“You saida child,” Beckett says, after a moment, and his voice has shifted again, sharper now, the way it does when he’s circling toward something. “Whose child, Valentino?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters enough that you called me at midnight.”
“It’s a work situation,” I say again, and even I can hear how flimsy the lie sounds.
“Right.” Beckett doesn’t push, which is somehow worse than if he had. “Well. For what it’s worth, you sound like a man who’s further down a road than he’s willing to admit he’s walking.”
“I’m not walking down any road.”
“Sure.” A pause, and then, quieter: “Can I tell you something, and you don’t interrupt until I’m done?”
I exhale through my nose. “Go ahead.”
“When Scarlett and I first got together, I thought the worst thing that could happen to me was losing control. That’s the whole architecture of a man like me, like you, like every one of us in that Society. Control is the currency. You lose control, you lose everything. That’s the lesson we all learned somewhere along the way, one way or another.”
I say nothing. The water laps quietly against the dock supports.
“And then I had kids,” Beckett continues, “and for about a week I was convinced it was going to be exactly what I feared. That loving them, needing them, being terrified something would happen to them, that it would make me weaker. Slower. Less effective. A liability in my own life.”
“And?”
“And it was the opposite,” Beckett says simply. “It made me more dangerous. Not in the way I used to be dangerous, all edges and arrogance but more cautious. I started seeing threats I’d never have noticed before, because suddenly there was something in the world worth protecting that wasn’t an asset or a client or a contract. There was a kid who needed me to come home. And a man who has something worth coming home to doesn’t get careless, Ferretti. He gets sharper. Because the stakes are real for the first time in his life.”
I think of the racetrack in the living room, blocks lined up with surprising precision, a small voice insisting on the car that makes the real sound. I think of a hand curling into my shirt in the dark, trusting, unguarded and certain that I would come.
“I used to think family was the thing that got used against men like us,” I say, before I can stop myself. “The weak point. The lever.”
“It can be,” Beckett says. “If you let the wrong people know it exists. But that’s not a reason to never have one, Valentino. That’s a reason to get better at protecting it.”
I don’t respond. The thought sits in my chest, heavy and unfamiliar, like a weight I’ve been carrying so long I forgot it was there.
“You still there?” Beckett asks.
“I’m here.”
“Good.” A pause, and then, lighter again, “Now. Are you going to tell me whose kid it is, or am I calling Vaughn the second we hang up?”
“Goodnight, Beckett.”
“That’s not a no.”
“Goodnight, Beckett.”
He’s laughing when I end the call.
I stand on the dock for a while longer, phone loose in my hand, the cold finally starting to work its way through my shirt. Behind me, up the slope, the cottage windows are dark except for the small nightlight glow from Nico’s room, a soft amber square against the black shape of the building.
It feels less fake every day.
That thought arrives unbidden, and I don’t try to push it the way I usually would. The contract was supposed to be simple. A fabricated engagement, useful optics for the Aurelius deal, an arrangement with a clear beginning and a clear end. I have run a hundred operations like it. Clean lines. Defined parameters. No bleed between the performance and the reality.
This one has bled from the first day.
It bled when I watched her fumble through that interview with coffee on her blouse and felt something shift in my chest that I didn’t have a name for then. It bled every time Nico looked at me like I was simply, unquestionably, a fixed point in his world, the way only a child looks at someone before they’ve learned that adults leave.
And it bled tonight, against a hallway wall, with her hands in my hair and my name on her mouth like she’d been holding it back for years.
