Chapter Twenty-Four
Matteo
Imade an Italian breakfast the way my sister Aurora used to make it for Santino and the girls on Sundays, when everyone was home.
Fresh ciabatta toasted in olive oil with garlic.
Soft scrambled eggs with cream and chives.
Crispy pancetta. Roasted tomatoes with oregano.
A big bowl of sweet ricotta mixed with honey and lemon zest. Fresh blood oranges cut into rounds.
Espresso for the adults. Warm milk with a little sugar for Camilla.
I could picture Aurora at the big stove in the Moretti kitchen, hair tied back, telling Santino to set the table while the kids tried to steal pancetta. The memory sat strangely soft in my chest.
The table looked like excess. I wanted it that way.
Morena appeared first, barefoot, wearing one of my shirts that hit mid-thigh. The cut on her cheek was cleaner. She stopped in the doorway and stared at the spread.
“You cooked again.”
I watched her take a bite of the ricotta. “Tell me what you actually like to eat. Not what you think you’re supposed to force down. Real answer.”
She looked surprised for a second, then thoughtful. “When I was little… before everything… my mother used to make this simple pasta with just butter, Parmesan, and black pepper. And blood oranges. I always stole the sweetest ones.”
She glanced at the plate of dark oranges I’d cut. “These are perfect.”
“Favorite color?”
She blinked. “Why?”
“Because I want to know. And because Camilla’s new room is getting painted, tell me hers as well. If you have a preference, say it,” I shrugged.
A small, almost shy smile tugged at her mouth. “Camilla’s is yellow. The kind that looks like morning light. And mine… a deep gray. Like the ocean when it’s quiet.”
I nodded once and made a mental note. Soft yellow for Camilla’s walls. Deep gray somewhere she would see every day.
“Go ahead,” I said.
Camilla padded in behind her a minute later, in the oversized t-shirt, hair sticking up in every direction. She climbed onto the chair on her knees, peered at all the food, and then looked at me with big eyes. I nodded.
She reached for the bowl of ricotta with both hands.
I watched her take a careful first bite, then a much bigger one. Halfway through the second spoonful she stopped, looked at the bowl, then at Morena, then back at the bowl.
A little bit of honey ended up on her cheek. She did not seem to notice. The tight, cautious way she had held herself since we pulled her out of the car loosened a little.
Camilla watched her sister with wide, curious eyes while she licked honey off her spoon. Then she pointed the spoon at Morena’s middle.
“Rena,” she said, “your tummy is getting big. Is a baby in there?”
Morena choked on her coffee. I handed her a napkin and kept my face still.
“Cami,” Morena said, face going red, “that’s not how it works.”
Camilla tilted her head, completely serious. “But you’re eating so so much..”
Morena dropped her forehead to the table with a quiet groan.
I took a sip of espresso so I would not smile.
“There’s no baby,” Morena told the table, voice muffled. “I’m just really hungry because I didn’t eat much while I was looking for you.”
Camilla thought about this, swinging her feet. Then she shrugged and went back to her ricotta. “Okay. But if there is a baby can it be a girl? I want a little girl to play with.”
“Finish your breakfast,” I told Camilla gently. “Both of you.”
Camilla gave me a sticky little smile and obeyed, humming between bites. Morena lifted her head, flushed, and shot me a look that promised she would get even later. I held her gaze and let her see I was not laughing at her. The warmth in my chest was quieter than that.
They ate until the plates were mostly empty.
Color had come back into Camilla’s face.
For a short while the kitchen felt almost ordinary, the same way it used to feel when Aurora forced everyone to sit down and pretend the world outside was not made of sharp edges.
I waited until Camilla was busy stacking orange peels into a wobbly tower before I spoke again.
“I need to talk to you,” I said to Morena, quiet enough that the little girl would not catch every word. “After she finishes.”
Morena’s eyes lifted to mine. The embarrassment faded, replaced by the sharper look that never fully left her.
“The Families?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She nodded once. I stood and started clearing the empty plates, giving her the moment she needed.
Behind me Camilla kept humming her little song, completely absorbed in her sticky orange-peel tower, safe and full and four years old in a way she had not been allowed to be for a long time.
My wife was watching me over the rim of her coffee cup, something careful in her expression.
“There’s one more thing,” she said quietly. “I was waiting until she was safe to tell you.”
