Page 123 of The Cost of Silence

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.