“I know,” he said softly. “Or I’m learning.”
Silence stretched before I asked the question that had been sitting under everything else.
“How do you live with it?”
He didn’t pretend not to understand me.
“The violence?”
“Yes.”
For the first time since I arrived, he looked away.
Then he crossed slowly to the kitchen island, resting both hands on the marble before he answered.
“We are not rogues,” he said at last. “Not in the way people imagine. We are not chaos without structure or men with guns doing whatever pleases us in the dark. There are rules. Codes. Conduct. There is honor, however unfashionable that word sounds now.”
He looked back at me.
“That does not make everything clean,” he continued. “It does not make every action defensible. I know that. I am not asking you to call it noble.” He paused. “But there is a difference between monsters and men who live by a system, even a brutal one. There is a difference between cruelty for pleasure and violence used as a tool.”
I held his gaze. “That sounds very convenient.”
“It is,” he said. “And also true.”
The answer was so direct it stopped my train of thoughts.
Then he went on, more quietly.
“My family is not what it is because we prey on our own. Women in our world are not decoration. Not if the men are worth anything at all. My mother is the center of my father’s life. My aunt Violet is the center of Hoka’s. They are not consulted out of courtesy. They are listened to because without them, everything else rots.” His voice changed on the last part. Not softer. Deeper. “When my father taught me about power, he did not teach me that being feared was the goal. He taught me that whatever darkness lives in a man’s hands should stop at the threshold of the people he loves.”
The line hit me hard enough that I couldn’t speak.
I believed him.
Not in the fairytale way but enough to understand that the difference between Adam and Pietro had never been danger versus safety. Adam wanted control over others because it made him feel big. Pietro wanted control over himself because he understood what happened when men had power and no discipline.
That didn’t make his life harmless.
It made it more complicated.
I stepped a little closer.
“You say all the right things,” I said.
A humorless smile touched his mouth. “That wasn’t meant to reassure you.”
“I know.” I stopped in front of him. “That’s why it did. At least a little.”
His eyes searched mine, as if he still didn’t quite trust this moment not to vanish.
“So,” he said carefully, “what happens now?”
I let the question sit between us, because I wanted him to feel the weight of it too.
“Now,” I said, “we go slowly.”
He nodded once.
