“Mafia,” I repeated dumbly, because my mind seemed to have caught on that one word. Not just someone connected to it. Not just adjacent. “The heir…” I whispered.
“Not just an heir,” he said quietly.
I looked up then, almost ready to laugh from the sheer shock of it, because the scale of what he was saying was so far beyondanything I had prepared myself for that I could barely take it in. Fear was part of it. Disbelief too. But neither of those hit hardest.
He held my gaze as though looking away now would break something between us for good.
“An heir,” he said quietly, “who is desperately in love with you.”
The silence that followed felt different from ordinary silence. The kind that settles after something has already changed, before your thoughts have caught up enough to name it.
Because in the end, that was the part that undid me most. Not the mafia. Not the blood and violence sitting beneath his beautiful face and careful hands. It was the love. The impossible honesty of it.
I didn’t know what he saw on my face, only that whatever it was made something in his expression lift, hope and resignation tangling together so tightly I couldn’t tell them apart.
“Emily,” he said softly.
I still couldn’t answer.
CHAPTER 12
PIETRO
“Ineed to go for now.”
That was all she said before she got up and left.
I kept my promise and let her.
For her sake, I hoped I hadn’t just made the worst mistake of both our lives.
I was not a child. I knew exactly what the consequences of that revelation could be. At some point Matteo would find out. Men like him always did. There would come a day when I would have to stand in front of him and explain my choice, explain why I told an outsider the truth before she belonged to us in any formal sense, and if Emily was not standing beside me when that day came?—
I cut the thought off before it could finish.
The look she gave me on her way out stayed with me anyway. There had been too much in it to name cleanly—regret, doubt, something I wanted very badly to believe was still care. Whether I truly saw it or only imagined it occupied my mind for the rest of the day.
I went to my lecture and retained almost nothing. I sat in front of my laptop for two hours and managed one paragraph of an economics essay that would have embarrassed me underordinary circumstances. Every time I tried to force my attention back to the screen, my thoughts drifted straight to her. The expression on her face. The way her body stilled when I said the word mafia. The silence after I told her I loved her.
That silence stayed with me most.
As if she had reached the edge of something and still had not decided whether to step forward or back.
“Ridiculous,” I muttered under my breath as I checked my phone for what had to be the twentieth time in a shamefully short span.
It was not a small secret to hand someone and expect them to carry without hesitation. And yet some irrational part of me had hoped what lay between us would count more. I didn't yet know if it did.
With a low curse, I slammed the laptop shut and walked into the living room. Olivero was sprawled in one of the armchairs, reading as if he had not spent the last twenty-four hours witnessing the steady collapse of my dignity in real time.
He didn’t look up when I entered.
I stopped in front of him and stared.
Nothing.
“Want to spar?” I asked.
“No.”
