“You’re all right.”
Valentino’s voice comes from beside me, low and even, and I don’t startle because I felt him coming, it's like my nervous system has updated its registry and put him at the top of the alert list.
“I know,” I say.
“You didn’t look all right, across the room.”
“I wasn’t, across the room.” I watch Nico execute a particularly spectacular turn that nearly sends him into the garden wall. “I am now.”
A pause. Valentino is watching Nico too, I can feel it, that same focused attention he brings to everything, except with Nico it’s never strategic. It’s just there.
“He threatened you.”
“He implied. It’s different. Dante doesn’t threaten directly. Direct threats can be documented.”
Another pause, longer. “He mentioned Nico?”
“Yes.”
I hear the exhale beside me, controlled and deliberate, and I finally look at him. His jaw is tight, his eyes still on my son in the garden, and there is something in his expression I haven’t seen on his face before.
It looks like fury. Not the explosive kind, this is quieter than that, and far more dangerous, the fury of a man who has encountered something he cannot risk-assess his way around.
“Valentino.” My voice comes out softer than I intend. “I’ve been handling Dante De Luca since I was old enough to understand what he was. I don’t need you to—”
“I know.” He says it quietly, still watching Nico. “I know you don’t need me to.”
And he leaves it there. Not as the careful distance he usually puts between himself and us. He leaves it there like a door he’s decided to open.
In the garden, Nico has stopped running and is now attempting to convince the other boy that the correct way to be a dragon is on all fours, demonstrating with complete convictionand no self-consciousness whatsoever. The other boy watches doubtfully. Nico is unperturbed. He has never in his short life met a position he couldn’t advocate for with his whole body.
My father’s voice replays in the back of my head, smooth and certain.
Everything you build, I can still reach.
I think about last night, the hallway, Valentino’s mouth on my throat, the words I almost said. I think about the way Nico curled his fist into Valentino’s shirt and went straight back to sleep, because on some animal, unexamined level my four-year-old already knows what I’ve spent four years trying to outrun.
I think about what it would mean to let someone stand beside me. Not in front, not in the way Dante’s men always stood, as a wall you couldn’t see past, that you eventually realized was a cage. But beside. Actually beside.
“He said everything I build, he can still reach.” I say it without looking at Valentino, keeping my eyes on Nico, who has successfully converted the other boy to dragon methodology and is now leading him on a patrol of the garden perimeter. “He’s said versions of it my whole life. Usually he’s right.”
“Not this time,” Valentino says.
I look at him then. He’s looking at me, not the garden, and his expression is the quietest, most unguarded I’ve seen it in the daylight, stripped of the careful professional remove he carries like a second jacket.
“You don’t know that” I say.
“No,” he agrees, and doesn’t look away. “But I know what I’m going to do about it.”
In the garden, Nico raises both arms above his head and roars.
Chapter Eighteen
VALENTINO
I know exactly who Dante De Luca is before I look him up.
I know the type. The way he carried himself through that corridor, the ease of a man who has never once in his life entered a room and wondered whether he belonged in it. The fabricated warmth. The eye contact held a beat too long, not because he’s interested but because he wants you to know that he is the one who decides when to look away.
