Chapter 10 #2
The front door opens again and a woman enters with a man trailing behind her, a baby balanced in the crook of her arm.
She's striking. Long black hair with blue-dyed tips that catch the light, light brown eyes shot through with golden shards that give her gaze an almost feline quality.
She moves with the confidence of someone who has been underestimated her entire life and turned it into a weapon.
I mentally run through my files of names.
Ilona Marchetti. Luca's wife.
Behind her, Luca Valentina holds the door with one hand, his lean frame draped in a slim-cut black suit, dark hair tied back with a leather strap like Kon wears.
He scans the room with gold-flecked brown eyes that miss nothing before settling his gaze on me with a disarming smile that somehow makes him look more dangerous, not less.
"The famous journalist." Ilona shifts her baby to her other hip and extends her hand. Her grip is cool and firm, her expression knowing. "I was where you are not long ago. Scared. Angry. Certain these men were just another cage."
“How..” I start and she cuts me off with a smile.
“It’s written all over your face, sweetheart.”
“Ah.”
The directness catches me off guard. There’s no preamble or small talk. Ilona serves up the truth first thing and I have to admit, I like that about her already.
"And now?" I ask, whole-heartedly wanting to know her answer.
"Now I know the difference between a cage and a home." Her golden-brown eyes hold mine, steady and certain. "It took me a while to learn it. Give yourself the time."
I feel like she is reading the war raging between my heart and brain without me giving much intel.
Luca catches Ilona's eye from across the room and his whole face changes. The sharp calculation softens into naked adoration, the smile reaching his eyes in a way that transforms him from the Syndicate's intelligence operative into a man completely undone by the woman carrying his daughter.
I look away. The intimacy of it burns behind my eyes.
Lunch happens. And it is the most disorienting hour of my life.
They talk about teething schedules and sleep regressions and a new bookstore Katriana found that has a children's reading corner.
Persia describes a recipe for butternut squash soup that she swears changed Rafael's life.
Ilona complains that Luca reorganized her closet by color while she was sleeping and Katriana nearly chokes on her scone laughing.
This is not what I prepared for. I walked into this loft braced for tension, for the careful smiles of women navigating dangerous men, for hushed voices trading survival strategies over coffee.
I expected bruises hidden under silk sleeves and rehearsed laughter that never quite reached their eyes.
I expected them to talk about exit plans or at the very least commiserate over the mistake of falling for men who carry guns and keep secrets and decide who lives and who doesn't on a Tuesday afternoon.
That's the mafia wife playbook according to every case study I've ever read, every documentary I've binged, every assumption I carried through that elevator door.
It’s the life my mother lived and I expected to see it mirrored here.
And it’s not.
I should have known too because if I am being honest with myself, Kon has never lifted a hand to me and I've given him enough reason to want to beat me into submission.
If anything, my stubbornness has made him…hotter for me?
I run that over in my head and realize the truth of it.
Before I can fall down that rabbit hole, everyone asks me about journalism. They don’t touch my current investigation nor talk about my family. I don’t know how much Kon has filled them in on my situation and I don’t feel like darkening anyone’s mood.
They ask about my actual career. What stories I'm proud of. What drew me to investigative work. And they listen like it matters.
I keep waiting for the collective mask to slip. For the careful performance to crack and reveal the fear underneath, the bruises, the hollow eyes of women who've learned to smile because the alternative is worse. I've seen that face. I've worn that face.
But it never comes.
Because it's not a performance.
The realization settles into my bones slowly, a cold weight that contradicts everything I've built my worldview on.
These women are not prisoners wearing designer chains.
They're not broken. They're not performing.
They chose this. They chose these men, these lives, this messy, loud, crumb-covered domesticity.
And they're happy. Genuinely, infuriatingly happy.
Rafael appears in the doorway and Sofia shrieks with delight, arms outstretched, fingers grabbing at the air.
