I think about Venice. The timeline keeps landing on the same impossible, inevitable answer. Eighty percent certainty, I told Vaughn. The remaining twenty percent is fear.
But standing here, in the cold, with the echo of Nico’s hands clutching my shirt still warming my chest, I understand something I didn’t understand on the phone with Vaughn last night.
The eighty percent isn’t the part that frightens me anymore.
It’s the twenty.
Because if she is the woman from Venice, if Nico is mine, then everything that follows is complicated and dangerous in ways that have nothing to do with Dante or the Aurelius Consortium or any threat I know how to plan around.
It means years I missed. It means a child who has been growing up somewhere in the world without me, calling another man Daddy on the phone, or no one at all. It means Livia carrying that alone, hiding it, for reasons I haven’t let myself fully consider.
And if she isn't – if this is nothing more than a starving man's hope dressed up as certainty – then I have built a family out of scraps of coincidence and desire. The thought hurts in a different way.
Not because I would lose Livia, but because I would lose something I never truly had. The boy asleep down the hall would remain exactly who he has always been: someone else's son. And I would have to learn how to love them both while carrying the quiet ache of knowing that even if he calls me Daddy, it will never truly be me.
Either way, there is no clean exit from this. No contingency plan that resolves it without cost.
I have spent my entire adult life building exit routes. Apartments I can leave in ten minutes. Cars parked facing the street. Relationships kept at arm’s length, contained, manageable, nothing that couldn’t be walked away from if it had to be.
Standing on this dock, looking up at a cottage with a nightlight glowing in a child’s window, I find myself doing something I haven’t done in longer than I can remember.
I am looking for a way to stay.
The cold finally drives me back up the path. Inside, the cottage is quiet, the kitchen counter where everything startedtonight innocuous now in the dark, just wood and stone and the faint lingering scent of cereal.
I pass the hallway, past the closed door of the main bedroom, past Nico’s door with its sliver of amber light. I don’t stop at either.
In my own room, I sit on the edge of the bed and stare at the wall for a long time, turning Beckett’s words over like a stone in my hand.
A man who has something worth coming home to doesn’t get careless. He gets sharper.
Tomorrow, the retreat continues. More drills, more performances, more eyes watching to see whether the Ferretti engagement is real enough to survive scrutiny. Somewhere in the building, Dante’s people are still circling, still probing for weaknesses, and I know better than anyone how quickly a man like that can turn a soft spot into a wound.
If Livia and Nico are the soft spot, then I have a choice to make.
I can keep building exit routes. Or I can finally, for the first time in my life, build something worth defending instead.
I lie back on the bed without undressing, staring at the ceiling, and somewhere past two in the morning, I make a decision.
Tomorrow, I’m going to find out the truth. Whatever it costs.
Chapter Seventeen
LIVIA
I sense him before I see him.
Not literally. But there is something that happens to the air in any room my father walks into, a subtle shift in pressure, and I have been finely calibrated to sense it since I was seven years old. My shoulders are at my ears before I’ve consciously registered anything at all.
The morning session has just wrapped. We’re in the main lodge’s reception corridor, forty-odd delegates milling between coffee stations and conversation clusters, and Nico has disappeared toward the far end with two other kids and an obliging staff member who has been running an unofficial children’s program since yesterday. I’m watching him go, cataloguing the exits the way Valentino has been quietly training me to do for the last two days, when the double doors at the corridor’s end swing open and a familiar figure steps through.
Dante De Luca does not enter rooms the way other men do, he saunters in like he owns the room. White shirt, no tie, the kind of effortlessly expensive tailoring designed to look casual but communicate the exact opposite. Gray threaded through his dark hair now, more than I remember from the last time I stood across a table from him, but it only makes him look more authoritative, more permanent, like a building that has been designated a heritage site.
He’s scanning the room with a smile already in place. Warm. Interested. The smile of a man delighted to find himself among people worth knowing.
His eyes find mine in about four seconds flat.
The smile doesn’t change. That’s the thing about my father’s smiles. They never change, regardless of what’s happening behind them.
