Her smile returned at once, brighter than before, and some traitorous part of me wondered what Emily’s smile looked like when it arrived as unexpectedly.
This was becoming absurd.
The wake was held at Lou Moretti’s estate, which meant the house was overflowing before we even reached the front steps. Black cars lined the drive. Men in dark suits stood in quiet clusters beneath the portico and along the gravel sweep, speaking in low voices weighted with ritual, memory, and calculation. Death was rarely just grief in our world. It was optics. Allegiances. A reminder of who remained standing when someone else no longer did.
By the time I stepped out of the car, my expression had settled back into something colder, flatter, more useful.
Victoria reached for my hand automatically. I let her hold two fingers until we reached the entrance, then passed her back to my mother. This was not a place for a child, no matter how protected she was.
Inside, the air smelled of lilies, polished wood, cigar smoke, and too many people pretending not to study one another.
My father spotted us almost immediately.
Alessandro Benetti did not hurry. Men like him never did. He crossed the room with the same measured certainty he brought to everything else, broad-shouldered and immaculate in black, his presence stilling the air around him without effort.
Then he reached me and, without a shred of hesitation, pulled me into a hard embrace.
For one brief moment, I was not a future sotto capo, Benetti heir, or a man being measured by every pair of eyes in the room.
I was simply his son.
“Pietro,” he said, stepping back just enough to look at me properly. His mouth curved, the severity in his face easing. “You look well.”
“I’ve been told,” I said.
His hand closed briefly around the back of my neck, a gesture both grounding and deeply un-mafia in front of half the city’s most dangerous men.
Most fathers in our world were not demonstrative. They thought love softened boys, made them careless, weak, too easily used.
Not mine.
And if Alessandro Benetti loved harder than most men knew how to admit, I was certain my mother was the reason. Lily had a way of undoing old ugliness simply by refusing to let it stand unchallenged.
My father’s gaze flicked over my shoulder to where my mother stood with Victoria. Something warm passed over his face and vanished again so quickly most men would have missed it.
I didn’t.
“Come,” he said, his hand dropping away as business reclaimed him. “There are people you need to greet.”
And just like that, the son became the heir again.
I moved at his side through the room, offering my condolences to Lou’s widow, shaking hands, nodding to men I had known since childhood who were only now starting to look at me not as Alessandro’s boy but as the one who would soon stand beside him in full. I knew how to do this. When to speak. When to stay silent.
A future sotto capo was not made in one ceremony. He was made in rooms like this, under watchful eyes, seen, weighed, and remembered.
I felt it happening.
Approval from some. Curiosity from others. Calculation from all of them.
Good.
Let them calculate.
Eventually my father steered me toward a side room where the noise dropped a fraction and the drinks were stronger.
“Laura Bianchi is here tonight,” he said, as if commenting on the weather.
I glanced at him. “My condolences to Laura.”