The most powerful man in Chicago's underworld scoops up his daughter, settles her against his chest with practiced ease, and makes airplane noises to coax a spoonful of pureed carrots into her mouth.
His dark eyes crinkle at the corners, the gray at his temples catching the light, and for a moment the man who I discovered decides what's legal and what isn't in his territory is just a father covered in orange baby food.
If his enemies could see him right now, they'd surrender out of sheer confusion.
My father was never like that.
Drake arrives to collect Katriana and Charlotte, filling the doorway with his broad shoulders, silver-gray hair immaculate, steel-gray eyes scanning the room before landing on his wife.
He crosses to her in three strides, cups her face in both hands, and kisses her with an unhurried thoroughness that I bet makes the room disappear for both of them.
When he pulls back, Katriana's cheeks are flushed and her glasses are crooked, and the smile on her face could power the building.
Luca hasn't left. He's been hovering near Ilona the entire time, gravitating back to her side every time he drifts, as if she generates a field he can't escape.
When baby Lucia fusses, he takes her without being asked, settling the baby against his chest with one hand while his other arm curves around Ilona's waist, pulling her into his side.
He presses his lips to her temple and murmurs Italian until she smiles.
These are the monsters I planned to expose right after I ruined my father and uncle. Dangerous Crime Lord Makes Airplane Noises: A Pulitzer-Worthy Investigation.
These are fathers and husbands and men who would burn cities for the women they love and then come home and warm bottles and read bedtime stories and fall asleep with tiny fists wrapped around their fingers.
The careful structure of enemies and villains and righteous exposure that I've built my entire identity around is crumbling under the weight of pureed carrots and crooked glasses and a family made up of people who care.
If these men aren't the monsters I told myself they were, then what the hell am I doing here?
And if Kon is like them, soft underneath the violence, capable of love in ways I never imagined, then what does that make me for keeping a secret file on him? He thinks I’m rebuilding my case on my family–and I am–but on the side these people are my next target.
Knots tighten in the pit of my stomach.
Persia walks me to the elevator when it's time to go, Sofia on her hip, one small hand tangled in her mother's violet hair.
She waits until we're out of earshot, then stops and turns to face me with an expression that strips away the sunny warmth and reveals a fierceness underneath.
A protectiveness, maternal and sure, that extends beyond her own child.
"I know this is a lot." Her voice is quiet, pitched for just the two of us. "I know you're still figuring out what's real and what's the story you told yourself to survive. I was there. We all were."
"Persia..."
"Let me finish." She shifts Sofia higher on her hip and meets my eyes with those bright aqua blues. "Kon is the best of them. I know that's hard to believe when you look at him and see the scars and the tattoos and the hands that have done terrible things. I don’t know if he’s told you what he does for the family or his past. That’s for him to decide.
But I've watched that man tend roses in a rooftop garden at five in the morning because they remind him of his grandmother.
I've watched him hold Sofia so gently you'd think she was made of glass, and I've seen the way his face changes when someone mentions your name. "
My throat closes. My eyes burn. I blink fast and hard.
"He won't tell you how he feels. Or maybe he will. Ask him. He’s brutally honest most times.
" She reaches out and squeezes my hand, her grip warm and firm.
"But the fact that you're standing in this elevator, the fact that he brought you here, that he let you see this?
" Her eyes glisten. "He's never done that before. Not with anyone. You’re special to him. Please don’t hurt him or the family we’ve all built. "
I open my mouth. Close it. Nod once because that's all I can manage without shattering.
The elevator doors close and I ride down thirty-two floors in silence, my reflection staring back at me from the polished steel walls. The woman in the reflection has red-rimmed eyes and a jaw clenched so tight it aches.
Rule number one of investigative journalism: never become part of the story.
I'm so far past that rule I can't even see it anymore.
Kon is waiting in the SUV, engine idling, one arm draped over the steering wheel. He takes one look at my face and his expression shifts, the dark eyes narrowing, reading me the way he reads a room before entering it.
"That bad?"
"That confusing. Why didn't you come up?"