saying it.
On my way out, I pause at the tree.
The angel ornament catches the light, wings glinting, stupid and perfect. Isabella had it engraved with my father’s name. She said it was so he could be here with us in spirit.
She put it near the middle, not the top. “Because that’s the heart of family,” she’d said, bumping my shoulder with hers.
I flick off the office light and head back down the hallway.
The bedroom is dim, lit only by the soft spill from the living room. Isabella has rolled toward my side in her sleep, like her body refuses to believe I’d be gone long.
Guilt punches through me, sharp and deep.
I strip off the hoodie and slide back into bed, careful, always careful, easing myself behind her. She makes a small sound when the mattress dips, then relaxes as soon as my arm comes around her, her spine fitting against my chest like we were cut to match.
I curl my body around hers, wrapping her up, anchoring us both.
My hand settles over her heart.
“I love you,” I whisper into her hair. The words are easier every time I say them, even though I haven’t said them to her while she was awake yet. “Ti amo, Isabella. More than I have any right to.”
She doesn’t stir, but her fingers find mine in her sleep, tangling, holding.
“I’m so sorry this happened,” I breathe.
“I’m sorry they keep dragging you into a war you never asked for.
I’m sorry we didn’t end this sooner. But it ends now.
I swear it. I don’t care if it’s Orlov or Domenico or some rat bastard in between them.
I’ll burn every bridge we have to, as long as you walk away from this alive. ”
My throat feels tight.
I press a kiss to the back of her neck, the place that always makes her shiver when she’s awake.
“You’re mine,” I say softly. “And I protect what’s mine.”
Her breathing evens out, deep and slow.
Eventually, with my nose in her hair, my arm locked around her, and war plans lining up one by one in the back of my mind, sleep finally comes.
It’s not restful.
But it’s enough to get me to morning.
And morning is when we stop waiting for the next hit and start swinging back.