Page 109 of Double Trouble for the Mafia Prince
The silence Gianna leaves behind tastes like ash in my mouth.
She doesn’t answer my question.
Not with words.
Just that look, the one that says she has already started choosing.
I don’t know which way the scale is tipping, and I don’t know if I want to.
After she disappears into the south wing, I stand there too long.
Her nails left marks on my chest.
My shoulder still throbs from where she bit down.
I can’t stop replaying her voice from minutes ago—sharp, furious, ragged with heat—and the way she went silent when it mattered.
That night, I don’t sleep in her bedroom, and perhaps that is why sleep refuses to come.
I lie in bed with my eyes open, watching the thin line of light slip through the curtain and stretch across the floor like a blade waiting to be drawn.
I can’t make myself close them.
Every time I do, I see her face the way it looked when I first brought her back here.
Hollowed.
Haunted.
And underneath it, something older.
That silent war between two loyalties she hasn’t yet named aloud.
By morning, I’m already on the phone.
I don’t use the Trieste line often.
It was one of the old Rossi fallback routes—secure, buried under a different family’s telecom infrastructure, sealed after the Adriatic trade collapsed.
Only a handful of people knew it still existed.
We were never supposed to need it again.
But nothing about this is supposed to be happening.
The man who answers doesn’t say his name.
I don’t offer mine.
That’s how this works.
Our silence is mutual, practiced, and therefore protective.
I give him the Rossi code fragments we extracted from the burner phone—hex-spliced keys, leftover from a legacy shell company on the southern routes.
He says he’ll verify the trace against the old, dead ledger.
Then tells me he’ll respond the usual way.
