Page 136 of Double Trouble for the Mafia Prince
I can still feel the echo of it on the back of my tongue.
I wonder if he’s in a safe house right now, crouched by the edge of some forgotten vineyard, dirt under his nails and a loaded gun by his knee.
Or maybe he’s in a hotel suite, shirt pressed, whiskey poured, playing the game like he was born to win it.
I don’t know who he is anymore.
The line rings once.
Then again.
Each second unspools memory.
The way he used to hold my hand at night when storms came through the valley.
The way he took the blame when I crashed the Vespa into the old trellis at the south wall.
The way he whispered "I’ll handle it" when the Rossis started offering me like bait to every southern heir with a title and a grudge.
In our world, daughters were chips.
But Rafa always made me feel like I was something more.
Until one day, he became one of them.
The line clicks.
His voice comes through, older and more worn than I imagined.
But it still hits the same chord inside me.
"Sorella."
My throat closes around the word.
All I want, in this breathless second, is to ask if he remembers the fountain.
The lemon drop.
The hand-holding during storms.
"You’ll want to hear what I have to say," he continues, quiet, clipped.
There’s a pause.
"Before your husband does."
23
GIANNA
Ican hear the faint shift of fabric, the breath caught in the back of his throat like a man preparing to say something that cannot be unsaid.
"You’re working against them," I say at last. Not a question, nor an accusation. Just a line drawn in the sand.
"I’m working for us," he replies, with an unnerving calm, as if he hasn’t uprooted everything I believed in.
It was never the Salvatores against Rafa and me.
