Page 95 of The Kingpin’s Bride

Then the dark, and Santino’s name tearing through the speaker like he could drag me back by force. I opened my eyes.

The ceiling tiles were the expensive kind. I knew the place. I had sent other men here. I had never been the one on the table. I catalogued what I could.

Left arm: working. I flexed my fingers against the sheet and felt the cotton. Good. Chest: tight, but the pain there was old. The crack under my ribs, the one I had been trying to close since I was twelve. It was wide open now. It hurt in a way the drugs could not touch.

Right leg… I looked down.

Brace. Heavy bandaging. The shape of my knee gone under layers of gauze and plastic. I stared at it until the room tilted. They had not taken the seat. They had taken the part of me that walked into rooms like I owned the floor.

The thought should have been about power. About votes and docks and the older men who still held the longer knives. It was not.

Santino was still watching me. He had handed me Angelo’s watch years ago and said almost nothing. He had tried to keep me on the edges. He had stood in that upstairs office at After Dark and told me a seat came with a target and blood that never washed off. I had chosen it anyway.

Now he was the first face I saw. My throat worked. What came out was air. Santino did not fill the silence. He had learned, the same way I had, that some rooms got worse when you rushed them.

I turned my head on the pillow. Even that small movement sent a white line of pain down through the brace and into a place that no longer felt like a joint. My vision sharpened and then swam. I breathed through it.

I could live with a bullet I had earned. I had earned plenty.

I could live with a limp if it was the cost of a war I’d won. What I could not stand was the families hurting my wife.

They had aimed for the lesson, not the funeral. They had left me alive so I would have to stand in my own kitchen and feel it every time Camilla ran across the floor. So Morena would see it.

I thought of my father. I had sworn I would never become that man.

I had put a collar on a girl and called it protection. I had put a baby in her and called it a marriage.

Santino’s jaw flexed once. He had seen enough of me to know when I was circling the old fear. He had seen it before. He had almost lost my sister to the version of himself that thought hardness was the only safehouse.

I held his eyes. I did not ask if I was going to walk. I already knew the answer was going to be a different kind of yes. I asked the only thing that mattered, and I asked it without opening my mouth.

Santino understood anyway. He leaned forward a fraction. The flatness in his eyes did not warm. It just focused. “The ladies are waiting for you outside. Your knee’s done. Surgeons saved the leg. You’ll walk. But you’ll do it differently.”

I looked down at the brace and the heavy bandaging. The pain sat underneath the drugs like a second pulse.

“Greco’s people sent flowers to the clinic with a note that just said ‘Get well.’” Santino scoff. “The balls on them. Still… They’re not trying to remove the seat.”

I nodded once. Even that hurt.

Santino leaned closer. “They could have killed you clean. They didn’t. That means they want you in the seat. They just want you quieter. And they want you to feel it every time you stand.”

He was quiet for a moment, then added, voice lower, “I used to think the only way to keep the people I loved safe was to stay hard enough that nothing could touch me. It almost cost me Aurora. Don’t make the same mistake with your wife and the little girl.”

Santino sat back a fraction. “There’s someone else here to see you.”

I knew before the door opened. The air changed the way it always did around him. No rush. No wasted movement.

Leonardo Moretti came in like the room had been built around his patience. The same eyes that had measured the distance between my pulse and the nearest exit at every table we had ever shared. Chiara’s husband. The man who had poisoned our father and left my sisters and me to live in the hole he made.

I felt my jaw lock. Even that small thing sent a fresh line of pain down into the brace. Santino did not leave. He stayed in the chair like a witness. Or a guard. I could not tell which, and I did not ask.

Leo stopped at the foot of the bed. He looked at the brace first. Then at my face. He did not offer sympathy. He never had. “Matteo.”

“Leonardo.” I smirked. “Or do you prefer The Serpent still?”

The names sat between us like old debts. I could have told him to get out. Part of me wanted to. The twelve-year-old who had cleaned blood off a floor was still in this room, and he still looked at Leo and saw the end of one life and the start of another he had never asked for.

Leo set something against the side of the mattress. A cane.