Page 255 of Ricardo

“Harrison will pay,” I finally say.

Mario steps forward. “Julia is right.”

I turn my head toward him, and narrow my eyes.

“He is the reason my son is in the hospital.”

“Whatever you are thinking of doing to Harrison,” he says, “will blow back on you.”

“You think I care?”

“No,” Mario says. “But the people around you do.”

The words hit me exactly where he intended them to.

For one second, I have no answer.

My eyes move before I can stop them.

To Julia, standing across from me in clothes that are not hers, my jacket around her shoulders, still carrying the shock of my son’s blood on her hands.

To Victoria, pale but steady beside Mario, one hand resting over the child she carries.

To Matteo and Tomasso, who look too young and too hard beneath hospital lights.

To Lorenzo, Diego, Edoardo, Alessio.

To the door Dante lies behind.

The people around me.

My family.

My son, who may wake up to a new war because I could not wait long enough to choose the correct battlefield.

That is the part that slows my rage.

It does not soften it. Nothing in me softens.

But it changes shape. Narrows.

Diego pushes away from the wall, his face stripped of its usual charm.

“Mario’s right,” he says. “We can’t just go around putting hands on politicians here.”

My gaze cuts to him.

He lifts one shoulder, but there is no humor in it. “If this were back in Italy, different story. A family like theirs would still be powerful, but we would have power to match, and information. We would know the church they pray in, the cousin who drinks too much, the judge they paid, the mistress they hide, the banker who smiles at dinner and drowns in debt.

“Here?” Diego says. “We have money. We have reach. We have people. But we have been in the United States full time for only a couple of years. We do not have enough roots yet to pull at a family like the Winthrops without pulling the rug out from under our own feet.”

Lorenzo nods once. “Their power is old here. Public and protected.”

I see the truth in those words. That is the problem.

The truth is standing in front of me, wearing a borrowed sweater and trembling beneath my jacket, telling me the man I want to destroy is wrapped in a flag, a family name, and generations of carefully polished influence.

I look at her.