She set the cup down.
“I’m pregnant.”
The words landed in the quiet kitchen like a held breath finally released. Camilla kept humming, oblivious. I stared at Morena for a long second, then reached across the table and covered her hand with mine.
“Say it one more time.”
“I’m pregnant with your baby.”
I stared at her.
The kitchen did not change. Camilla’s orange-peel tower listed a little to the left. The espresso had gone cold in my cup. Morena’s hand was small and warm under mine, the same hand that had put my mother’s ring on itself three weeks ago and then dared me to live with it.
Pregnant.
The word did not land like triumph. It landed like a door slamming open in a house I had spent my whole life locking.
I had wanted this. I had scheduled it. I had come inside her in front of the Five Families and called it strategy.
I had told myself heirs were the price of the seat and her body was the method.
I had been a liar then, and I was a worse one now, because the first thing that moved through me was not the chair and not the bloodline.
It was the idea of my wife as a mother.
A baby. Mine.
My thumb found the inside of her wrist. Her pulse was fast. Not fear. Not exactly. The kind of speed that comes after you finally set a thing down and wait to see if the other person drops it.
I brought her hand to my mouth and kissed her knuckles. Once. Harder than the moment deserved. I tasted coffee and the faint salt of her skin and the knowledge that I had put this in her when I was still pretending she was only a solution.
“How long?”
“I’m not sure about the specifics,” she muttered. “Since before I ran.”
Camilla hummed and added another peel to the tower. She did not look up. The world, for her, was still breakfast.
I looked at Morena’s stomach. There was nothing to see yet. Soft. Hidden under one of my shirts. I had had my hand there a dozen times since she came home and I had felt only heat and breath and the stubborn fact that she was still here. I had not felt this. I had not let myself.
Something in my chest pulled tight enough to hurt.
Not joy. Not yet. Joy was too clean a word for a man who had burned a bloodline so he could sit at a table and then used a girl’s womb to keep the chair.
What I felt was worse and better. Ownership with the sharp edge knocked off.
Terror that I would become the man who made children watch.
A hunger so specific it made my hands want to shake. I did not let them.
“I’m just tired. And hungry. And I didn’t want to tell you in a kitchen full of orange peels if you were going to look at me like I had handed you another weapon.”
“I’m not.”
“You are thinking it.”
“I’m thinking,” I said, and had to stop, because the truth was uglier than the version she expected, “that I planned this when I did not love you yet, and now I do, and that makes it better.”
Her fingers tightened in mine.
Camilla knocked the top off her tower and said a very quiet “oops.” Neither of us moved to fix it.
“Come with me.”
She glanced at Camilla.
“Thirty feet,” I said. “Door open enough. I’m not taking you out of her sight. I just need a room where I can say the rest without a four-year-old hearing how her sister’s husband got his seat.”
Morena searched my face. Whatever she found there made her nod. I let go of her hand only long enough to touch the back of Camilla’s hair as I passed. She leaned into it without looking, sticky fingers still working.
“Don’t eat the peels,” I told her.
“I wasn’t going to,” she lied, solemn.
Morena followed me into the study. I closed the door most of the way so we could hear if Camilla called, but far enough that the little girl would not catch the words.
She crossed her arms and leaned against the desk, watching me.
The pregnancy sat between us like a live wire.
I could still feel the shape of her knuckles against my mouth.
“Talk,” she said.
I did not start with the baby. If I started with the baby I would get on my knees in this room and I would not get back up, and she needed the other truth first. The one that decided whether she was carrying a child for a man she could live with or a man she would have to run from again.
“The Vernizzi seat on the Five Families was never empty by accident,” I said.
“I decided I wanted it. They were weak, greedy, and stupid enough to think their old blood protected them. I spent months cutting them out from the inside. Their supply lines. Their allies. Their money. When the time was right I finished it. The men who held that seat are dead because I wanted the chair they were sitting in.”
Morena’s face did not change, but something in her eyes went very still. “You killed them.”
“Yes. I erased a bloodline for power,” I continued. “Proof that I will burn anyone who touches what is mine, and I have practice doing it.”
I met her gaze and did not look away.
“I am not a good man who did one bad thing to save you. I am the man who murdered his way into the Five Families and then murdered again to keep you,” I said.