I make my hands stay in my lap.
The man I?—
I shelve it. Hard.
Later.
He doesn't touch me beyond cutting me free. Takes position at my shoulder — not in front, not behind. Beside. The message is wordless and complete.
I'm not alone.
My father looks at Luca.
Then at me.
His gaze drops last to the way my body has turned toward him — unconscious, involuntary, the body doing what it does when it knows where safe is — and something moves across Giovanni Virelli's face I have never seen there before.
Not anger. Not calculation.
Grief. Real grief. The kind that belongs to a man watching something slip away that he genuinely believed was still his to hold.
"You've fallen for him," he says. Quiet. Like confirming a diagnosis he didn't want to make.
I don't answer.
I step forward instead — not behind Luca, not behind my father. Between them. Equidistant. My own person in my own space.
"Giovanni Virelli." His full name. Notpapà.
The name the world uses for the man who ran a crime family for forty years on a foundation of manufactured grief. "This ends tonight."
He looks at me.
"The evidence goes public Monday morning unless I personally cancel the send." Surgeon's voice. Precise, steady, not a wasted syllable. "Your name. Enzo's. Every hit, every shell company, every body this feud produced. Public record." One step forward. "Or you walk away. From me. From Luca. From any claim you think you have on my life. Go back to your world and leave me in mine, and the drive stays buried."
"Serafina—"
"Those are the terms." I hold his gaze. "There's no negotiation. There never was. You just convinced me there was."
My father looks at me for a long time.
Then he looks at Luca.
Something passes between them — the specific, wordless assessment of two men who understand each other's language even when they'd rather not. My father's jaw works once. Then stops.
His shoulders drop a fraction. His hands open at his sides.
Forty years of grip, loosening.
"Your mother would have liked him," he says. Then, quieter: "She would have been proud of you."
He walks out.
I stare at the empty doorway.
I don't exhale right away. I wait. Count three seconds, then five. When the footsteps fade, and a door closes somewhere distant, the thing that has been wound tight inside my chest for longer than I can name releases one coil. Just one. But it's enough to breathe around.
Luca's hands find my face.
