Page 104 of Double Trouble for the Mafia Prince
A silence spreads, until I force my voice to work.
"Have you told Dante?"
Luca shakes his head.
"He’s with logistics, reviewing clearance records. I wanted to speak with you first."
The mercy of it cracks something small in me.
Valentina is watching me like a hawk.
"We don’t know what any of it means yet. But you needed to see it before it moves any further."
I nod once.
My voice doesn’t come.
Because I can feel it now—that fracture in the center of me, the one that started years ago but never broke the surface.
Valentina’s voice softens. "I know this is difficult. But you need to be honest with yourself about what this might mean."
I fold the folder shut.
My hands feel cold.
"He wouldn’t betray me," I whisper. "Not like this. Not Rafa."
The words hang there, brittle and hollow.
And I don’t believe them.
Because deep down, beneath the loyalty and the years and the blood we share, something in me has already started to fracture.
Because what if he would?
And what if I don’t see it until it’s too late?
I push back from the table and stand, the folder still in my hands.
I rise without a word, the chair sliding back with a muted scrape that seems too loud for a room like this.
I leave the folder on the table.
I don’t trust myself to hold it.
Not when my hands feel like they’ve turned to something brittle, something that might break if I let them curl too tightly around a truth I can’t outrun.
The corridor greets me like a tomb.
No voices, no footsteps, no sound but my own breath, shallow and sharp in my throat.
The air presses close, dense and unmoving, as if the walls themselves have thickened in anticipation.
I walk, but each step feels less like motion and more like surrender—like slipping further into something I won’t be able to climb back out of.
I want to deny it.
To claw my way back into belief.
