Page 10 of The Hidden Heir

Breakfast is served in a morning room with windows on two sides, by a round, gray-haired woman who introduces herself as Marta and falls in love with my son in under a minute. The pancakes have a crust of caramelized sugar at the edges and Mikey eats them with both hands and his whole soul, syrup to the eyebrows, and I drink coffee that costs more than my old rent and hate how good it is.

I'm memorizing the room while I sip. Two doors. The windows don't open past six inches; I checked the latches while Marta's back was turned. The terrace guard passes the south windows every eleven minutes.

"You counted the cameras yet?"

I nearly drop the cup.

Luca stands in the doorway, sleeves rolled to the forearm, no jacket, no holster. Dressed down the way a knife is dressed down when it's still a knife. In daylight he's worse than he was in the dark. The silver at his temples. The lines at his eyes that could be from laughing, on some other man. I catalog all of it against my will, and the wanting under my fear makes me so angry I could spit.

"Three from my window," I say, because lying seems pointless. "I assume there are more."

"Fourteen on the grounds." He comes in, pours his own coffee, and sits across from me like we do this every morning. "You'll waste less time if you know that."

"UNCA!" Mikey bellows, delighted, and holds up a fistful of destroyed pancake as tribute.

I watch Luca Petrucci, the devil of Chicago, the man from the newspapers, the man with the suppressor, go completely still, the way he did last night over the cracker. Something crosses his face and is gone before I can name it.

"Eat it yourself, piccolo," he says, low. "You've earned it."

I look away. I refuse to find that anything. I refuse.

"Marta," Luca says, "would you take Michael to see the fountain? He'll like the fish."

It's smooth, and it's kind, and it's a clearing of the room, and I clock all three at once. Marta scoops up my sticky, thrilled son, who bellows "FISH!" at the ceiling, and I make myself let him go, watching through the window until they appear on the terrace, her hand swallowing his.

Then it's just us and the coffee going cold.

"Ask your questions," I say.

He does. Who runs Mauro's crews now. Whether the men from the old days are still standing or been replaced. Whether Caroline still manages her father or only manages his image. I answer what I can, which is little and two years stale, and I watch him bank every word like ammunition. When he says Caroline, something in my chest pulls. My stepsister. The only one who ever stood between me and Mauro's moods. He sees it, because he sees everything, and he mercifully lets it go.

"You really have had no contact," he says at last. It's not quite an apology for the interrogation. It's an audit result.

"That's what I've been telling you."

"Mm." He turns his cup a quarter turn. "Then you should hear this from me before you hear it wrong. I sent men back to your house at dawn. To clean it, close it up." A beat. "They found sign along your back fence line. Cigarette ends, fresh, two nights of them at least. A flattened spot in the grass with a view of your kitchen window."

The room tips.

"Not my men," he says. "Mine arrived with me."

Two nights. Two nights someone stood in the dark behind my house, smoking, watching me do dishes. Watching me carry my son past the window. While I changed the porch bulb. While I slept. While Mikey slept, twenty feet from the fence, behind a lock I bought at a hardware store.

"Valentina."

I can't get a full breath. The edges of the windows are going white and my heart is a fist beating on a door and I'm standing, apparently, my chair scraped back, my hands cold, and the room is enormous and airless all at once. He was already there. Luca didn't lead him to us. He was already there, days behind, hours, a fence away from my baby.

"Valentina. Eyes on me."

I can't. The white is everywhere.

A hand closes around the back of my neck. Warm. Enormous. Absolute. He turns my face to his like it's not up for discussion, and there is nothing gentle in it and nothing cruel either. Just command, the kind that leaves no room in the air for panic to live in.

"Michael is at the fountain," he says, low and even. "There is a wall, fourteen cameras, and thirty men between him and Mauro Mancuso. No one gets through my gates. Breathe."

My lungs drag in half a breath.

"Again."